Wombles

A second BBC News magazine atricle has also caught my attention today, but this is one that I’m not totally sure what my views are…

Lucy Kellaway’s article is entitled Making good use of the things that you find, and starts by talking about taking some her late mother’s possessions down to the tip to dispose of them. When she talks about getting rid of things though she refers to it as “an enjoyable leisure activity – a bit like a sport” and then says “the other beauty of getting rid of stuff is that it leaves one free to go out and buy some more”. Now I’m afraid that this started to get me a bit annoyed.

I’m a firm believer in the idea of the three R’s (Reduce, reuse recycle) where as at this point I was sure that the author was concentrating on the 4th R, replace.

She does go on to talk about the recycling aspects of eBay and car boot sales before launching onto her pet hate of charity shops, describing them as being “like a benign fungus … taking over town centers of Britain”. There has been recent debate on the INEBG forums on the subject of charity shop prices and I have to say that I personally do feel that some are selling things quite expensively these days, but I wouldn’t say that I was against them totally. They certainly do serve a purpose in keeping things out of landfill and (in some geographical places) allowing people to buy things for less than they could new.

Finally the article does move onto something that I agree with the author on – mending things that are broken, rather than throwing them away. I’m quite passionate about this at the moment, especially since reading Nella Last’s War a few months back. This real life diary of a WW2 housewife made me realise the importance of taking car of what we own and mending things when required. Like Lucy Kellaway, I have found it very satisfying to mend a top that had become damaged in the washing machine. That feeling was nothing compared to the excitement of showing Mr C the repair job I had made to a pair of woollen bed socks that had worn through in the heel. The insertion of a knitted test square made me feel like all the pain of teaching myself to knit had been worthwhile!