As you may have noticed I’m on a mission to find out how few material possessions I need to survive, and maintain a wholesome lifestyle. This will enable me to travel light and fast and have more fun adventures. Apart from my goose feather down clothing and the synthetic clothes which I wear cycling, this is everything I currently carry in my bag:

For an inventory list including the contents of my piano tuning kit please see my new page entitled Stuff, where I describe everything I need for this lifestyle and explain why certain ‘essentials’ got left out.

For a while now I’ve been travelling in the ‘ultralight’ category. Wikipedia gives a good intro to Ultralight Backpacking:

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I spent a few more nights sleeping outdoors in London with no sleeping bag. They weren’t very cold but still a good opportunity to get used to the arrangement.

The first evening I cycled up towards Kentish town where I had a piano to tune the following day. For part of the journey I cycled next to an Irish astonault who had lost his rocket, gotten drunk and taken off on a Boris bike!

I stopped at St Pancras International Station to use the 24 hour toilets and to my delight I discovered that the street pianos were still there. They normally remove them after the Summer but they had left two in the station. This one is an old over-damped Brinsmead, about 100 years old:

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I’m a minimalist, I think… well at least the last two years have been a neverending onslaught on all my possessions, commitments, and any other complications in life, trying to cut right back to the real me and find out how simple life can become. Doesn’t mean I’ll always live like this, but I think it’s a healthy exercise, and when it’s complete I’ll be able to think much more critically about whether I ever want to go back to being more complicated in any way.

About 21 months ago I decided to give loads of stuff away and move out of my rented flat to live in a tent. About 15 months ago I decided to give up the tent and sleep in a bivvy bag instead. This has been my sleeping arrangement since then for cold Winter nights:

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I’ve spent a few weeks in London, Oxford, and the Welsh Valleys. In London I slept in various places, revisiting some posh town squares and climbing onto a couple of low roofs.

But before I go on I must mention that I’ve tried to make this website a bit more user friendly – since my blog posts are so few and far between I thought perhaps if anyone’s following they’d soon get tired of visiting to see if I’ve written anything new. So on the right of this page (or at the far bottom in some web browers) you can enter your email address and click ‘subscribe’ to be notified when I publish a new entry. Why anyone would want to know when I’ve written another long rambling, I do not know…

Back to London where I saw this elderly woman sleeping in a grubby corner off Vauxhall Bridge Road near Victoria Station:

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