Dylan Evans’s account of his doomed attempt to set up a self-sufficient community should be mandatory reading for anyone tempted to follow suitThe word “Utopia” derives from the Greek words “no” and “place”. Despite this ominous sign, when the academic Dylan Evans decided to quit his job, sell his house and found a self-sufficient community in the Scottish Highlands, “Utopia” was the name he chose. Looking back, from almost a decade later, Evans sees that the project was doomed from the start: an overambitious attempt to act out the aftermath of civilisation’s collapse, populated by a mixture of namby-pamby part-timers, outright nutcases and a few genuinely hardy souls.These include Adam, a Merlin-like hippie who talks constantly about pleasing “The Great Spirit”, breaks food rules and sings around the campfire “like a country and western singer with throat cancer”. On the plus side, he can build a really good reed-bed toilet. Despite Evans’s (sometimes shockingly) damning descriptions of him, it’s Adam he ends up with most respect for, owing to his stubborn commitment to an alternative lifestyle. Continue reading...
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