Freegans Celebrate ‘Year One’ of Self-Sufficiency

The first annual general meeting of the self-styled Freegan’s Society was held this weekend amid the sprawling sand dunes at Scroungeford-on-Sea, culminating in a four-course banquet prepared from waste food that the local garbage tip’s rats and seagulls had disdained from touching.

Freegans Candida Muffitch and Wilf McScrunt celebrated their first year of living without cash and strictly off the government radar by staging a festival to highlight and publicise the novel alternative lifestyle of Freeconomics.

This is an austere discipline that traces its roots back to the hunter-gatherer traditions of our cave-dwelling ancestors - with the slight modification of the actual ’hunt and gather tasks’ now being carried out on landfill sites and from chew n spew restaurant garbage bins rather than in the vast dark forests of prehistoric Britain chasing down mammoths or razor-backed aardvarks – and poaching giant Killiwacky bird eggs.

The couple, who forage for all their food, clothing and discarded supermarket vouchers, told the media they’d experienced "an amazing year" of eye-opening enlightenment that bordered on true Nirvana – apart from the incidences of chronic diarrhoea, scurvy, galloping psoriasis, chilblains – and that other ubiquitous physical affliction common to the global warming phenomena – frostbite.

The banquet of warmed-up pigswill fed a total of 250 attendees – with the centrepiece a road kill ‘game pie’ (for anyone ‘game’ enough to try it) known among Freegans as a ‘Grogger’ - which the gourmet cuisine columnist from the Mendicants Gazette described as tasting like ‘shit with a crust on’.

McScrunt informed Fux News "This ‘as bin the best year of me life an’ while it does ‘ave certain challenges I don’t get stressed out over council tax bills an’ bank overdrafts or payin’ an effin’ mortgage ter some Shylock rip-off buildin’ society. Plus I never get stuck in traffic jams goin’ back an’ to ter an office or factory an’ workin’ every effin’ hour God sends in some poxy job that does me effin’ ‘ead in."

“Okay, I’ll admit yer get certain setbacks - like bein’ pissed wet through every time it rains and shiverin’ me bollocks off through the winter, but I made Freeconomists me new religion cos Al Bore is the next best thing ter God an’ it’s my way of doin’ me bit ter save the planet from CO2 poisonin’ and pollution – an’ all that other good shit.”

McScrunt, a Glaswegian-born former wheelbarrow mechanic, and partner Candida, live in a commercial-size wheelie bin, kitted out with double glazing and a rudimentary central heating system – plus a bay window that provides a spectacular south-westerly panoramic view of the Scroungeford-on-Sea coastline.

Candida, who gave up a promising career as a Chelsea-based dog walker to pursue the Freegan lifestyle, claims her conversion has been ‘spiritually enlightening’ in certain respects and a ‘shock and awe’ wake-up call in others.

“Good grief, if anyone ever tells my mother I’m living like this she’d shit kittens and die of embarrassment in case anyone at the Townswomen’s Guild found out.”
“I doubt Mumsy would approve of her daughter’s new culinary skills – walking along the local bypass every morning looking for fresh road kill, and knowing twenty recipes for cooking a dead hedgehog.”