Yes, that's the good humoured, tolerant brand of self sufficiency promoted by Andy and Dave Hamilton on their website and now in their book.
I spent an afternoon with the twins at their home in Bristol last week and learnt about the most brutal slug-slaying method known to man and why everyone can make a few lifestyle tweaks to become more self sufficientish. The interview will be in Body&Soul this Saturday. In the meantime, here are the boys with their top tips on becoming self-sufficientish (clicking here should take you to a video), and below are some benefits of their lifestyle you might not have thought about.
1/ Being self-sufficientish is generous spirited. There isn't enough land in Britain for everyone to become properly, pig-in-the-yard self-sufficient, a la John Seymour, the father of self sufficiency. So, adopting a few measures, such as growing your greens or making your own dandelion cough syrup, is a more sustainable way of letting a greater number of people have a go.
2/ You'll save a lot of money, at a time when rising fuel and food prices are causes for concern. Andy reveals that his total earnings a few years ago were ??5,000. On this, he lived and ate very well. Thanks in part to his commitment to Freecycle, skip-diving (never passing a skip without having a poke around), growing his own food, mending things rather than chucking them, cycling and walking rather than driving and buying clothes in charity shops.
3/ Your brain works better away from a desk. Andy and Dave's idea of a work meeting is to head to the woods and pick some wild garlic. 'It helps you to think, much better than speaking over the phone,' they say. I quite agree, sometimes I have to move to think. I'll sit at my desk and stagnate for hours, then trot off to make a cup of tea, and bingo, I've got it.
4/ It's an affordable way of eating delicious, organic vegetables. That is, if you're not keen on coughing up a fiver for a bag of carrots and a cabbage at a farmers market. This is was why Dave started growing vegetables as a student. He persuaded his landlord to let him cultivate the garden. (And yes, they are delicious: Dave gave me a bagful of purple sprouting broccoli from his allotment. For the past few evenings, I've been steaming it ' both florets and stalks ' and eating it with a wedge of butter and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. It is truly a gourmet vegetable and I'm planning to plant some myself this weekend.)
5/ You don't have to move to the countryside. Dave and Andy say the self sufficientish lifestyle is well suited to towns. There's great urban foraging potential (here's a thread about foraging in parks); more desirable stuff in skips; good public transport and you can still go to the cinema and find pubs full of different kinds of people.
6/ You end up absurdly healthy. Just take a look at Dave's budget food section. Yes, it's cheap. Yes, the recipes are simple to make. Ok, so it is a bit studenty. But just imagine how healthy you'd be on a diet of dahl, broth and cous cous.
7/ It promotes a happy lifestyle. 'Just spending ten minutes in the garden or making your own soup for supper will make you feel better than half an hour in front of an X-box,' says Andy, and I believe him.
8/ You'll be at the forefront of a trend. You might think that your moth eaten cardigans and second hand clothes are an embarrassment to your children/husband/friends but actually ' and you can tell them this ' they are part of a new fashion trend called chic-eco (pronounced chico). Or so says Dave and Andy (but it could be a Bristol thing).
9/ It doesn't matter if you're not perfect. Don't think that there's no point trying to be green because you've blown it by owning a car or flying on holiday. Everyone has weak points. Andy feels bad about taking taxis and he confesses to eating meat, which has a heavy carbon footprint. Dave still smokes, even after writing this handy guide to quitting, and he feels especially bad about it because tobacco is a heavily sprayed crop with a bad record for exploiting workers.
10/ You can wow your friends with nettle haggis dinner parties. It tastes nicer than it sounds, apparently.