Living in a château attracts lazy criticism from those hostile to our ways. We are erroneously referred to as those ‘champagne communards’ or ‘hooray hippies living it up in the hills.’ These are falsehoods. The Kommune has no tangible assets. We are not flush in the paper or, for that matter, any type of currency. We have neither the taste for posh bubbly, nor the budget to buy it.
Château is certainly not a word you’d readily associate with the place. Well before Calculus came to live here it had fallen into ruin. Cracked ceilings, mildewed plaster. Cobwebs everywhere. Many invisible in what is a sombre interior. (Small, medieval windows.) Spiders appearing to dance in the air.
The first jobs had been to hack away the vampiric vegetation and give the place a thorough airing, principally to remove the reek of stale cigar smoke. The place came instead to smell of Indian cigarettes and home-grown marijuana. Sweet and superior aromas, according to the château’s new resident.
Pylons, felled by the catastrophic millennium storms, had been left to rot slowly. Meaning there was no means of supplying electricity to the creeper infested walls. Calculus had not minded. Quite the opposite in fact. He was delighted. Being off grid meant the château was uncontaminated by digi-ether-al and light pollution. Great for night sky eye bathing, as Martha puts it. She means stargazing.
Yurt mania
With meagre funds, renovation was out of the question. The solution to living in a dilapidated château was to put up yurts – inside it! One in each of the six bedrooms. And two in living/dining hall area which had space left over to accommodate a long oaken table and a huge, thread bare settee draped in one of Koockie’s oriental quilts.
So eight Mongolian tents in total, not including the solar clock yurt outside, which measures infinitesimal spots of cosmic time. The kind of time we revere. Most other kinds we detest. Especially public time; that yucky melange of merchant and digital time.
The proliferation of yurts wasn’t entirely due to laziness or an attitude of short termism. Calculus, you see, has a theory about shelter – that, in marked contrast to how Western architecture had developed, it should be comparatively light, mobile and subordinate to mankind. In keeping with ancient traditions of Mongolian and Arab nomads.
The Kommune’s detractors, of which there are many, consider the yurts a brand of parasitic architecture, but Calculus says they are missing the point. Yurts, unlike a stone construction, can be easily moved, (even) into the surrounding forests.
Yurts inside a building; wood and leather inside stone. Contrasting constructions. The yurt, a nomadic invention, transportable. The château made of stone. Stone extracted from rivers by human muscle, then hauled up the mountain by donkeys and asses.
Squatting
Word quickly got out that Calculus was squatting the château yet nobody volunteered to come and boot him out. So he stayed, the yurts having made the place liveable. More than liveable, agreeable even.
Yurts make for exceedingly effective draught excluders. Inside a yurt candles stay lit. Outside a yurt (inside the château) they gutter with frustrating frequency, blackening the château’s interior. The château’s outer stone skin is contrastingly (storm rinsed) white and (sun buffed) clean.
Calculus ‘squats’ the château in more than one sense, preferring the posture to that of sitting. He is convinced Western civilisation has made the wrong choice in this regard. Resting on one’s haunches helps to keep the body supple, favours healthy bowel movement. It also saves on furniture costs, dispensing with the need for chairs.
Aside from Martha we have all trained our muscles accordingly, and become accomplished squatters.
Calculus is out of sync with a lot of society mores. He has lots of unconventional beliefs that he will mischievously air in public. He is a natural contrarian, a social irritant like Socrates. Like the Greek philosopher Calculus has this knack with words, a facility to speak off the cuff with penetrating clarity. A gaudily clad eccentric winning arguments against his interlocutors even when he’s plainly in the wrong!