Wendyl Nissen: A life less complicated

Forget women's mags, the chickens have cunning ways of trying to sell you an 'exclusive'. Photo / Derek Flynn

If someone had taken me aside five years ago and told me that my future career would have more to do with making soap on the back porch than the cut-throat, high-pressure life of editing a weekly magazine, I would have thought that someone a very odd person in dire need of getting their head read.

Yet, just a few days ago, there I was on the back porch, rubber gloves on, safety glasses perched on the end of my nose, furiously stirring a concoction of drain cleaner, olive and coconut oils and Kremelta all bubbling away at 100C. Most weeks I'm trying out some old recipe I've dredged up from a dusty book. I have three sets of blotchy blue sheets following my attempts to create a blueing powder similar to that our nanas used to make sheets white. We are currently road-testing a rose liquid handwash, which turned out to be a muck green colour. And the dog has only just forgiven me for dousing her in vinegar and tea-tree oil to give her a shiny, flea-free coat.

It would appear that I have joined a fast-growing trend to eschew a career I maintained for 28 years in favour of something that allows me to express my "inner creativity, even perhaps to contribute to humanity, to important dialogues in ways that are personally meaningful", according to this week's Viva magazine, which features a police officer who became an artist, a marketing director who became a kinesiologist and a foreign exchange dealer who became a fashion designer. I am a journalist who became a green goddess, creating recipes for natural cleaners and sharing them with anyone who will have them.

For some people, breaking out of their traditional industry is a reaction to long hours, stress and a need to find some other way to make a living which won't give you cancer or heart disease. But for me it has simply been that people are just so much nicer in the community I am now inhabiting. I started a newsletter, which many people who read this column signed up to. But very few just signed up. They sent messages of support, shared stories of their new ventures, advice on how to handle my website, offers of help, and sometimes just a nice chatty email about how much they love making their own cleaners and keeping hens, too.

I was overwhelmed for days with the positivity, the generosity and the lack of competitive sniping that I had become used to in my own industry. I have been allowed into what can only be described as this country's cottage industry community, and I like it.

There's my new friend from Canterbury who makes lavender oil and wants us to promote each other. There's another woman who set up a newsletter and gave me some outstanding advice. And then someone else who named her hens after me, Kerre Woodham and Aunt Daisy. In the past month I have had more positive reinforcement for my green goddess work than I received in two decades of publishing.

I now find myself at media lunches drifting off from so and so's failed marriage and such and such's latest gossip column into a gentle musing in my head about how soon I can get home to try out that natural sunscreen recipe.

And then I arrive home to find that an old colleague, whom I used to shout at when negotiating exclusive story deals for my magazine, has dropped off some snails from his garden for my hens.

"Such a wonderful, creative, local, cottage community," I clucked all afternoon, congratulating myself on making such a successful transition into a more real and meaningful life.

And then the hens stopped laying for three days.

"You don't think he's trying to sabotage me?" I asked my husband in a brief moment of paranoia, wondering what you could put in a bucket of snails which would stop hens laying.

"You're not in the media now, Green Goddess," he responded before reaching behind the rose bush to claim nine eggs after yet another attempt by my hens to hide them from me.