Neil Ansell had the opportunity to rent a dilapidated cottage deep in the hills of Mid-Wales, in countryside so remote that you could walk twenty miles in one direction without encountering another dwelling.  What started as short-term let, turned out to be a five-year period of solitary living, far removed from the services we expect to find today – hot water from a tap, central heating and plumbing.  The rent of £100 a year reflected the lack of services but failed to take account of the incredible beauty of the location and the land available to the tenant.

Neil has a great affinity with nature and things which would phase other people were causes of delight.  I am not sure how I would feel about sharing my home with twenty of thirty bats for example.  Even Neil however baulked at the spring-invasions of mice – fortunately the pretty field mouse variety rather than the disease carrying house mouse.  The mice reduced Neil to hanging food in carrier bags from ham hooks embedded in the ceiling.  The only way Neil could reduce the population of mice was to trap them and carry them across a river where he released them.  No doubt killing them would have had no effect other than to make space for others.

Neil found that his life settled down into natural rhythms, “I had a daily routine dictated by the simplicty of my lifestyle, and an annual routine too, led by the seasons, the elements”.  He even developed his own rituals, such as seeing in the New Year from the summit of his hill or walking overnight into the hills at the Summer Solstice so he could watch the dawn from a mountain top.

Five years of solitude was broken up by visits from friends, but Neil became accustomed to his way of life and found that he welcomed the return to quietness when they departed.  He writes,

I couldn’t fee lonely.  Loneliness is the product of an isolation that has not been freely chosen.  You can feel more lonely in the midst of a crowd of people if those people are not giving you the human contact you desir, in the same way that poverty surrounded by affluence feels harsher, more shocking, than poverty shared.

While it is interesting to read how Neil looked after himself, the major part of the book is a sort of extended nature diary – fascinating for anyone who loves the ebb and flow of the seasons and the changing wildlife that accompanies them.  The hills of Wales are remarkable rich in wild-life of every description and Neil went out of his way to cultivate a relationship with it – maintaining a large number of nest boxes for example, which he patrolled regularly to check on the progress of his many bird families.

He became remarkably attuned to the life around him and was aware of every bird in his patch and any new arrivals which turned up.  He rescued an ailing raven at one point and took it indoors to care for it, until passing it on to experts who could nurture it back to a full life.  I was reminded of a time I went for a walk I knew well in the company of an enthusiastic bird-watcher – he kept pointing out birds which I hadn’t even noticed before and began to realise that the area I lived in was far richer in wild-life than I had imagined.

Neil already had an interest in “food for free” having lived in Sweden where “foraging in the wood in autumn is practically a national pastime”.  He gathered chanterelles, parasols and ceps, preserving them in olive oil with dill and coriander seeds.  He made thirty jars of jam each year from berries found in the woods, and he gathered wild strawberries – a pleasure I have shared while walking in South Wales.

Neil had two mild winters and then a third winter when he was snowed in for six weeks.  Fortunately his hoard of logs supplied warmth enough, and he was able to draw flocks of birds and individaul rarities to his home with strategically placed seed and nuts.

The solitary life was a phase which could not last forever. Neil is now a successful BBC journalist and lives with his family  in the city of Brighton. He still returns to his Welsh cottage but things are not quite the same – in his epilogue he gives the impression of returning to the location of an earlier part of his life, now long gone.

Neil has recorded a video for Penguin Books with some footage of the cottage which lets us get a good idea of where he spent his five years with nature and self-sufficiency.

Life as A Literary Device, is partly biographical, partly reportage, and partly miscellaneous musing on life.  The book consists of  ”seemingly disjointed snippets of real life, they connect by association alone – the random pieces of coloured glass that from themselves into a pattern if viewed through that wonderful children’s toy, the kaleidoscope”.

Early in the book he writes of being influenced by the Russian writer Valentin Kataev, the founder of a literary style which he called “mauvism” – “a literary device consisting of the complete negation of all literary devices”.  The term mauvism comes from the French word “mauvais” meaning “bad”, and as Kataev himself wrote, “I am the founder of the latest literary school, the mauvistes,  the essence of which is that since everyone nowadays writes very well, you must write badly, as badly as possible, then you will attract attention”.

I am pleased to say that Vitaliev does not write badly – far from it in fact, but he has certainly held to the principle of mauvism in writing a book for the Internet age where  ”one website routinely carries links to many others.  You open a link in a story that you are reading and it takes you away to another story loosely connected to the first one yet years and/or miles away from it;  you then close the link and return to the story you were reading in the first place”.

The result is a book which holds the interest throughout as Vitaliev describes his travels in various parts of the globe, muses on countless contemporary themes and journals his way through marital breakup, unemployment and temporary states of depression.  I am sure that there are hundreds of topics and themes covered in this substantial, 565 page volume, but the book does not seem to be particularly long when you are reading it.

Its very difficult to describe this book, a vast potpourri of thoughts, impressions, reminiscences so perhaps the best way in to describing it is to give a few examples of the topics covered.

The plight of asylum-seekers sent to live in almost uninhabitable blocks of flats in Sighthill, Glasgow:

Covered with graffiti – like the body of a hardened criminal with tattoos – Sighthill was far from a pretty sight.  What struck me most however, was neither dust and litter flying in my face, nor frozen spittle in the lifts or putrid puddles of dubious origin under my feet, but the behaviour of some of its Scottish residents.  Whereas foreigners  were invariably civil, neatly dressed and polite, the “locals”, particularly teenagers, were – with very few exceptions – foul-mouthed, agressive, uncouth and either tipsy or dead-drunk (or stoned).  They corresponded to the image of would-be terrorists better than any of the asylum-seekers of Sighthill.

The growth of “book towns” such as Hay on Wye and Wigtown:

In the tiny picturesque Ardennes village of Redu in Belgium, there are now as many bookshops – twenty four – as there are children and the trade is drawing in 350,000 visitors every year.  Interestingly, before bookshops appeared in its centre, the village was experiencing the same economic woes as Hay on Wye.  Bredevort in the Netherlands also copied the magic “Hay forumula” and now boasts 300,000 visitors a year.

Vitaliev’s love for old guidebooks:

I am proud to have discovered my own way of time-travelling – Baedekers, Murrays, Bradshaws, Cooks – of all of which I am a passionate collector.  To me these pocket-size tattered volumes are full of time travel magic, especially when I find an old London Tube map (with a curtailed pink “Northern line” ending at Highgate), a faded landing card, or just a dried out hundred year old flower in between their tattered pages.  Touching such books is like touching eternity itself, for bygone realities and small practicalities of a distant past come to life in their estranged, meticulous and matter of fact style.  In this respect old guide-books are preferable to fiction:  they provide me with an ossified time carcass, which I am free to fill with the contents of today’s reality.

Not that there aren’t major themes running through the book.  The core experience Vitaliev was going through in the years he compiled this material was separation from wife and family and unemployment.  During this period he was offered at cheap rent, a small cottage in the run-down South Coast town of Folkestone.  Folkestone proved to be a dispiriting place for Vitaliev and he captures the sense of down-at-heel decay which has afflicted the harbour area of the town now that the ferry services have largely departed the town.  The place matched his mood only too well, and having had a similar time of isolation in a small town myself in my early twenties I could relate all too well to these sections of the book while giving thanks that I have never had to endure such a time again.

Each of the book’s countless sections is complete in itself but they all offer interest, for Vitaliev has an enquiring mind which leads him into meandering reflections on most things around him.

This book is going to be a great travel-companion when its released in paper-back.   You can dip in and out of it and not need to remember what went before.

As to the “mauvism” – this theme keeps coming up in the book – and Vitaliev like to categories his own work as following in the style of his Russian mentor.  One of his own descriptions of his work is, “the Badlands of literature” which is true only insofar as he covers a vast miscellany of messy subjects somehow synthesising them into this quite unique volume which is by no mean “stylish” in the usual sense but certainly kept my interest throughout.