John-Paul Flintoff has written up Fiona Houston's Garden Cottage Diaries in his Times column, Green Central. Fiona's story of "Living in the Past" and the attendant recipes, notes, linocuts and so on appealed to him on many levels, we're very glad to learn! John-Paul is the author of Through the Eye of a Needle - an entertaining tale of how he made his own clothes to find meaning instead of idly consuming sweatshop-made threads. Having made underpants from nettles, he's no stranger to green challenges. Here's what he wrote about The Garden Cottage Diaries:

Having recently stayed in the utterly unmodernised cottage that featured in the BBc's Victorian Farm series (and written about having no electricity, heating or water here) I was very excited to come across a new book in which another writer spent a whole year living in a rudimentary 18th century cottage in Scotland.

The Garden & Cottage Diaries, by Fiona J Houston, are not only fascinating but beautifully produced with photographs and lino cuts by the great Clare Melinsky (whom fellow lino-cut enthusiasts will know illustrated Penguin's Shakespeare playtexts).

Houston is scrupulously honest about the trials of living in the past -  something that many environmentalists think we'll all be doing fairly soon as overpopulation and resource depletion kick in.

She cooked meals from her own produce, lay on a lumpy straw bed she'd grown to loathe and rose in the dim light of the winter dawn to make porridge. She walked everywhere, and in home-made 18th century clothes too. Towards the end of the year she began to feel like a nun, "or perhaps a prisoner, counting the days till my release".

That said, she enjoyed learning to use her ingenuity, rather than money, to solve problems, and ate well, with plenty of variety, using only her own produce. She also felt more vigorous and strong - "Cottage life was so physical that I seldom sat down for long."

It's a lovely book, and I strongly recommend it - as well as the films about Houston's project [on Saraband's site].