I was with my partner from 1983 to 1993 and that was my preparation for living very differently. For example we used candles instead of electricity, we fetched our own water and we chopped our own wood, and cooked on a wood burner. I even made myself an oven from a biscuit tin -and I realised all things are possible!

My partner was already vegan when I met him . I had never really heard of veganism before. I wondered what to make him when I first met him and my friend said he's always eating TrailMix so that’s what I bought him! .

It was my partner who taught me how to make flatbread, although at that time I wasn’t gluten-free but I am now . On my path to being almost entirely vegan I remember having an epiphany where I’d gone into a butcher shop and nearly passed out and I knew then I’m not doing that anymore, I don’t want animals to go for slaughter.

At that time in the 1980s we found a wholesale collective that was completely veggie and vegan and we bought our food from them.

There were no processed vegan foods back then so in lots of ways it was better, you ate whole foods. I used to make things like a aduki bean shepherds pie. My son and daughter were not impressed because they wanted to eat the same foods as their friends, and I used to send them to school with things like seaweed and millet pie which they weren't impressed with!

As I’ve got older and I’ve lost some of my teeth I like to eat soft food, so I like things to be grated, I grind lots of seeds, I like things to be blended. I like to eat simply and I find that eating this way is affordable, and it really is not hard.

When I left I moved to France and lived with another woman in our own 2 person commune, and we grew all of our own food and cooked everything fresh, things like flatbreads. We used to trade courgettes for flour. We bought our flower from Pascal who grew his own grain himself and ran his own mill, and if the wind wasn’t strong enough a donkey turned the wheel. He allowed us to pick all the windfall fruits and we used to trade things in a barter system.

For a while I lived in an eco-house in Leeds, that was the most beautiful house I have ever lived in but it was also hard because I was sharing one cooker and a tiny fridge with quite a lot of other people but they weren’t really keen on washing up and sometimes it felt like living with kids. Then I moved into a cabin in the field behind the eco-house and that was better, it was nice to have a place to myself and I could still use the house facilities.