Back Once Again (like the renegade master?)

After a break of quite some time I find myself back at the keyboard tapping away on the Ditch Monkey blog. It has been some two and a bit years since I last wrote and so there is a fair amount to catch up on but I shall not even attempt to do so just now, instead lets look to the future.

I am not in the jungles of Ecuador, I have not even been to the jungle in fact the closest I have come to it has been spending an afternoon clearing bamboo with a machete in Spain. However, Mrs Ditch Monkey and I (a lot has happened in the past two and a bit years) plan to move to South East Asia in the summer. There I shall attempt to live for a year in the jungle whilst Mrs DM lives somewhere with a shower, she refuses to entertain the possibility that I might be able to build a functioning shower. Quite what she bases this belief on I do not know.

In the mean time I shall be passing my time in preparation for the next adventure, we currently reside in rural Dorset where I have been considering the possibility of living off the land as training for living off the land abroad. It is perhaps prophetic then that on my recent birthday I received a book on seafood cookery, a crab net, a new knife (the old having been lost in a bar in Spain) and membership of River Cottage which gives me access to online courses on topics such as hunting, fishing and foraging. The idea of spending evenings by a fire eating fish I caught myself is a most appealing one. Then again, it has only been three or four months since I finally accepted the inevitable and moved out of the woods and into a house and I have become fairly enamoured with the comfort, cleanliness and convenience of the arrangement. There is also Mrs DM and her incomprehensible desire to see me of an evening to consider, she is a game girl but has not fully grasped the delights of walking for miles into cold wet woods in order to get smoke in her eyes and insects in her tea.

I suspect that some form of compromise will have to be found but I am rather keen to start the new year with some form of resolution, perhaps to live outside with some form of resolution to live off a pound a day with my diet supplemented by what can be supplied by nature. I could live, mostly, outside and thus Mrs DM and I could work out some sort of routine ahead of hitting the jungle. In the mean time I shall chart my preparations, most of which appears to be fattening myself up through the application of butter and double cream to every recipe I know.