We are doing it all over again! Summer Solstice 2009 to Winter solstice 2009 we will be on the wagon again, coming off the consumer wheel and hopefully saving my bank balance!
There are a few more rules this time!
1. We can buy recyled things and handmade. This isn’t going to include all “ethical” products, otherwise, with the help of the many, many good websites out there, I will continue to consume at an unsustainable rate.
2. The e-Bay habit must be addressed. Yes, its all second hand, but it gets out of control. The new rule is I can only buy if I have earnt money by selling. Essentially I want to make spending a closed loop system.
So why? Spending money is starting to again become a comfort thing – feel bad? Buy something nice! Oh dear. Add to that the fact that I am losing my job at the end of July. Money is going back to being tight, not a great place to be at.
I also feel that there are more lessons to be learn’t and more experiences to be had. Six months is not long enough. Although this time there will be less of a steep learning curve as I know where to buy things from and how to swap for what I need.
Just got back from a great ’shop’ in town. Discovered a new charity shop further up the high street and was pleasantly suprised: came away with three hard-board books (Meg eats anything else) and three ties for Sir. Very happy. Megan has adopted “Whose tail?” and thinks the lion at the end is funny.
This helps ease the pain of discovering that my beloved Oxfam shop is closing for a month ….. nooooooooooo!!!!!!! It is moving, so they are busy selling off the dodgy pieces of stock that no-one wants …. must have that pastel china dolly… yum……
Thank god for eBay, the fine sellers of every piece of tat known to man and beast. Sean’s trousers ripped last night (unfortunately not in a classic comedy way, but across the knee, which is rather dull) and the poor boy had to brave eBay. After having stuck in one search term, he declared that ‘nothing was out there’. Such an amateur! “Dear, try “stone” or “cream” or “beige” not just “chino”. You have to show determination and patience”. I went to bed and about an hour later, up comes an eBay victorious hubby with trousers bidded -on-and-on-the-way.
Well the eBay habit really is in my veins now. The postman is weighed down with packages, but has told me ‘I am keeping the Post Office alive’ – crikey, has my eBay habit gotten that BIG???? Anyway, for light relief, I leave you with the all-time-classic eBay song:
The true weight of this addiction has only really been felt by an unfortunate few such as the Salvation Army which, with around 2,750 of the UK’s 9,000 charity clothing banks, has been faced with an ever growing mound of tat to flog to consumers indifferent to pre-worn unless it happens to be vintage. Value fashion retailers will debate forever as to how they can sell clothes so cheaply, usually citing economies of scale, but it has been clear to recyclers for some time that a fall in fibre quality and finishing is part of the equation. This makes the resale of last season’s paper thin, slightly shrunken sun dress a distinctly unappetising commercial proposition. Besides, there isn’t much incentive for consumers to buy worn when a new dress costs less than a lunchtime panini and coffee.
But when Defra, the department for the environment, began to analyse the impact of different materials in the nation’s landfills a couple of years ago, fast fashion’s get-out-of-jail-free card was unexpectedly revoked. The nation’s penchant for ‘McFashion’ – as one-night-only T-shirts and skinny jeans have been dubbed – was found to translate into more than three million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
So the question is, what we do re: shopping when we finish the Not New Year. I am keen to continue to find what we need second hand. I also want to buy from genuinely ethically sources such as http://www.adili.com and other sources. I truly want to value what I buy and remove myself from the throw away culture of the high street.
One of the main aims of the Not New Year was seeing how it would be for a young mum. The obvious impact would be where to get baby tut, how much baby tut is really required, how much pressure would I be under to get said tut. This impact hasn’t been as bad as I thought, as the massive baby buying period of 0-6months is over. There are some things that are so undoubtedly cute that it makes me sad she cant have them, but its not too bad.
The unexpected impact has been that my ‘time off’ has been seriously impacted. Let me explain: Every Saturday, I got two or three hurried hours away from home. This gave me a break from baby and the four walls of our humble abode. So where would I go? I will let you guess – town. Yup, the old trap of shopping as leisure. Factor into the equation buying clothes/make-up/jewelry to boost the ego and a powerful combination arose. Hence the term Yummy Mummy. Yummy for the marketing people anyway….
So the result is that I haven’t had ‘time off’ in at least a month, if not more; until yesterday, when i went into town! I went to a different town to raid their second hand shops and have a coffee (a genuine pleasure, always). I was delighted to find one shop had been refitted and had transformed from a below average shop to a magnificent second hand haven – Red Cross be very proud! Weirdly though, I just bought chocolate, thats it, hummmm.
Adding a random note to this post, I did have to endure WHSmith, as the Canterbury Post Office has closed down and moved into said stationers. The result is a hot, windowless, crowded space that is shockingly the main town branch. Mutter, mutter…. Anyway my actual point was WHSmiths. I found the entire store cluttered, overly bright, and essentially shouting at me – go here, buy this, sale, sale, sale, save …… How could anyone have a clear, focused mind there? But maybe that is the point, to have a clear mind would be to have an opinion, an inner direction that cannot be moulded by advertising and the store. To keep the consumer off balance is the whole idea. Oh Dear.
Well in the interest of research, I investigated our local charity shops to see what I would be living off in the next six months to a year (will we last to midwinter, or be brave enough to continue for longer?).
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