Letter from Utopia

Sound of music is badly missed

Dylan Evans

One of the questions I ask the volunteers at the utopia experiment is what they miss most about life back home. Pete doesn’t hesitate when it’s his turn to answer: “Music on demand,” he says. It’s funny how quickly people become accustomed to something so radically new. For most of human history and all our prehistory the only music we could hear was that which we played ourselves. For a few thousand years, the very rich and powerful had the luxury of paid musicians to entertain them, but concerts didn’t happen at the touch of a button.

Yet now, anyone can use technology to summon up a whole orchestra or a rock band. It’s something many people take for granted, and think about only when for some odd reason – such as taking part in a crazy experiment in postapocalyptic living – they are deprived of it.

Pete’s answer prompts a discussion. I wonder out loud whether, in the postindustrial future that we are trying to simulate, people might carefully preserve old iPods as valuable treasures. Tommy, an experienced dumpster-diver who uses rubbish in his streetwise art, scoffs at the idea. “There’ll be thousands of the things lying around,” he says. “You’ll just have to wander into the abandoned houses and pick them up.”

Pete’s sensory deprivation has benefits that he hadn’t anticipated. When Adam strikes up a tune on his guitar – an instrument Pete normally avoids – he finds the sounds sweet and mournful. Adam’s guitar is now silent, however. After threatening to leave on several occasions – he felt that when I cleared up some broken plates he’d left on the ground as “art”, the message I was giving him was “clear out” – he has finally packed his bags and headed off south. I’ll miss him. He certainly added a lot of colour to the experiment, and made some beautiful yurts for us. But he also alienated a lot of people with his talk of the “Great Spirit”, by which he meant a spiritual being, and not a sense of pulling together, though when pressed on the distinction he became mysteriously hard to pin down. Now Adam has gone, Agric has assumed a more dominant role, coordinating everything from growing vegetables (his speciality) to refilling the header tank that keeps the back boiler on the Rayburn topped up, and coordinating the evening meal. He’s constantly on his feet, scampering around with a nervous energy that is by turns amusing and exasperating – exasperating because sometimes it seems like activity for activity’s sake.

“Agric never stops!”, Johanna whispers to me on one side. A 67-year-old retired biology teacher living in Edinburgh, she has a Nordic accent that adds to her aura of dignified solemnity, but whose smile immediately dissolves any sense of distance. Johanna is here for only a short stay, and the revolving-door policy of the experiment gets me wondering about its validity.

When volunteers stay for just a week, they don’t get quite dirty enough to summon up the courage to use our primitive bathing facilities – an old whiskey barrel cut in two, which we fill with buckets of hot water drawn from the Rayburn. So we lose out on the sense of gradual decline that would surely set in if people were here for longer – people arrive with fresh clothes and all their teeth – and on the will to do something about improving the facilities.

Only the hardened utopians who stay for longer than a few weeks get fully into the spirit of this primitive way of life. Agric, who has been here for six weeks now, does not seem fazed by the barrels any more. But he is also taking increasing interest in the practicalities of plumbing . . .