December 18, 2018
Frugality
plus inventiveness can be a trap
When people see all the beautiful
things Dave has made - furniture, stained glass, carvings, Christmas
decorations - they envy me. They also envy me because he is so good at
FIXING things. I am a lucky woman. I know this. However...there is a dark side
to all this talent: his eagerness to create things from bits and bobs when one
would much rather go out and BUY said object.
Take yesterday. I came home from
Bakewell market and complained to Dave about the heavy shopping, and how I was
wondering about buying a shopping trolley - a trendy one (if 'trendy
shopping-trolley' is not an oxymoron.)
He said “Oh, you mean one of those
tartan ones.”
“No! No! Something modern!”
“You don't need to buy one,” he
said. “I'll make you one. Something robust and capacious.”
My heart sank.
“What you need is one like window
cleaners used to have,” he said. “I could use old bike wheels. I've got two in
the shed.”
“I have no idea what you're talking
about, but NO.”
“Yes, yes,' he said. 'Google an
image of a traditional window cleaner's trolley.”
I did. It had large wooden cart
wheels with a platform on top.
“That's it,' he said. 'But there
should be a big box on top.”
“And just how am I expected to get
that in the back of the car to bring it home from Bakewell?”
“I'll make you a ramp!”
You may laugh, dear reader. I
would if I didn’t live with this man.
Anyway, this conversation reminded
me of a piece I once had in the Times which I don't think I've shared
with you before:
Make do and mend spend!
Do you ever look with dissatisfaction at your
furniture and wish you could start again? You don’t want to submit to the
horrors of trial by makeover, but you would like to junk that ugly lumpen
armchair your mother-in-law gave you, or that trendy-in-the-seventies standard
lamp reminiscent of a salon hairdryer? After we lost all our things in a fire,
and the emotional ashes began to settle, we had that chance to start again. But
even with a lump sum and an empty house the task was arduous for a couple with
no experience of buying new furniture.
We married as impoverished students, and as the years
passed most of what furnished our house before the fire was not so much chosen
and bought, but inherited, or just somehow acquired. Objectively speaking we had
some good stuff, such as the three handsome grandfather clocks my husband Dave
had inherited. But I could have counted on the fingers of one hand the items of
furniture which we actually went out and bought in a shop. This was a result
partly of lack of funds at the appropriate time, but also of an abhorrence of
waste, a make-do-and-mend philosophy, a drive to recycle and reclaim wherever
possible, and the inability to look a gift horse in the mouth.
In our young and untroubled student days when we were
able to afford a Land Rover but not new furniture (why was that?) we had been
asked by some newly married friends if we would take to the tip a “hideous
three piece suite” which a parent was foisting upon them to be helpful. Well,
the suite turned out to be beautiful - art deco, upholstered in blue velvet,
with walnut veneer arms – so we took it home. It became one of my favourites,
much coveted by the more discerning of my friends, but much reviled by my
modernist husband. It was followed by similar items, which friends wanted
to get rid of and which I wanted to give a good home to. At one time in the
sitting room of our first small flat we actually had three sofas.
It’s hard to buy new things when recycling is in your
genes. I remember going off to camp for the first time with a home made
rucksack my mother had recycled from an old gaberdine mac, with zips reclaimed
from long dead trousers, and a cord from a pair of tattered pyjamas. She would
make us bedside tables and dolls houses out of orange boxes, and even long
after she had anyone needing dolls furniture, she found it excruciating to
throw away those tiny plastic catering tubs when emptied of jam or UHT milk -
they made such wonderful wash-basins. Her one thousand and one ways with a pair
of old tights is so well documented that we can’t see a pair adrift in a
hedgerow without my husband saying “your mother must have been here again.” Her
favourite use was as twine for tying up my father’s raspberry canes in the
autumn.
And my grandmother was the same. She made a superior
picnic blanket out of an old tweed coat, and dusters out of old
knickers (“every gusset a memory” – Victoria Wood.) Her better underwear
was not suitable for dusters, being made from an old silk parachute. The
tights-recycling gene manifested itself in her case in the knitting of them
into peg bags.
As for Dave, his recycling tendencies verge on the
pathological. Once, to get rid of unwanted junk, we hired a skip with the
couple next door. The two men would each wheel a barrow full of old rammel
through their respective gates to meet at the skip with mutual cries of “Don’t
you want that? Can I have it?” followed by the swapping of treasures and the
wheeling of full barrows back up the two garden paths.
So you can see that the fire did us one or two
favours: I am delighted to be rid of the hundreds of beads from a
dismantled car bead seat, the spherical light shade made out of Sainsburys High
Juice plastic bottle caps, and a mound of worn bicycle tyres.
Make-do-and-mend is a trap. In one of my Dave’s
joyful austerity periods he mended my daughter’s glasses with string and then
sprayed it gold to match the glasses: she has never forgiven him. He also
resoled his shoes with an old car tyre. Even now, when anyone needs anything at
all, from a bird feeder to a roof rack, our long flown children will say with
ghoulish delight “Don’t worry - Dave will knock you one up out of an old bike
tyre!” Don’t get me wrong: I love the huge set of wind chimes made from
wardrobe rail which now adorn our hall; and the aerobic ankle weights he
fashioned from a piece of old lead piping are great.
But recycling requires raw materials, and even Dave
was flummoxed by an empty house. On receiving the insurance cheque it was
extremely difficult to break away from frugal ways and actually spend money on
large items of furniture, particularly when we viewed them as once only
purchases which had to last us the rest of our lifetimes.
And even though we had been married for 25 years, the
profound clash in our tastes only became apparent when we were choosing new
things. It was a case of traditionalist with a penchant for period style meets
radical minimalist who thinks that form should always follow function. What
possible middle ground in clothes storage is there between someone who wants an
Edwardian chest of drawers in satinwood, and someone who prefers a stack of
wipe clean plastic boxes? Or between someone who yearns for a kingsize cast
iron bedstead, and someone who hankers after hammocks?
Yet another problem was Dave’s aversion to shopping.
I thought I’d found the solution by using mail order. But catalogue sofas with
apparently perfect proportions, when transposed to our sitting room looked like
sofas on steroids. We returned them, and for 18 months we sat on the floor.
We have now managed to buy most of the furniture we
need, but it has been a novel and a gruelling process. And after having a
lot of detritus forcibly taken from us, we are definitely more discerning in
our recycling. But what’s that lurking behind the new sofa? A carrier bag full
of old tights?