With Drive Opportunity

With Drive Opportunity is a tragic-comedy or maybe a comic-tragedy, based around hitching and environmental protest. It draws on my own experiences of non-violent direct action. Whilst entertaining and humorous, it pulls no punches

A naive country kid, Jason hitches lifts with strangers who open his eyes to different ideas and philosophies. He gets rides from hippies and heroin addicts, from arms dealers and rich businessmen, from old ladies who turn out to be antifascists from the 1930s, from people who are excited about the prospects life presents and people who’ve been worn down and just want a quiet uneventful existence. He sees the injustices of the world and the futility of trying to address them by conventional methods. He becomes an angry young man and tries to create something positive from his anger. The book tackles big issues and difficult subjects, but it does so with a smile on its face and a piss-taking attitude.

The book is a journey into protest told as a series of lifts. It’s based around Jason’s recollection of the lifts that changed his life so profoundly that he ended up sitting in a cell counting the bricks and listening to the screws jangling their keys as they walked up and down the landing. Each lift he recalls leads him further on the path to his prison cell.

With Drive Opportunity will be launched at the Bristol Anarchist Bookfair on 1st November 2025.

About the author

I live in an off-grid house in the woods in Devon with my partner. With Drive Opportunity is about Jason’s journey through life, so I thought I’d say a bit about my own journey through life.

My early childhood was spent on an organic smallholding and I spent a lot of my time wandering around the countryside avoiding adults wherever possible. When I went to school, my teachers were ill-equipped to deal with me and my, still now undiagnosed, neurodiversity. At primary school, my headmaster recommended moving me to a school for the “educationally subnormal”. At secondary school my headmaster told me that I would either end up in grammar school or borstal, Eventually, I was diagnosed with dyslexia, labelled with “behavioural issues” and sent to a boarding school for “maladjusted” kids.

As a teenager in the eighties and a young adult in the nineties, I lived in squats, in a van and in a bus amongst other places. I hitched around Europe, jumped on diggers and had far too many interactions with the police on protests and while hitching.

I’ve done carework, warehouse work, farm work, shop work and office work as well as the work I now do in the woods. I’ve had the pleasure of working in a co-op and I value non-hierarchical structures.

My partner and I moved into the woods in 2009 and set up our little woodland enterprise known as Bulworthy Project. We lived in a caravan for five years whilst we worked as charcoal makers, got planning permission and built a house. It’s been a lot of hard work, but you can get more done when you’re not carrying the weight of a boss and a landlord. We’ve had the privilege of preserving and enhancing habitats on other people’s land since 2008 and love to see the results of our small but positive impact. Our work now is mainly surveying and managing woodlands. In our spare time, we manage Devon Culm, which is a grassroots environmental charity. We’re also co-founders of Rackenford Community Benefit Society, which has been set up to buy our village pub for the community.

I believe it’s feasible for society to evolve to a point where people are respectful to each other’s physical and emotional needs and play a productive role within that society without the need for reward to inspire them or sanction to restrain them. I want to live in that world.

Contact

Please use this form or email pete@withdriveopportunity.uk if you’d like to be sent a link to buy the book through an independent bookshop when the book is published, or if you’d like contact me about anything else.