But until recently, it seemed like we were all meant to aspire to the own-nothing-and-be-happy life. It’s a vision in which travel is easy, possessions are minimal (and delivered by drone), work happens remotely on a laptop, and different geographies aren’t homes so much as flavours to sample on a tasting menu.

Perhaps no voice expresses this more elegantly than the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh, who this week wrote a plaintive defence of the frictionless life: “The myth of the man-child”.

The childless bachelor male, Ganesh claims, isn’t a perpetual adolescent. Far from it: this figure is cultivated, high-minded, “austere” and well-travelled, with “a decorum, almost a formality, born of aversion to the smells, stains and general boisterousness of a kid-filled home”. The most adult conversations, Ganesh reports, “are with the childless”.

This isn’t the first defence of the frictionless life he’s written. Shortly before the pandemic hit in earnest, he made “The climate case for childlessness”, in which he acknowledged that it’s not really about climate at all, but a desire to stay unencumbered. It’s about “a taste for leisure, a dread of sexual monotony”. He and others like him did not, he says, “hate to ‘bring a child into this world’ […] so much as into our diaries”.

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And this is driven, he claims, by a desire for “maximum control” over life: “I know with some precision the list of cities in which I want to pass the rest of this decade, and in what sequence” — a plan that, he acknowledges, wouldn’t be workable with a spouse and children in tow. Ganesh realises this makes him selfish. But he sees this as “a bid for a more, not a less serious life”.

There was a time I would have nodded energetically along with this idea. I wanted, I would say, joy rather than contentment. (I’m pretty sure I recall claiming that the latter emotion merely ‘bovine’.) I spent my twenties living light, travelling lots, and resisting the accumulation of permanent possessions or obligations.

I could have bought a flat in London back when it was affordable; but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to be tied down. Nor did I want a long-term relationship. I didn’t feel stable or coherent enough to tolerate the sheer consistency of commitment to just one other person.

As for the most serious such commitment there is — children — the prospect gave me recurring nightmares. In this I was an early adopter of a now-mainstream Western trend: to remain “child-free”. Many frame this in ecological terms, as in the recent COP26 protest by Population Matters aimed at encouraging people to breed less to save the earth. But a recent Pew poll reported the most common reason given by childless Americans for their decision is simply “I just don’t want to”.

I don’t want to sound like I’m picking on Ganesh, who is thoughtful and clearly aware of the inverse correlation between freedom and intimacy. “Our horizons widen as our commitments narrow,” he observes in his defence of the ‘man-child’. Or, as he puts it differently in a column mourning the decline of expat city-states: “shallowness can be emancipating”.

Even as he defends the atomised hyper-liberal lifestyle, Ganesh is not insensible to what can be lost. He comments, for example, on the way pets “fill a hole” for many millennials in a way allotments, or religion, or volunteering might once have done: “Their dog or cat is the only endothermic mammal that some outwardly successful peers can count on for affection, or don’t have to walk on eggshells around.”

And in any case, even he is uncomfortably aware that his preferred way of life as a “middle class world citizen” may be on borrowed time. Climate anxiety, political instability, middle-class wage stagnation and, more recently, pandemic restrictions all militate against the democratic opening-up of the world to mass frictionlessness.

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But here’s the rub: swapping emancipation for shallowness is less enjoyable when you can’t afford the consumerist upside of minimal ties. One of the first columns I ever wrote here discussed the growing demographic who have embraced liberal atomisation, only to find changing economic conditions have denied them the disposable income that makes being unencumbered fun.

It’s all very well rejecting loyalties and obligations, if your earnings open the full range of upscale world-citizenship for your delectation. But Ganesh has little to offer those who lose this abundance. His best suggestion is that if you own nothing, having spent your twenties acquiring memories, you can always be happy by marrying into money in your thirties. It scarcely needs saying that while this might at a pinch be plausible advice for the kind of 20-something who reads the Financial Times, it’s unlikely to be of use more generally.

For the bottom tier of the new knowledge class is materially increasingly difficult to distinguish from gig-economy proles: both groups own nothing, and neither seems especially happy. Political unrest is rising and, as I’ve argued, the principal distinction between the Left-wing version of this discontent — antifa — and its alt-Right counterpart is cultural.

Some have belatedly realised they traded deep commitments for horizons that aren’t wide at all but shrinking rapidly. Happily not all of these disappointed would-be world citizens have responded by setting cities on fire. And it’s far from a foregone conclusion that the unlucky also-rans who got the atomisation but not the spending-money are all doomed to a future eating mealworm slurry in tiny one-person ‘pod’ homes.

Many are responding in far more constructive ways. For every doomer meme or creepy WEF video, subcultures are emerging in which people raised to be maximally individualist are trying to work out how to live together. In its most mundane form, this looks like a backlash against waiting till your thirties to have kids, or young parents writing about how to rebuild local community. In its more Bay Area-esque form, the social organiser Richard Bartlett is working on strategies for making ‘decentralised’ communities more capable of long-term interpersonal commitment, and thus less vulnerable to the well-documented tendency utopias have of imploding.

Or further out on the apocalyptic spectrum lie green land-based projects such as the Rizoma Field School, which is one of a growing network of families and groups attempting what adherents call ‘Doomer Optimism’: an approach to life based on the idea that things will probably get a lot worse, but that all is not lost if we can find ‘regenerative paths forward’. It seeks to develop sustainable forms of farming and community life, and also teach them to others. Many of these are a long way from the egalitarian ideals of the hippie commune era, and often explicitly opposed to the progressive and hyper-individualist ideas that drove such utopian ventures.

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Will any of this work? ‘Doomer optimist’, smallholder and sustainability academic Jason Snyder is acutely aware of the difficulties likely to be faced by the first generations after Peak Frictionlessness. “An uprooted generation will suffer all sorts of embarrassing contradictions as they try to relocalise,” he observed earlier this year. “They should do it anyway”.

I won’t bore you with how I came to reconsider my commitment to the frictionless life, beyond saying I’m glad I did so just about young enough to form a family before I got too old for that option to be open. But Snyder is right: adjusting to a life organised around the commitments I always feared hasn’t always been easy. It’s not uncommon for family members to get exasperated with me when I do something that implies I still think of myself as a solitary atom-self rather than a member of the team.

I don’t think I’m the only voluntary adopter of a more encumbered life to wrestle with this. The Bay Area technologist Venkatesh Rao captured something of the resulting ambivalence recently. In an increasingly politically unstable world, Rao acknowledged, the frictionless life may be less prudent than stockpiling supplies and working for a durable, secure home. Even so, he doesn’t seem wholly thrilled, tweeting nostalgically: “Remember when the ideal was a backpack, phone, passport, credit card?”. In contrast: “Owning lots of shit and supplies is a PITA [pain in the arse]”.

But what else can we do? Ganesh is right that narrower commitments mean wider horizons. But that’s assuming you can afford to enjoy those wider horizons. And for the rest, when emancipation is unaffordable, all you get is the shallowness.

In response, growing numbers are struggling, however clumsily, to rebuild all those commitments we were raised to discard. It might not work, but I refuse to be cynical towards anyone who’s trying. After all, some loves are worth sacrificing a measure of freedom for. And as the world grows stranger and more unstable, perhaps these are all we’ll be able to rely on.

And then, in 1906, an earthquake destroyed the fragile city. Buildings toppled. Broken gas pipes and fallen powerlines started fires. The authorities tried in vain to create firebreaks, resorting to dynamiting whole blocks of houses, but there was no stopping the fires that burned for another four days. More than 80% of the city’s buildings were destroyed. At least 3,000 people were killed, and the majority of survivors were displaced from their homes.

It is what followed the disaster, though, that is truly fascinating. San Francisco transformed. It went from a city renowned for cut-throat competition, race riots and brothels to the site of an extraordinary upsurge of public-spiritedness. Residents who survived built impromptu health clinics and makeshift shelters.

A beautician, Anna Amelia Holshouser, recalled how she and others stitched blankets and sheets together to make a tent for children, and then set up a soup kitchen, feeding as many strangers as they could out of a few unbroken plates and tin cans. All across the wrecked landscape, groups of survivors banded together to create places of safety and mutual aid. Rebecca Solnit describes the small-scale initiatives on each rubble-strewn street of San Francisco as “little utopias” — that is, idealistic micro-societies where people lived as much for others as for themselves, spontaneously rejecting the dominant narrative of individualism.

What occurred in San Francisco was a rare thing, but it had happened before and it would happen again. Over and over throughout history, idealistic, cooperative communities have sprouted up in the wake of disasters.

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There are few examples as clear as the communities that followed the First World War, less than a decade after the earthquake in San Francisco. On a single day in the war — 22 August 1914 — the French army lost 27,000 men: half as many soldiers dead as the United States would later lose in the entire Vietnam War. In addition to ten million lives lost over the course of the conflict there was the wider damage: the uncounted millions scarred in body and mind; the disorienting sense of an entire social order destroyed.

People reeled under the compound effect of war and an influenza pandemic — robbed of their young, their hopes destroyed, uncertain of what the future held. But amid the destruction arose an impulse that was optimistic, energetic and humanitarian.

As in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, small groups of men and women began to rebuild, starting experimental settlements, renouncing old ways of living and trying to create new ones. Many people around the world believed the old social order was to blame for the Great War: the preoccupation with capitalist gain and nationalistic competition. Their response was to lead lives built around philosophies of non-materialistic mutual aid. In Germany, coteries of students and intellectuals took to the country to live collectively and farm cooperatively. In Japan, so many idealistic settlements were started that the conservative press reported anxiously on a “new village craze”. These post-war groups, though drastically different in style and structure, all had shades of the resilient, compassionate and communally-minded action that defined the days after the earthquake in San Francisco.

What can we learn from these reactions to disaster? Perhaps simply that adversity itself can prompt what is good in mankind — the urge to redraft the lines along which our societies are built for the better; a turn to co-operative social striving that would otherwise never have manifested.

And yet few utopias last long. In San Francisco, it was just a matter of days before thousands of soldiers were “restoring order” in the city — which included shooting those who were trying to collect food for the needy. New modes of living rarely spark large-scale social transformations, and all too often the status quo resumes.

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But short-lived though most utopian communities are, they are connected in a beneficial way to the existing social order. They are in what German sociologist Karl Mannheim called “dialectical tension” with it: offering a reconfigured version of the outside world, expanding people’s sense of social possibilities, while at the same time being shaped by the mainstream’s needs. Even the communities that disintegrate quickly leave traces behind them, some of which are absorbed into the dominant social structures. And their examples gesture towards the fundamental idealism and resiliency in the human spirit, and the easily forgotten truth that it is always possible to recast the way we live.

We’re passing through another disaster now. And though the defining nature of this pandemic has been that people have been forced to live apart, it has nonetheless sparked impressive examples of idealistic activity, of cooperation and social action. Drivers in Wuhan created a volunteer car fleet to transport medical workers to hospitals when public transport shut down; young people in India mobilised to provide aid packages for those without savings; experts created the open-source library “Coronavirus Tech Handbook”, pooling knowledge on technologies and organisational methods for fighting the pandemic.

Climate change is a slower-moving crisis. Like the First World War, it has sparked in many a sense of the failure of the underlying systems of society and governance, which seem to be unable or unwilling to cope and change. Collectives experimenting with low-impact modes of communal living — ecotopias, as some of them call themselves — are proliferating.

At Old Hall Community in Suffolk, a group of 50 share a manor house, farming, cooking communally and keeping their carbon footprint as near as possible to net zero. In the mountains of Asturias in northern Spain, sixty Spanish, French, Danish and German women and men live in the remote commune of Matavenero, where they grow their own food, build their own houses and consume as little as they can. There are larger initiatives, including the community of Toyosato in Japan, where several hundred participants aim to demonstrate a fulfilling life built on sustainable farming, cooperation and minimal possessions. This settlement is one of more than 70 low-impact communities that form the Yamagishi movement, which stretches to Australia, Brazil, Switzerland and the United States.

These contemporary utopias are not a replacement for long-sighted national and international legislation, or for the much-needed regulation of corporate actors. In many ways they may be less effective than change-oriented activists such as Extinction Rebellion. But ecotopians put their money where their mouths are. They live in the way they think we all ought to live.

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There seems to be a time limit on utopian communities. When the disasters that inspired them are forgotten, they generally collapse, or are absorbed back into the old order with its attendant oppressions and injustices. Sometimes, they mitigate that old order, demonstrating practices that can help make society a little better, a little more just. But climate change falls outside of this pattern. We are not likely to live to see the end of this global disaster. And if we insist on holding fast to the old order, to the dominant ideologies of hyper-individualism and materialism, the crisis will only deepen.

Utopian living, at its best, creates an opening in the fabric of society, allowing us to see how fragile the habits and structures which seem immutable in day-to-day life really are. “While the crisis lasted, people loved each other,” wrote the young reformer Dorothy Day of the San Francisco earthquake, having watched her mother give away her clothes to survivors. We haven’t quite reached the moment of imaginative, communal rebuilding that people are capable of when faced with disaster. We must hope that this moment will arrive soon.

Sentimental, I know. I think what I found moving was that the Communards, including most of their leaders, were ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. Here was a crisis not of their making or choosing, but one they seized nonetheless.

At the crack of dawn on 18 March 150 years ago, the French government sent troops to repossess a large number of cannon in the possession of the Paris National Guard, the citizen militia. Crowds of Parisians turned out to stop the troops and, in a panic, the government, the army, the police and the senior civil service fled. Paris was left in the hands of its people.

A week later, they elected a city council, the Conseil de la Commune. Soon after that, clashes with government troops began in the suburbs, and intensified over the following six weeks. On 21 May, soldiers climbed over the city walls, and there followed a week of fighting which left whole streets in ruins, major public buildings in flames, and the streets strewn with corpses. Many hundreds of people were summarily executed, 40,000 were marched away as prisoners and over 4,000 were subsequently exiled to penal camps in New Caledonia. The Paris Commune seemed utterly defeated.

That the Commune and the “Communards” should still be remembered by so many people, however vaguely, is itself something of a mystery. Nineteenth-century Europe was not short of urban uprisings and bloody massacres. But only specialists recall the Warsaw rising of 1830, the revolts in Vienna and Prague in 1848, or the Roman Republic of 1849.

Part of the reason must be that it concerns Paris. But apart from Delacroix’s painting of Liberty Leading the People and Les Misérables, most know nothing of the half-dozen other Parisian uprisings of the century. Marx wrote importantly about the Commune, which must be another part of the reason. But then he wrote importantly about the June 1848 revolt and the December 1851 coup d’état, without that being enough to place them within popular folklore. So is it the name “Commune” which resonates both with hippy dreams of anarchic togetherness and with Communist narratives of history?

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For Marxists (although Marx was privately unsure) the Commune was a political and theoretical breakthrough: “the form at last discovered”, he wrote, “for the emancipation of the working class”. The Communards, he argued, had hit on a non-oppressive and yet fully revolutionary way of exercising power, by abolishing all oppressive institutions — army, church, police — and giving power directly to the people themselves.

Marxists took it for granted that the industrial proletariat of Paris must have been the most dynamic and forward-looking element. Engels elaborated further by defining the Commune as the first “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the transition to a classless society. Lenin (whose body was to be shrouded in a Communard flag) was more critical: it was the Commune’s defeat that was really significant. It had failed because it did not have the leadership of a disciplined party, and because it was insufficiently ruthless in combatting class enemies. So the Communards were retrospectively enrolled for nearly a century as pioneering ancestors in the long march to Communism.

But a heretical counter-explanation emerged in the 1960s in the work of a young French historian, Jacques Rougerie: the Commune was not the first of a new kind of revolution, he said, but the last of an old one. Rougerie was brutally attacked by the Communist Party for his suggestion that the Communards were the descendants of the sans-culottes of the 1790s. Not an industrial proletariat, but skilled workers in traditional industries (engravers, joiners, cobblers), small businessmen, shopkeepers, clerks. Not looking forwards to Communism, but backwards to self-managed workers’ cooperatives and the republics of 1848 and 1792: they officially adopted the revolutionary calendar, which placed them in the Year 79. So, concluded some historians, the Commune was really the last gasp of the French Revolution.

But historians have a weakness for pioneering movements, which after all give their research projects extra glamour. A popular view in the Swinging Sixties was that the Commune was a bit like May 1968, a carnival of anarchy, even a “total revolution, as one historian suggested fancifully. Or was it a revolution to take back control of space that had been appropriated by bourgeois urbanism?

Particularly in the United States, it was reinvented as an act of feminism. It was the women of the Commune, the notorious pétroleuses, who made it unique. This had once been a label of shame for the (mythical) women who supposedly went round setting fire to buildings. Now it became a title of honour. Communard women not only spoke up for themselves and their collective interests, it was argued, they actually fought on the barricades.

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For some American historians, it was their organised use of violence that was the significant novelty of 1871: emancipation by the gun. The most recent reinterpretation is that the Commune was an event in global history, the most fashionable historiographical trend.

Old? New? Leninist? Anarchist? Feminist? Urban? Global? There are plenty of reasons for commemorating its 150^th anniversary. But there are also simpler explanations for why the Commune is still remembered by many as inspiring and meaningful.

First is that it was short: two months. As Marx noted, this was only enough to indicate what might have been — and, of course, that includes almost anything. So it is easy to project things onto the Commune, things we would like to imagine as possible. And it also means that it didn’t have time to go really wrong. Yes, there were plenty of errors and some sinister aspects, but compared with the 1793 Terror or Stalinism, the Commune was innocent. It didn’t have time either to moderate into bourgeois banality, or to start devouring its own children. So always unfulfilled, its promise undiminished, it remains (in the words of a famous song written by one of its leaders) “le temps des cerises” — the cherry time.

The other reason it is remembered, as Marx also noted at the time, is because of the ferocity with which it was crushed during the last lurid “Bloody Week” of barricade fighting amid a city in flames. Around 7,000 people were killed — a unique bloodbath for the 19^th century. This turned its followers into martyrs, and created a heroic legend.

There is still an annual pilgrimage to one of the killing sites, the Mur des Fédérés in the Père Lachaise cemetery. But the intention was commemoration, not repetition: in future, the French Left would fight at the ballot box, not on the barricade. Quite a number of prominent Communards returned as elected politicians or city officials. Two lived to be ministers in the French national unity government of 1914. Put all these elements together, and you get a powerful if enigmatic memory which can serve a range of purposes, including sentimental nostalgia.

But is this all the Commune can tell us 150 years later? I think there is something else, something that is not so often celebrated: namely, that the Commune was fundamentally about popular democracy. Today, we might even call it “populist”.

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France since the implosion of the Revolution in the mid-1790s had lived under a succession of oligarchies, whether under republics, emperors or kings: a roundabout of elites. But the defeat by Germany in 1870-71 had discredited both mainstream Left and Right, and created a political vacuum. It looked as though this would end in another period of monarchy — rule by another section of the elite, with nothing to offer except repression spiced with paternalism.

But the Communards said no: this time the people themselves would rule. Of course, their defeat in war marked a far more dramatic break than anything we have so far experienced in the West. But today’s impatience with politicians, technocratic bureaucracies and establishment “experts” certainly invites some comparisons. Certainly, too many progressives today seem to prefer the elite: they have abandoned the idea that people who are poor, or even those who do ordinary jobs or who have not been to university, have ideas and experience of their own, and an equal right to a political voice.

Populism is feared and denigrated as reactionary. Yet the most basic principle of the Communards was that power should be shared as equally as possible, and that every person (well, every man) had an equal right to make decisions. Office holders at every level would be elected, and if they failed in their duty their electors would dismiss them: not just politicians but officials and magistrates, too. Wherever possible, citizens would perform public duties themselves — for example, as members of the National Guard, they would be their own police force. The aim was freedom and emancipation: to be treated as adults.

This was the purpose behind the secularisation of schools and a widespread demand for technical education: so that, wrote a Communard newspaper,  “those who can handle tools can also write books”. It lay behind the aspiration to workers’ cooperatives for women and men. The multiplication of political clubs across the city showed a thirst among ordinary people to have their say on political and social matters, often speaking for the first time in public.

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The pithiest expression of the Communard spirit is the famous Internationale, written by a member of the Commune, Eugène Pottier. It includes this: “there are no supreme saviours, not God, not emperors, not politicians … let’s save ourselves; … enough of languishing as dependents, equality demands other laws.”

It is, of course, easy to pick holes in this. Not much was put into practice in seven weeks of civil war, and if it had been it wouldn’t have worked for long: what normal person wants to spend all their evenings in political meetings, sitting on local committees, or patrolling the streets in National Guard uniform chasing prostitutes and bakers illegally working at night (two of the Commune’s slightly eccentric reforms)? Besides, there were plenty of Communards who were a bit too keen on repressing opinions they didn’t like, persecuting harmless priests and nuns, and dreaming of a return to the Jacobin Terror.

Nevertheless, the Communard leadership were reluctant to introduce censorship, disliked locking people up and refused to use the death penalty: the guillotine was fetched from its shed and publicly burnt. Yes, in the end a number of hostages were killed, some even nastily lynched: mainly gendarmes and priests, including the Archbishop of Paris. But this was done in the last desperate days, as Communard prisoners were being slaughtered by the army, and it was never officially sanctioned. As the writer and Commune member Jules Vallès put it, even in defeat they wanted to go down in history “unstained by the filth of the abattoir”. How many revolutionary leaders can say the same? Lenin’s conclusion was that they were fools who were defeated because their “excessive magnanimity” held them back from the “implacable extermination” of their class enemies —not a weakness he ever yielded to.

The Commune was doomed anyway. No government was going to permit that level of democracy. If the French army had not defeated it, the German army, which was still camped outside the city, would probably have done so. Or it might well have collapsed of its own accord: as one of its members lamented, they were really just “a talkative little parliament” and they were haemorrhaging support. As we have seen over and over again in history, most people sooner or later (and often sooner than later) want to get back to normal boring life.

But had the Communards anticipated Lenin’s retrospective advice, or followed the example of Robespierre’s Terror, the Commune would not have left the enigmatic but positive legacy it has — this wistful, always unfulfilled aspiration to true democracy.

There remains something profoundly moving in that aspiration; moving enough for me to make my annual journey up to Montmartre. For on the whole the Communards did their best, according to their lights, for democracy, for their city, and for their fellow citizens. They were people for whom Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were more inspiring than Censorship, Identity and Victimhood. In that sense, at least, their actions still resonate today.

In practice, possibly fortunately, this never happened. None of us worked out how to make the jump from the city to our bucolic dream. (Though I did, for a while, live in a kind of commune in Brixton, where I soon discovered that even radically egalitarian households rapidly form pecking orders that — in more everyday settings — would definitely be described as ‘hierarchies’, an experience that was formative for my now middle-aged politics.) As time went on, life took me in a different direction: I got married, eventually left London in rather more conventional style, and now live in a small market town in rural Bedfordshire.

Someone wittier than me remarked other day that the difference between British and American post-liberals is like the difference between Britpop and a rave in a derelict factory. The former is cheery, vaguely agrarian and occasionally at risk of being twee; the latter feels like an excerpt from a Mad Max film, all post-apocalyptic survivalism and weird technology.

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This makes sense when you consider that there isn’t really space in England for everyone to build a survivalist bunker, so British post-liberalism tends to take a more sociable form than its wilder American cousin. My own domestic post-liberal utopia definitely shares a border with the world of twee: our first backyard chickens hatched this week, all claws and beak like tiny dinosaurs, and my husband and I are dividing our time between remote working and planting summer veg. It’s a painfully middle-class version of Back to the Land, and decidedly more Tolkien than Mad Max.

Working from home, I often think of the generation a decade younger than me wilting under lockdown in grim city flatshares like the ones that prompted my agrarian fantasies at the turn of the Millennium. I wonder how many of them dream of a more rural lifestyle — and how achievable that would even be, when graduate jobs are overwhelmingly city-based today. After all, it’s one thing being Blur-bassist-turned-cheesemaker Alex James, using a fortune garnered in the music industry to set yourself up as a country gentleman. But for the generation struggling with massive student debts, flatlining wages and soaring rentals, what prospect could there ever be of even settling down, let alone outside the big city with friends and a few acres?

One way round this could be to join a commune, though according to University of Waterloo ecologist Stephen Quilley these have “a patchy survival rate” compared to more conservative agrarian communities such as the Bruderhof in Sussex (founded 1971). Left-wing communes, Quilley told me, don’t tend to survive as long “because they have an individualistic culture, and raise individualistic children who want to leave and do something else”.

That said, some long-established communes such as Findhorn have survived beyond the founding generation, while keeping community and ecology centre-stage and managing to make ends meet without imploding like my Brixton effort did. (If anyone is tempted by the commune option, WWOOF has a list of current vacancies here.)

Or there’s the Britpop method already mentioned: use money earned elsewhere to subsidise your rural idyll. Arguably my own domestic chicken-raising and carrot-planting is a variant on the Alex James model, as both adults in the house also earn money elsewhere while producing veg (and, if Chicken Sunny and Chicken Flora both turn out to be girls, eggs as well) for our own consumption.

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Of course, not everyone who dreams of a smallholding wants to become a commercial farmer. But for most people, buying land isn’t realistic unless there’s a business plan attached. So another approach that’s gaining in popularity is Community Supported Agriculture. CSA initiatives can take different forms, but what they have in common is ‘a partnership between farmers and consumers in which the responsibilities, risks and rewards of farming are shared’. The idea is to bring communities and farming back together, with communities having more access to farm life and in turn helping to support the more labour-intensive styles of growing that market logic routinely forces out of business.

Strawberry Grove Growers, a CSA market garden in Cambridgeshire, is one example local to me. Owned by its founders, it is neither a commune nor a millionaire’s toy farm, but run as a membership organisation supplying seasonal veg boxes to the local area. None of the three founders is wealthy: Felicity, 35, is a former nurse. She and her partner Sam started the project with their friend Connor, with all three founders working part-time to support it. Four years in, their membership is growing steadily, veg box subscriptions are at capacity and they are on a course to be self-supporting.

You have to be seriously rich to buy a tract of farmland just so you can sit on it and write poetry. So for most, the agrarian dream means some kind of business plan – even just to break even. Felicity told me that when they started Strawberry Grove, locals assumed they had far more conventional commercial plans: “Everyone thought we were going to build houses,” she says. “Even the council didn’t understand what we were doing.”

But if Felicity and her business partners are on their way to being self-supporting, maybe perhaps there is hope for those who dream of their own patch of land without being millionaires or joining a commune. And maybe there are ways for our food chain to become a bit smaller-scale, more local and more more labour-intensive without being killed by the brute logic of the market.

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If so, it will be welcome. The pandemic has prompted concern about Britain’s fragile food security: currently, half of the food we consume is produced overseas. One biologist estimates that by shifting toward more labour-intensive gardening methods, Britain’s entire fruit and veg requirement could be met using a mere 200,000 hectares of green space – just 2% of current farmland. Allotment-style management could even make cities fruitful: a recent study estimated that cultivating just 10% of urban green space could supply 15% of a city’s population with five portions of fruit and veg a day. So at least from an ecological point of view, there’s a strong case for more small-scale growing of all types — including Strawberry Grove style initiatives supported by a wider community.

From my own experience, pursuing a kind of 21^st-century update on the productive household, the Bilbo Baggins dream has many upsides but some challenges too. For one thing, a productive garden is a serious commitment. You can forget going on holiday in August, as that’s peak harvest season. And as Felicity says, unless you’re a millionaire toy farmer who can afford to hire a manager, there’s always work that needs doing, outside, whatever the weather. “In the winter it can be tough,” she told me.

Whether you’re dividing your time between growing and something else, like Wendell Berry, or Roger Scruton, or producing full-time like Felicity, it’s also a lifestyle that does away with the idea of ‘time off’. “Unless you’re willing to work hard this isn’t the life for you,” Felicity told me. Though our growing is on a smaller scale, I can relate – there’s always something that needs doing. And while it’s a lifestyle that offers flexibility for mothers, you can forget maternity leave: Felicity had her first baby in January and has continued working in the garden, with her baby son in a sling.

As long as you love your work, this is all fine. As Felicity puts it, “If you love gardening, it doesn’t feel like work.” But those of us drawn to the Tolkien rather than the Mad Max postliberal aesthetic, busy promoting chicken-rearing and the joy of limits as possible solutions to all manner of ecological, economic and sociocultural issues, probably need to think pragmatically about the trade-offs as well as the advantages of the agrarian idyll.