Interview: Voirey Materson & Cameron Middleton
Cameron: What first brought you to Schumacher, Voirrey?
Voirrey: I was very into lots of different ideas when I worked in theatre. I was into science, particularly biology, and I was interested in what we called ‘global warming’which became ‘climate change’ later. I was going to different classes and I had a really great web connection because we were on a street in Edinburgh that was the first to get a cable web. So we had this great internet connection and I had quite a good computer at the time. And so I was wandering around a lot on the web and I discovered Schumacher College. And I still remember the picture of the Postern, which I really liked for some reason. And they did this ‘holistic science’ So I thought, oh, wow. And that was in about 1999, 2000 or something.
Cameron: So did you come for a course or then you just came just to visit?
Voirrey: So that’s when the holistic science masters were beginning. And I was very excited by it. But it was very expensive. I was in Edinburgh and it was down at the other centre, right in the bottom of England. And I didn’t have much affection for England. I still don’t, really. But anyway, eventually I did manage to make an appointment to come down here and stayed in Hawthorne in number two or something. No, number one.
I literally came to visit. I think I was here maybe one or two nights, but it was just to visit. And I met people, a couple of people, but I just thought, I can’t afford it. But anyway, three years later they did an introduction to holistic science called ‘seeing through new Eyes.’ It was three weeks, and we had teaching from Craig Holdridge on holistic science and he was fantastic. And Brian Goodwin was still around. He was the founder of holistic science. And Stefan was about and who else? We had this astrophysicist who I’d met before and he was very interested in words as well. And we really shared this passion for the history of words and stuff like that, and consciousness. I remember we were all clustering around computers and talking into the night. It was really exciting.
And when did baking come into the picture?
Much later. So when I came as a volunteer in 2007, the baking came in because there was a tail end of an arts and ecology course that had been set up, still finishing. And one of the people who had done the course for her thesis did a bread festival and she was into sourdough. And I’d been into bread already, but I had to stop because I couldn’t afford it because of the cost of heating in Edinburgh, the house is so cold, the bread didn’t rise, so I was using heating to get the bread to rise. But anyway, she was setting up this bread festival and it was really fun and exciting and she invited all these interesting people, including this chap, Andrew Ritley, who set up the Sourdough Matters campaign. Bread Matters campaign. And he brought this sourdough with him and taught about making sourdough. And he gave us some of his starter. Starter which he brought back from Russia 20 years before.
Oh, my God.
So that was 20 years old. He’d had it for 20 years and it was eight years old when he got it. So the starter was already 20 years, 28 years that it was going. I mean, Sourdoughs are always young. It’s like a garden. It’s constantly refreshing. But anyway, we’ve still got that same starter that originally came from Russia.
Voirrey, what does ‘sourdough matters’ mean?
It was about persuading people away from eating industrial bread that’s made with lots of additives and has hardly any nutrition in it and persuading people to come back to eating sourdough bread, which used to be the conventional bread. It’s only more recently that people started eating this blown up yeast bread.
You wonder how many microbes are there even in that sourdough that’s come all the way from Russia, it’s incredible.
Well, yeah. When there are any of those russian microbes left in there, their descendants are, but they’re probably not that different from some of the microbes you find over here. But the number that there are in a tiny bit of soil is just amazing. And just trying to imagine what that means, that they’re so small and yet they can be so powerful. And the way that they communicate as communities, just that in itself, because like, one flu microbe won’t make you sick, you have to have enough of them.
Right. So they must know when there’s enough of them to be able to set you off to move in a sickness cycle.
Right. Certainly. That’s what they’re saying about bacteria. They have this thing. They talk about it as quorum sensing or something, and that they know what’s around. So the bacteria know if their neighbors are the same as them or not.
Like critical mass. You just reminded me of the studies people like Diana Beresford Kroger and others have done on the German on tree communication and the way that they are able to work with the fungi to send out different messages.
The wood wide web.
The wood wide web. Exactly. Could you describe what is special about the Schumacher community to you?
I mean, the people that come, because I find every year there are people that turn up here that are just so interesting and so innovative and creative about their lives and doing different things, and they’ve got these different ambitions and working together, because people have all sorts of qualities that you only find out by working together with them or spending time with them.
What do you think about the building?
I don’t know. I go through phases with this because I know some people have said, oh, if we get all this money, let’s not buy the Postern, let’s build a new place. But I think personally, the thing I like about the Postern is that it didn’t get designed by one person. It started as a smaller place and things have been built onto it and changed. It’s kind of an aggregate of small buildings or something, small parts. And that means that the different parts of the Postern have got loads of character in different ways. So that the playroom for me is nothing like the library and that little room in between.
We used to have these evenings called soirées, right at the end of a course, and it would be for people to get up and sing, say a poem, do a little dance piece or play an instrument, whatever, anything that they felt brave enough to do. And people were really encouraged to do it and make fools of themselves as well. So, anyway, there was one time, and there were a few people on this course together, and they decided to do this little piece in the library. And I don’t know how it was possible now, but they had all the lights off in the library, and it was pitch black in there, so you couldn’t see anything. And then somebody came in on the balcony wearing this kind of hood and big hat and carrying a candle. And somehow this candle seemed to be hanging on a stick or something, and started talking about things. I can’t remember the rest of it very well, but I really remember this image of this person coming into the library on the balcony, and it was just so magical. And the thing that made it really lovely was that they then started imagining all the creatures that had that little piece of land, because the Library is the oldest bit of the building, had that, all the rabbits. And although it probably wasn’t rabbits, it was probably other animals in that time, but all the rabbits and squirrels and mice and earth, all these creatures that would have been there before the library was there. And I love the thought of that, that just bringing that out to us, that where you’ve got a building, you’ve got a piece of land where you’ve displaced a lot of creatures, and that’s not necessarily bad, but it’s good to know that those creatures were a part of your world.
That recognizing, yes, every place has been facilitated by many hands other than humans.
Yeah. And that has always stuck with me, that thing about the other creatures that have been here. And I think, although the old postern is always kind of light-footed in the landscape, it’s grown bit by bit.
It feels like it’s alive sometimes.
Yeah, it does. And it’s very quirky. You got these strange kind of past routes through rooms that lead to other rooms that you wouldn’t expect to be there, and you don’t discover them straight away. It’s like there’s a room off the meditation room and there’s a funny little cupboard. Have you explored it?
No, I heard there was but haven’t explored it.
And it’s good not to tell people about them. You can tell people about them, but not to show them so that they find them for themselves. I was listening to this thing a while ago about cathedrals, and apparently they were looking at this cathedral and they were discovering little things written into the stone, say, high up in a belfry or something, and thinking, well, that must be one of the craftsmen that wrote this. And the architect who was doing this program then started saying that in the past you didn’t really have architects. You had master builders and master builders. They would be responsible, but it’d be more like a director in theatre. They’d bring together a group of people to make a building, and then it would go on for years and years. It took time. It took hundred years or more to build these big cathedrals. They weren’t one persons’ conception.
hoto By Raman Feiz, Vorrey and Julia in the Old Postern Kitchen