Slow Life Blog

Jonathan Denby’s Slow Life blog from the Lake District

Slow life blog
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About Me

The hotels where I earn my living.

Newby Bridge Hotel Riverside Hotel
Newby Bridge Riverside
   
Damson Dene Hotel High Lowscales Farm
Damson Dene High Lowscales Farm
   
Kitchen Garden Yewbarrow House
Kitchen Garden Yewbarrow House
   
Heroes Of She Lakes Hospitality
Heroes Of She Lakes Hospitality
   
Slow Food (UK) Beekeeper's Garden
Slow Food (UK) Beekeeper’s Garden

The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials
Thoreau

This is the story about one family's quest for self-sufficiency. The idea of a Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food and extend them to life in general. Here in the Lake District where I live with my wife and three daughters, we have a garden and a farm where we produce our own food. We know full well that this is an inefficient and expensive way of organising our lives but we do it because we enjoy it and because it forces us to eat healthily and in season. It is slow, because gardening and farming are all about patience; a crop will take months to mature; a cattle breeding programme will take years.

The principles of Slow Food are “good, clean and fair” - ‘good’ means that the food should be of good quality, ‘clean’ means that it should be free of pesticides or harmful chemicals, ‘fair’ means that when you buy from a farmer, you pay him a decent price. Supermarkets and the large chain stores routinely break all these principles, which is why we, as a family, don’t use them. Slow food means also taking the time and trouble to cook the food yourself and to take pleasure in eating it with your family and friends. I like the idea of extending the principles of Slow Food to life in general. This blog of my Slow Life is mainly about my garden and farm in the Lake District, but also about my hotels, where I earn my living, and about the occasional forays, which my Slow Life allows, into the worlds of design, music and local affairs.

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Jonathan Denby - jonathan@slow-life.co.uk - Design by Cypher