An Escape from the Roman Empire

My greatest adventure

Dear fellow Roman slaves,

Here we are in the days of the 2,022nd year of our enslavement to the ever deceptive re-branded but barely disguised Roman Empire.

We are astonishingly numerous now.

The bigger the Empire the greater the number of us.

Where is the resistance?

The debt slaves cannot break free.

It was a devious move by the Empire.

First they conquered by military force and then by devious religious beliefs foisted on unsuspecting innocent people. As religion ceased to control humanity there was a slow shift towards creating more and more national debt.

When a nation pays huge interest on debt it has less with which to improve living standards.

Poverty leads to personal debt.

All the wealth vanishes from the entire nation as it is funnelled up to the Empire.

But that is mean and ugly materialism. Devoid of love or spirit.

Didn't Jesus say "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”?

I always imagined this meant to give the Empire only that which belongs to it but claim, use and develop a relationship with all life out of respectful love for whatever we imagine is God and the natural universe.

Just my personal take, I could be wrong, of course.

This opinion was the impetus which drove me to sell up my home and business in 2003 and set out to lead a travelling life.

I wanted to avoid the Empire as much as I could, it had harmed me enough by the time I turned 50 years of age and I needed a break from it and some communion time with nature, my two dogs and cat in particular.
I wanted to be out of touch, out and about with no destination. Seeing what went on directly with my own eyes, rather than through a tell-lie-vision screen.

I purchased a hi-top LDV van and a good friend took it apart, rebuilding it until he could guarantee the vehicle for at least 10,000 miles. He loved that opportunity to work on a vehicle.
Good guy, near neighbour, Paul was an alcoholic and so he never could hold a job due to his binges.
I struck a terrific deal with him.
I bought all the tools he needed and he worked on my van. We became great friends and he helped me out in many other ways. Like taking my dogs out with him when he went to the pub while I worked full time. The loving dogs would attract a lot of girls and he would not get so blazing drunk! The dogs loved all the attention they were getting and I didn't worry that they were home alone and bored. Everyone was getting something out of the arrangement.

Fitting out the interior of the van was done in stages because small spaces need experience first, careful planning, decisions later. Minimalistic living is a test, I can tell you!

On the 30th of January 2004, I finally put the last of my furniture into storage and had thrown the last of the rubbish away.
I took the keys to my sold house to the Estate Agent and bid farewell to the mortgage.

I was free.

It was a freezing clear night. Hardly a breath of air moved. I drove to the open car park at the foot of our local park and let the dogs run. The cat, Pearlie and I sat watching them through the windscreen.

I made coffee and enjoyed the heat from the gas cooker. I thought about where to go for hours.

By the morning I had decided to stay within range of my Essex friends so that I could get help if I needed it but that minor insecurity did not last long.

Eventually, I drove all day, heading south and visited my son who was living in Totnes, Devon, UK. I revisited old haunts from my previous travelling days, ruefully noticing the deterioration. I couldn't miss it. The sand dunes of Cornwall were stripped away by tides and winds leaving bare rocky beaches.
I went through Wales, battered by stormy weather. I toured the Lake District but felt unwelcome in that slate grey wet and harsh environment.

It was my 52nd birthday in March before I decided to bite the bullet and drive to Dover. We took the ferry to France.

Driving on the wrong side of the road was terrifying at first. I was completely discombobulated for days. Driving was much more stressful so I did less of it daily and spent a lot of time finding secluded park-ups where my dogs could roam and I would not attract unnecessary attention.

I followed a convoluted route until the Pyrenees and from there I crossed into Spain. The heat as we summited the mountain range hit us hard and my van overheated on the descent.
It was time to stop and feel for my next direction.

Our journey turned into an epic odyssey of mountains, lakes and rivers, some of the most treacherous daring driving I have ever done and long periods of relaxing in the back of the van while the dogs and cat explored the land.
We had it so beautifully organised with great ventilation that we lived and slept very well.

In this escape from the Empire I had limited my interaction with civilisation down to fuel and food but I soon realised that if I ran out of money things would become sticky. Also I did not have indefinite time to spare. Once the paperwork on the van, MOT, insurance and Road Tax expired that would be the end of the journey and time to settle down.

So I searched all of the Spanish sierras for an off grid home. I called in to Inmobiliaras (Estate Agents) and everywhere I went I had a vague idea of what I wanted but I was not seeing it.

Eventually I made friends with a rancher who owned a beautiful lakeside place where I parked up for many days. He loved me because I cleaned up his land from litter. He recommended to go up to the nearby Vera of Extremadura. He got me an appointment with his friend, the local estate agent, and I was shown a number of properties around a string of tiny medieval villages. The soil was black and there were so many rivers and streams that the whole ledge of foothills around the south side of the mountain, Almanzor was lush and verdant.

The Garganta Alardos is a river which goes from cool blue flat calm to a raging torrent overnight. I loved this spot above all others. It is the Roman Bridge of Madrigal de la Vera:

There I found my dream home.

It was a 3 bedroomed bungalow with a wrap around verandah, car port under grape vines, swimming pool, exterior dining room, solar panels on the roof and a brick barbeque nestled under two mature cherry trees, in the corner of a wildly overgrown fruit farm right on the riverbank.
The three months of waiting for the purchasing paperwork to be done was a fun filled time.
I put a notice in the van window that I was looking for work and a lovely man offered me a job helping him to restore an old barn with a view to turning it into a home.
This gave me somewhere to park overnight, a donkey to wake me up at dawn, physically demanding bricklaying work from 7am until 1pm and then, the afternoons swimming and lazing on the river bank.
I began to meet the locals and found that the children had already named me Pocahontas due to being seen, followed everywhere by my two off-lead dogs!

When we did eventually occupy the finca (small farm) I was tidying stuff away in the house. I looked around and could not see the dogs.
They had gone to bed in the van!
It took them a while to get the message that our wandering days were over and this would be our new home. The cat absolutely loved it from the very start. Her favourite food was lizards which she had hunted on every mountain in Spain by then. My new property was loaded with them and moles, voles and mice. She also cleared all the scorpions for me, bless her!

Having spent the bulk of my life savings buying the fruit farm outright, I had to be careful to make what was left of my money last until I had got the place organised. I worked as a night watchman at a vast gravel extraction pit for the winter of 2004/5.
That was the easy life. I would arrive on site at 7pm, park up, lock the gates and let the dogs patrol the place! Rasta was a Groenendahl. Ben, a crossed German Shepherd and Staffordshire Bull Terrier. People were afraid of big black and soppy wolf-like Rasta, but Ben was the real danger. He would not think twice about attacking anyone who looked like they might break in and threaten us. He even chased lightning during cracking storms, barking at it in fury! He was so brave!
I would stay in the van while the dogs worked patrolling the acres of wild land around the gravel pit. I had plenty of Spanish books to read by candlelight, a blazing gas cooker keeping me toasty and time to text my friends back in the UK about my adventures. My boss was delighted. Nothing was stolen when we were looking after his business.

The nights were amazing and frosty in the plains below our mountain range. The silence there was profound. I would sleep, cosy and warm. Then, at 7am, I would unlock the gates for the workforce, go home and work on clearing my land of overgrowth.

The following spring I was offered a job teaching English in a private school in Madrid. This was only part time work but the pay was brilliant and I had free luxury accommodation nearby. I also gave private lessons in the evenings which added to my income. Holiday periods were so frequent and long that I was always able to drive home to my fruit farm and continue improving it.

The dogs and I dug a natural irrigation system that diverted water from the river alongside and fed it though a network of channels ending at a large pond which drained back to the river. From this I was able to pump fresh water into the swimming pool, up to the water tank on the roof and to hose down my baking land at sundown.
I learned how to use a chain saw and I created a wigwam wood store which defied the wind valiantly but eventually succumbed! I cooked at my huge fireplace all through the winters.

After two years teaching I felt I had enough experience to start my own evening school in the village near to my fruit farm. I got a lot of help from the local Alcalde (mayor) who was keen to see local youngsters take advantage of learning English in their spare time. I was given the use of a classroom above the village police station. All I had to buy was chalk for the board, everything else was provided by the village council, even advertising! My students ranged from 6 to 66 and I held classes from 5pm until 9pm every weekday. I soon became known to everyone and took part in village fiesta life.

I was paying the Empire very little at this point. It was heavenly. I was not wealthy materialistically, but in terms of communion with nature and all of that community, my life was full to the brim.

It is possible to extract yourself from the Empire but only to a certain extent. You will still have to pay land taxes, buy certain essentials like phone credit, solar panels, batteries and fuel but you can get it down really low if you find the right hermitage, like I did.

I had all sorts of deals going on. I cared for sick and abandoned pets for the local vet in exchange for her services to my precious animal friends, including a flock of free range chickens and later, a horse named Soldato which means Soldier.

Image from Soldato’s story: https://hive.blog/adventure/@francesleader/soldato-the-suicidal-horse

He was a retired goat-herding horse who let me ride him bareback. I received a fabulous pair of handmade riding boots for caring for him after his owner died. Soldato saved me a lot of hard work by chomping up all the grass between the trees and helping me drag huge boulders out of the newly dug pond.
The village people gave me a lot of support. The local butcher gave me bags of offal and bones to cook for my dogs every time I visited her shop. She loved to see Rasta and Ben sitting on her doorstep, waiting patiently for me. She chastised me for not eating enough myself. “You are getting thin, Francheska!” she would tut loudly. The grain merchant would deliver broken rice for the dogs, grain for Soldato and my chickens at knock down prices.
The cat, now fat but fleet of foot, was feeding herself entirely! She would leave food in the dogs’ bowls too, which they would stare at in amazement before gobbling it down raw.
I swapped my fruit produce for credit at the local grocery and gave fruit and eggs as presents when calling on village friends. One of my students paid for her classes with jars of honey! Another adult student provided small bags of dried home grown cannabis! Bartering is wonderful, huh?

Madrigal de la Vera was a community that kept its wealth within itself and yet was friendly and warm to me, a foreigner. In August every year the village would be over-run with holiday makers from Madrid, and over Spain, France and Italy. Brits had not realised that the natural fresh mountain mineral water of the inland ranges was much better than any of the coastlines full of hotels and mayhem.
Shh, don’t tell ‘em! 🤣😂

So where was I going with this? Oh yeah.

"Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s."

I guess what I am driving at is that in this the 2,022nd year of the Roman Empire,
why are we still paying Caesar, while his descendants use our wealth to destroy that which belongs to us all?

Yeah. That is where I was going with this.

Much love as always,

ONWARDS!
xx