It's all organic

If I told you I arrived home last night to find that my fiancé had cleaned the kitchen to within an inch of its life and told me not to touch any of the pots and pans bubbling away, you’d probably think what a sensitive and modern man I’m living with. Well, maybe the women would think that and the men would wonder what he’d been up to. In actual fact I’m ashamed to say that my other half has taken up a hideously embarrassing hobby: making homebrew. Not because there’s a shortage in real ale or even because the economic crisis has rendered it impossible for us to pay a visit to Threshers. No, apparently it’s fun to spend your time up to your elbows in barrels of pungent smelling fluid. Fantastic.

So, why am I wittering on about beer? Well, it seems as though my man isn’t the only one to be reinventing their own version of The Good Life. I call it the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall effect; we’re all yearning for a golden age when you grew our own carrots and slaughtered your own Sunday roast. Flick your telly over to Property Ladder and you’ll see that traditional occupations are receiving a revival, with ex-investment bankers abandonning their laptops for the simple, masculine pleasures of manual labour (grr). Bygone hobbies are becoming popular again, as film stars while away the hours knitting their own underpants. And eco warriers would do our wartime predecessors proud with their recylcling and ‘making do’.

I don’t think this resurgence of basic life skills is totally unconnected with the financial crisis that’s rocking our world. We’re living in a time when the most fundamental assumptions underpinning our lives are being torn apart. Whereas the nineties saw the explosion of credit, and a clammering for celebrity-style lifestyles, the noughties see us crying out for the reassurance and security we took for granted in the past. Our grandfathers fought in the war and dug for victory; we get into a tiz if the 24 hour Tesco runs out of lime to go with our Coronas. As Hugh advocates, we need to regain our self-sufficiency and make our modern lives less vulnerable.

The past is definitely the future when it comes to advertising. We can see it in the spate of cautious ads which have sprung up in the market, a good example being Nationwide’s excellent ‘Strong, stable, dependable. Exciting aren’t we?’ This advert is open in recognising that the headonistic days of fast cars and fast bucks are gone, and the only ‘perk’ savers in 2009 are looking for is that the cash they put in the bank will still be there when they need to take it out.

As a woman in her mid 20s, I tend to think that the desire for a simpler life is affecting the younger generation the most. We might be seeing the past through rose tinted spectacles but I, for one, wouldn’t mind bringing a few elements of it back. For example job security. During my eight year long career history, I’ve had three jobs working for some of the UK’s largest financial organisations and have been through three rounds of redundancies. That’s one re-application for my job per department I’ve worked in, and I narrowly avoided a second cull at one place by months. I’ve always been one of the ‘lucky survivors’, but a job for life is very much a distant dream for us 80s babies.

The recession is also making us wish we could go back to being first time buyers again. Why? Well because at least back then we could cobble together a few pennies for a deposit or, failing that, go for one of those wonderfully irresponsible 110% mortgages. Now, having pumped money into our homes since the early noughties, negative equity and restrictive lending is making second-time buying far harder than getting a house ever was in the good old days. Furthermore, if house prices rise, the other pipedream we have of surviving on one wage while the woman raises the children- a lifestyle our ancestors enjoyed and fought hard for us not to be able to- will never be more than a crazy idea.

Yep, things are pretty depressing at the moment, but don’t feel too sorry for us. Thanks to Hugh, at least we can survive on a diet of real ale and carrot soup.