Tag: reduce reuse recycle

The countdown to a simpler Christmas. Week 1: Advent

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In my mind and in my fantasies, Advent is a time for making memories, dancing from one perfect moment to another with well-fitting coats and knitted scarves and big smiles as we visit Santa, pick greenery, sing carols and romp together in the snow. The house is clean and shiny from top to bottom; all the de-cluttering jobs that have been nagging at me all year are miraculously tidied up into other people’s welcoming arms; and warmth, fairy lights and the smell of cinnamon and homemade sugar-filled treats fill the air. Presents are handmade and meaningful; cards are written with love and actually posted; decorations are natural, zero waste and beautiful; and the air is pregnant with expectation and spiritual growth.

What Advent actually is, in this household at least, is exhaustion. It is cold. It is hectic. It is children with runny noses and adults who rely on their voices for work but are losing them anyway, and an endless, nagging feeling of not being on top of things. It is hyperactivity and the screeching of “Fiiiiive goooooold riiiiiings” from every room. It is The Palaeontologist screaming in frustration because she used up all her energy five weeks ago and hasn’t worked out how to build up more. It is Zoom calls about upcoming SATS and last minute letters about Viking days at school and realising you have no suitable clothes for the end of term celebration because your children have grown two sizes since they last went to a party. It is waiting not for the birth of Jesus but for clarity over government rules and regulations, The Vicar writing and revising what church services will be possible and how, everyone bending their minds around who will feel safe enough to meet together over the Christmas week, and what the consequences of any actions we take might be.

My reality is overload. My ideal is overly saccharine. Neither of them have any connection to simplicity. And Advent is a season whose heart cries out for simplicity. It is a time when we remember waiting. It is a time that was first filled with the praying, and preparation, and solitude, and weariness, and fear, and uncertainty of a pregnancy and birth that would change the world. It is a time of hoping against all expectations that this year it will be different. It is a time that first ended in a dirty, crowded, love-filled overflow to an inn that was more welcoming than it had space to be. How might it be possible, in an era of moments engineered for the perfect social media shot and endless comparisons across the playground, to bring that simplicity into my own Advent rituals?

One way is resisting some of the many and increasing customs of Advent itself. Advent calendars are shared and re-used every year in this household, and contain acts of kindness and, this year, the Christmas story as well as chocolates (because let’s face it, without chocolate would anyone get as far as looking for the lovingly recycled messages to act on every day? Plus, that boost of sugar before getting out of bed in the morning is apparently exactly what they need to drag themselves into their school uniforms in these final, closing days of a term that has lasted at least two decades.) We avoid Christmas Eve boxes (easy enough when Christmas Eve is a work night, and a busy one at that) and buy Christmas Jumpers – an absolute necessity for any primary school child in modern Britain – second hand, and re-gift them after they are outgrown (or try to – currently, I confess, I have a large and growing pile of them I never remember to give away at the right time of year). And I flatly refuse, with everything that is in me, for the sake of my little remaining sanity and well-being, to do Elf on the Shelf.

Notes for an advent calendar, with quotes from the Christmas story and acts of kindness. They are surrounded by chocolate and lying on top of pieces of Christmas wrapping paper.
Acts of kindness written on recycled Christmas wrapping paper. Two chocolates for every action (anything to avoid another squabbling match); one action for every Advent calendar compartment.

These moves are not enough to satisfy my hope of simplicity. Noise and lights and already-decorated Christmas trees still surround me at all times. The underlying fear that presents will not get bought has started to seep into my nightmares. The alternating fears that when my children look back on Advent, they will either remember nothing but chocolate and Christmas films; or that they will remember nothing good at all, make me seek out more to do and more ways, new ways, different ways to fit in with the expectations of those they are surrounded by and Make Memories by doing, spending, acting.

There is no perfect medium in this one. The things that would be my ideal would not be the ideals of my family. The days are long gone, if they ever existed at all, when I could work towards making my own perfect Christmas and simply expect others to enjoy it too. And that is a good thing. Not only because my perfect Christmas was unachievable, but also because, in moving away from my own ideals and accepting that maybe other people’s ideas have equal value, I have also moved away from thinking only about perfection, about service by martyring myself in a quest for everything to look like a Disney set, and started noticing the moments when we get it right, together; even when that means letting The Cowgirl “help” with making the Christmas cake, turning a 15 minute mixing job into an hour-long blow by blow account of every moment of her school day, interspersed with us both swiping tastes of the uncooked cake batter, loaded with brandy-soaked dried fruit, whenever we thought we could get away with it. I still want to try to read more of the Bible and less of escapist novels downloaded because they were free on Kobo. I also want my children to help me to make new family traditions, which are likely to involve a lot more mud, shrieking, and screen time (quite possibly simultaneously), than I would ever volunteer for. I still want quiet times and times of prayer and times when I intensively clean away a year’s worth of dust and grime and make our living space feel more like a home and less like a haunted house, wrapped in spiders webs and clogged with cat fur. And I also want to do one thing, every day, just for fun. Simplicity can be about what we choose not to do, not to buy, not to eat; it is also about living here, and now, and enjoying what is here and now, rather than focussing always on the future. And focussing on the here and now can be as much a part of waiting and preparation as anything else.

Simple figures of a pregnant Mary and a caring Joseph, on a wooden tabletop, with a homemade Christmas decoration in the background.

Present absences

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Thumb idly scrolling, alarm clock snoozing for the seventh time, my day is starting with a whimper and a sigh. I tell myself to move before my back locks completely, but even while I am telling myself sternly to get up and get going, I scroll on. On through posts that I ignore – plenty of them, rightly or wrongly; posts that make me laugh – sadly few of them; posts that make me angry; posts that make me hurt. There are a lot of those, and they lurk behind my eyelids for the rest of the day, popping out of my subconscious and into my internal monologues whenever I stop for long enough to take a breath.

What is it that makes me hurt? It’s not the crisis after incompetence after tragedy typhooning through the world, though that does me no credit, I know. Those are the posts that make me angry, and my responses are either avoidance or self-destruction, as they consume my mind in a blinding supernova of rage. No, the things that make me hurt are the day by day moments that are so much more creative, more joyful, more full than my days are. Is it jealousy? Probably, in part, if jealousy starts with your throat and your eyes and your hope and moves on to your tummy, inching its way by repetition to your heart. I know those are the good moments, the islands in the storm for others, just as they are when I post the same. And yet, that litany of pictures, of family adventures, positive Lockdowns, weight loss, planning a holiday, making a difference, speaking out, being brave, achieving goals, taking a risk and getting it wrong, and just plain living – that cumulative scrolling makes my heart ache and saps my will.

This is not a post bewailing social media. Of course people should share their joys, their sorrows, their hopes and failures, if that is what they want to do. Indeed, for those of us who are congenitally incapable of maintaining relationships over a distance, Facebook is a marvel and a delight for much of the time. But when the presence of something is an expected norm, unquestioned and unquestioning, how do you share its absence?

I was one of the first in my friendship group to have children, so I won’t speak like I’m an authority on what it feels like to have none when your body and your mind and your soul are tearing you apart with longing. People I love have shared their experiences with me – of the fear and the pain and the praying, the debt and the hope and the impossible choices, but it is not something I can directly speak to. At the other end of life’s glorious spectrum, I have lost a parent when most of my peers were still living with theirs. I know that moment of jarring reminder when someone asks “Where do your parents live?” I have seen the dawning horror on their faces as the conversation progresses. I answer about my Mum, and they ask whether Dad will be joining us too.* Now my Dad died many years ago, so, although it still makes me sad to think of all he is missing and of all the things I can’t share with him, mention of those things no longer makes me cry. So if I’m asked, I answer the question. To be honest, I usually answer it bluntly. And then the person I am speaking to is left with no idea, at all, of what to say next. Because how do you respond when someone tells you that they are outside the box you expect them to be in and, no matter how much you want them to, they will never go quietly back to being normal?

Normal. Isn’t that an awful term? As though there is something we all started out as, and any deviation from that is somehow an error. But if normal is white, cis-gender, heterosexual, in a stable relationship, with children, able-bodied and neurotypical, with no mental health concerns and no traumatic events in their past – if that is normal, then normal is an awfully small collective. And where does that leave the rest of us?

It leaves us living with absence. It may be small. It may be life-changing or hope-destroying. It may be dictated by circumstances or forced upon you by another’s actions. But let’s not forget that it may also be a blindingly positive, proactive choice. How do you celebrate small, with the things you did not buy, the waste you did not create, the plastic you did not use? Or celebrate big, with the choices you made to not follow that expected path and the joys it has given you in the execution of your own vision? Living a more sustainable life, materially and emotionally, is as much about positive absences as it is about the presence of future-looking actions. It is about the counter-cultural refusal to cash into a society that tells you that the way to protect our communities is to buy and to fly and to keep on moving, spending, updating. It is the rejection of the message that if you buy this or avoid eating that or go there, you will be full and have no absences, because they are bad and must always be hidden from view. 

Epidauros II by Barbara Hepworth. Negative space can be extraordinarily beautiful.

Absence is as real as presence in our lives. Sometimes it is more real than the furniture around us and the lives outside our windows that all look so very, very different to our own. It can be a fury-filled growl of silence and frustration; a blank canvas of waiting for something to happen; an exciting and life-giving explosion of self over expectation. If we could share those moments of absence without fear, or pain, or judgement, or apology; if we knew the whole of our selves could be seen, how could the world not be a better place?

*As a side note, please don’t do that. Don’t repeat language someone else has changed. It wasn’t an accident. They heard what you said and they changed it deliberately. If you ask about someone’s wife and in their response they use the word partner, or husband, or reply about themselves in the singular, that’s what you need to use too for the rest of your conversation.

Inertia and goal-setting: making life simpler one junk-pile at a time

Simply Messy

“I am so angry with myself!”

“I know you are. But instead of getting angry, how about we think about why we were late, again, and try to find a way around it next time?”

“Not listening, not listening. OK, that was just pretending to be The Cowgirl. I am listening really.”

“Well [now speaking through gritted teeth] the problem seems to be that you see we might be late, but instead of doing something about it, you panic, get very stressed, curl up in the Wake-Up Chair facing the wall, and generally continue doing exactly what you were doing before. And that’s why nothing ever changes.”

“Oh. Well. That’s a bit like climate change, then. Everyone knows it’s happening. Everyone talks a lot about it. But no one actually does anything.”

From a girl who showed limited interest at best in the climate catastrophe before, The Paleontologist nailed it this morning. And I would have applauded that, if I hadn’t been driving too fast round the ring road on our way to church, being, as we were, late. As usual.

A couple of days earlier, I was teaching my students about motivation, and we talked (well, mostly I talked) about the difference between goals and dreams. Anyone can dream, and the bigger and wilder and more enticing your imagination is, the more fantabulous your dreams become. But goals? They have a cost. It may be money (nods around the room as they remembered previous discussions about the joys of student loans). It may be sweat and tears (a few were surreptitiously wiping away mascara run-lines at that moment, having just watched a heartbreaking and challenging clip from The Do Something Movement, so that wasn’t about to be argued with). But the hardest cost of all is giving up the things we have worked so hard to achieve: the ideas, the identities, the incentives that gave us the get-up and get-busy when what we’d far rather have done is hide under the duvet. Giving those things up, because they used to keep you moving forwards, a lifeline in the darkness, but are now an anchor once the storm is over, holding you in place when you need to soar free over the next horizon; giving those things up takes the sacrifice of stepping, blind, over the cliff-edge.

A bleak landscape: dark trees on the horizon, and dry and cracked ground. In the foreground is a dust blue boat, and one, bright, red flower.
Image by Ralph Klein from Pixabay

The Paleontologist is right. We talk and stress and panic about what may be around the corner, but we don’t actually do anything. Because doing something means letting go of what we still think is success, and joy, and the sign that life is actually going OK for once. We watch others going on exotic holidays. We save and hope and plan, and finally all our work pays off. Are we really going to turn round and decide not to go now, after so many years of empty longing? How is it fair to ask some to give up something they have never experienced, when others still take it for granted three times a year? And yet, if real change is going to happen, we are going to have to let go of those imaginings, the incentive of owning the best or the brightest or the newest, the idea dreamed up when the world felt younger and the future was not full of floods and wildfires.

Over the next few months, I am going to spend some time looking back over my self-set #Challenge2019 ambitions. This is partly because I was asked for an update, and mostly because I am both a perfectionist and a masochist, and do so love going over things I have done before, scrabbling around in the dusty neglected corners, reopening the cracks in the name of learning from my mistakes. I’m also going to look at them again because there were some pretty good actions in there, and I would like to continue them this year.

So, let’s begin. #ChallengeJanuary: to not buy anything that wasn’t essential, for the duration of the month. This was the challenge that most altered my behaviour during #Challenge2019: the act of consciously trying to reduce the amount I bought for a month had a lasting effect on the habits I took forward through the rest of the year. Probably the most significant change was my returning (in excited puppy who can’t wait to destroy a cherished item of clothing mode) to the guilt-free utopia that is the world of used items on eBay. Knee high boots, a Fitbit, new cards for Trivial Pursuit – it turns out you really can get just about anything that way, leading to less of an environmental impact, less internalised despair over going up another clothes size, and less screaming in frustration next Christmas when my mother-in-law is the only one who can remember any trivia from long enough ago to answer any of the damn questions.*

Setting goals means being Specific, Realistic, Achievable, Time-limited; much like my teaching nemisis, the omnipresent SMART target. (Always Achievable, interestingly, never Ambitious; an oversight and both a blessing and a curse.) This year, I will return to #ChallengeJanuary with this in mind. Being Specific means sharpening up the idea from just saying that I will avoid buying anything new – that isn’t sustainable in the long term, leading as it does to guilt trips over unplanned treats and agonising over new school tights. I have changed it to taking the goal of simplifying our household by the horns, wading unflinchingly in the midden that is the girls’ bedroom, and re-gifting or re-purposing all the things they no longer fit into or use. As a rough guide, I would like to remove two things for every one that gets added to their delightfully decorated black hole. Ultimately, they will have space to store things they still enjoy in the currently-overflowing cupboard-tops in their room. Is that Achievable? That remains to be seen. It is unquestionably Ambitious. And how to make it Time-limited? Saying I’ll have it done by the end of January is about as realistic as saying I’ll have climbed Mount Kilimanjaro by June (says me, the lady who generally finds perfectly reasonable excuses to avoid walking up 3 flights of stairs to the staffroom every morning). My honest goal is to achieve this by the beginning of the summer, learning as I go.

Changing everything that makes us who we are and tells us how to value one another is, as it turns out, something that is quite a big ask. It’s OK to be scared by that. We’re all scared by the unknown. We’re quite often scared by the known just as easily. But we don’t have the option of freezing, or hiding our faces in the cushions of the Wake-Up Chair until Mum or Dad comes in telling us how to fix the problems we have helped to create. We need to break it down and just take the next logical step. Get up and go through the airing cupboard to find clean school uniform; dig through the mess of Lego and ink stamps to find an unsnapped hairband; commit to borrowing all our books from the Library, or giving up meat for one meal a day, or to stop equating someone’s core nature and identity with their economic status, refusing the trap of judgements based entirely on what form of employment they perform. We need to take that step. And then the next one. And the next. And trust that Bilbo Baggins is as reliable a source of wisdom and insight as ever, and that it truly is a dangerous thing to take that step into the unknown: you never know where you may be able to end up.

The sun is rising in the background. A faint mist hovers over the road that leads from the foreground into the distance. Trees stand beside the road. Five hot air balloons float through the morning air.
Image by Cindy Lever from Pixabay

*Am I the only one with a family tradition of playing Trivial Pursuit on Christmas Day? Please tell me someone else shares this pain. We start at 10 and it’s all going well, but before you know it, it’s 1 in the morning, no one has more than 3 cheeses, and if we get any more questions suggesting Tony Blair should be in the history category we will all go into collective meltdown.

Challenge 2019: we’re halfway there (on a wing and a prayer)

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I know I say this every year, but seriously, how is it July already? As ever, time is not merely marching on but racing by, blue lights flashing and siren fading into the distance as it leaves us all on the pavement, gawking after it and wondering what it will find when it gets to wherever it is headed. However, as it is undeniably July, and even the weather has now caught up with the general principle that it’s time to grow up and act appropriately, I thought I would take this opportunity to glance into an under-used side room and dust off my Not-a-New-Year-Resolution. The beating heart of this collection of Things to Try and See If They Work is the intention of testing out in real life ways to live more sustainably; to shift the focus of what we as a family are doing away from excessive consumption or environmental fire fighting, and into a way of living a happy, meaningful, love-driven life that makes the most of what we have, allows us to have what we need, and helps in however small a way to show that life is about so much more than consumerism and out-living our mental, emotional and physical means. Good thing I didn’t aim for anything difficult, really, isn’t it…!

As was almost entirely predictable, my goals started off well and dwindled into dust around Easter time:

  • Challenge January: Not buying anything non-essential. Doing this for a month did make me more aware of what I buy, particularly the impulse buys. Do I still love buying new things? Yes, I really do. The change that has stuck is that I have rediscovered the joys of charity shops and used items on eBay, at least reducing the impact of making new clothes in the first place. Halfway there it is…
  • Challenge February: Gentle decluttering in a big way. So the tidying up happened. I’m not about to say that it spread to the rest of the house, or anything absurd like that, but at least some of the bigger improvements made that month are still just about noticeable now. It also helped me to consider which of the many things that I keep out of habit I actually need or actually like, what might be useful in future, and what would be better finding a new home where it has a chance of being loved; or, failing that, at least getting out of this home where it will never be more than a burden.
  • Challenge March: Fixing everything uncovered in the process of Challenge February. There have been some good successes here. A couple of skirts, some bags and coats, and several bras are all on the list of things that are no longer abandoned in a mending pile, out of sight and mind and will. Excitingly, this mindset of just do it has sneaked into everyday life: I found myself grabbing a needle before the school run a few days ago, quite happy to do an emergency button refastening then and there. Unfortunately, we are breaking/tearing/growing out of clothes so quickly, the reducing the mending pile goal itself hasn’t actually happened at all.

Then we sank into the depths of Lent. Challenge April existed only in my head, and May and June didn’t even make it that far. There is an unavoidable lesson there. Writing a promise down, making it public, having witnesses: these are things that help us to stick to the commitments we have made. Marriage, manifestos, Slimming World – part of the thing they all have in common is the idea of asking people we care about to hold us to our best intentions. Or at least, they should do, and we should be taking up that responsibility. Maybe that’s where politics has been going so wrong recently? But that’s a rant for a different post…

Challenge July certainly needs to be written down, then. It’s time to get back on the horse. To learn from what I’ve done so far and find ways to keep getting better. So here is my plan. This month, I am going to challenge myself to create a warm, welcoming, organised and functional hallway. No longer will it be a dumping ground of bags, shoes, gloves, sunglasses, drawings, takeaway menus (bless them, do they not realise we always use Just Eat anyway?), musical instruments, wellies, pipe cleaners, clerical collars… We are all guilty of coming in and crashing at once, layers and bags and lunch boxes falling behind us like a trail of crumbs, showing every step we have taken until we are found flat out on the sofa watching other people being energetic on iPlayer.

Given the level of chaos routinely to be found in our hallway, deciding to tackle it in itself is quite an undertaking. But it’s July, which means I’m not teaching much, and so I am reaching beyond the sensible, the brave, the wise, and finding myself halfway between the sublime and the ridiculous. I am going to do my level best to create that homely, warm, inviting and functional hallway space without buying anything. At all. Everything will be repurposed or upcycled from things already in the house. Pinterest, of course, is full of ideas to start with (though I’d be very happy to hear others too!) I’m thinking smashed up CDs, cloth-covered cardboard boxes, and wall hangings made from discarded jeans, and that’s just for starters. Who knows where this will end?

So far, I have emptied a few of the bags that have been lining the stairs for a little while now. (By little while, I mean that I found an old-style £1 coin in the bottom of one of them.) I have made plans and schemes and got excitable. I have worked out that using things from around the house frees two birds with one key, reducing the clutter around the rest of the building and also creating a more happy space in part of it. On paper, it’s all good. What happens when that paper is glued onto an old pizza box and turned into storage for sunglasses, plastic giveaways and treasured works of love and glitter is yet to be seen.

A tower of Very Important Things that need to be sorted including papers, bags for life and PE kits. Next to them is the mountain of things that I happen to have lying around my house anyway that I can use to create a more enjoyable space. And I thought there would never be any advantages to being a hoarder…

Waste not; want a lot

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I have just come back from a little time at the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. It’s hard to explain what this means to people who have never experienced it, but here’s my current best attempt. Over 1000 Quakers from all over Britain (and a fair few visitors from all over the world) gather in one building in central London for 3 days, and worship and work together to discern where we are at the moment, and where God needs us to be, in ourselves, our community, and the world. It is the very definition of organised chaos – there are never going to be enough toilets for that number of people to use in a 20 minute session break – with a lot of hugging (not a fan) and a lot of gin (bit too much of a fan). Before this year, I would have described the group as fairly homogeneous, but I wouldn’t do that now. Although it is not yet close to being the embodiment of diversity in action that we would like it to be, I think as a Society we will be healthier, happier and able to welcome others more sincerely if we continue and deepen the work done so far, speaking as clearly about how we are already different as we do about how we are the same.

“Quakers Meeting” by Thomas Rowlandson is licensed under CC CC0 1.0

As part of a wider exploration of Privilege and Power, we were also thinking about sustainability in the face of the climate emergency. The words currently ringing through my mind, pushing me out of my comfort zone in all the right ways, are “I need to do everything I can do. Then I need to do a little bit more.” But I don’t want to do a little bit more. I feel like a lot of the time I’m at breaking point already. How can I do more?

But, of course, I can. No, it won’t be easy, or I would have done it before. But as the same speaker said, I can’t look my children in the eye and say, in 30 years time, that I’m sorry I didn’t love them enough to leave them a world they can enjoy with their own children, in the way I can enjoy this world with mine. How can I deprive them of sharing the thrill of rolling headlong down hills covered in wildflowers (and plenty of things we all pretend are not hiding under the grasses); of counting the spots on ladybirds; of always knowing there will be enough food in the cupboards to keep them safe from hunger (even when half a loaf of bread has once more gone fluffy in the bread bin)?

So I need to do more. What can I do? How am I being called to change my life, and through that, help to make being more sustainable part of the collective default?

A phrase that I always associate with my grandmother (who was born into extreme poverty, lived in London through both World Wars and lost her parents-in-law to the Blitz) is “waste not, want not”. She also loved “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” In my head, whenever I hear that, I hear it in my own mother’s voice, with that slightly horrified tone of “did I just turn into my mother?” When I say it (and I do), I would imagine I say it with exactly the same inflection…

Waste not, want not. It has a visceral memory of rationing running clear through it. And it is in direct opposition to most of the way that things are made and marketed in modern society. But what does it mean to me?

The main areas of unquestionable waste in my daily habits are buying clothes I do not need, and eating too much. And in both of these areas, saying no to wasteful habits means saying no to things that I really, really want, if only in that moment. Saying no to consuming more than I need, more than is healthy, more than is right, is saying no to waste. It is also saying that I have to learn to resist the yearning that floods through me for that moment of indulgence and zoning out when tucking into a doughnut or three in the gasp between lessons; or the siren call of inhabiting that body and luxuriating in that lifestyle slithering its way into my subconscious as I dash into town for pens or the chemist.

I am a firm lover of lists and making plans (and usually slightly weaker at actually actioning those plans), and so I have been thinking about how I can create ways around me of reducing waste, and in particular, of stopping throwing away so much spoiled food, and eating so much food that I really don’t need – ways that are sustainable long term, by not adding straws to our already-creaking camels’ backs. I started this year intending to do something different and sustainable every month, a lifestyle change I called #Challenge2019. This (admittedly quite overdue now) is its next installment. So here we go.

I have said before that food waste in our household happens for a number of reasons. I buy healthy food and then don’t have the energy to cook it, so it goes off. (I’m not talking about going past its sell by date here, incidentally – I’m talking liquid cucumbers and green yogurt). I buy chocolate and crisps as occasional treats, and we all end up eating them as the satsumas go hard and brown in the fruit bowl. I cook what feels like the right amount of food, and put too much on our plates, so that we all end up either throwing some away (The Paleontologist) or eating until our tummies hurt (both The Cowgirl and me). I come home from work or days out, full of good intentions, and then snack on cheese because I need a quick boost and everything else takes effort. Then I put too much food on my plate when tea is finally ready and the cycle continues.

Working on all these things at once is impossible for me. Trust me – I’ve tried it I don’t know how many times, and it has never worked. Small changes, embedded one by one and built on slowly, is the only way I can see this working. This week, we’re looking at 5 a day. As a family, our challenge is to eat 5 portions of fruit or veg a day. If we do, we each get to put a cork (reused, of course 😉) into a pot. When there are a full week’s corks in there, we get a family treat.

How does this help sustainability, I hear you ask? I’m hoping, in lots of ways. It will mean snacking on the short-lived fruit and veg already in the house, instead of crisps and sweets. It will encourage me to incorporate more veg into meals, and hopefully give the girls the incentive to eat them instead of them going straight from the pan into the food waste canister. As we all get better at adding daily corks to the family total, I’m also hoping to bring in ideas about where our fruit, in particular, was grown, and how it reached us. And yes, it’s also about encouraging us all to eat more healthily, which might also help me to fit into more of my old clothes, meaning I don’t have to buy more when I have a whole wardrobe of clothes already that I don’t want to admit I may never be able to zip up again. Wouldn’t it be great to address both areas of waste in my life at once?

Is this going to save the world? Clearly not, with just me on my own, saying the same thing over and over to my nuclear family. Is it going to help? Yes. It will help me, but it is also a way of living my faith and my conviction, making the choices and sacrifices I can right now, helping my children and myself see I mean what I say, and that hard choices for me can look everyday and commonplace for others around me. And that’s ok. They may have their own hard decisions which I can support them with, which if we’re all lucky may be something that someone else they know has already overcome, and can show them the way around.

This is me doing everything I can, and then a little bit more. When this is normal, I will do a little bit more of the little bits more. What do you do that is a little bit more? And what can I do to help?

Second-hand gifts: the perfect solution, or social suicide?

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Shh… Don’t let it get around, but I gave a second-hand toy as a gift. At a children’s party. If I had any social standing, it would never recover from this.

I almost didn’t put The Cowgirl’s name on the label. Then I was going to put in a note with an apology, or an explanation. But I realised that no present is even worse than a second hand present, and I ran out of time to write the note (or a card, for that matter), so off the second-hand present went, in a second-hand gift bag, to add insult to injury.

In this pause, having committed to the action but with no idea yet about the reaction, I’m trying to work out why it seems such a suspect thing to do. What is it about gifts that makes them so much more respectable if they are new? If I had regifted something that hadn’t been opened, that would be fine. But the idea of giving away something that has been played with – but still something age appropriate, in good condition, and that is genuinely fun – fills me with feelings of abject failure. No one does it. Ever. I haven’t been to that many parties, by many mums’ standards, but I’ve been to enough to say that with absolute certainty. I don’t want to be labelled the cheap one, or the one who doesn’t care about other people’s children. I don’t want to be the one they mutter about in the playground (“Did you hear what she did? I’m hardly surprised, though, she never irons her kids clothes either.” – That one is true, and something I’m quite happy to own.)

Let me explain why, given all of this, I still gave this particular gift. Maybe this could be that note of explanation I didn’t have time to write earlier.

  1. It was such a lovely idea. Even better, it wasn’t my idea. The Cowgirl came up with it herself, during tea last night. She went off and found the toy she was going to give away, too. And frankly, after such unusual and unsolicited generosity, I’d walk through fire to encourage her, never mind breaking a few social conventions here and there.
  2. It was easier. Yes, it’s true, part of this is because I hadn’t got a present earlier in the week. I did have a plan to buy something on my way home from work, before picking up The Cowgirl, getting her changed, and getting her out to the party – but trust me, it was a huuuge relief when she came up with an alternative.
  3. It let me stick to #ProjectJanuary – I didn’t have to buy anything. Though, full disclosure, I had bought some Spiderman wrapping paper earlier in the week, in an attempt to not leave things to the last moment. Oops.
  4. It was more sustainable. Nothing like practising what I preach, and I do keep saying it’s better not to buy new things if we can avoid it. We have a family list of ways to help the world on the fridge, and giving away things we don’t need any more is squarely on there. It’s nice to actually do something about it.
  5. It helped us clear out. As I’ve said before, we have had a lot of celebrations recently. It was fairly inevitable that at some point, a toy worth having would be duplicated. It was also inevitable, given The Cowgirl’s general bolshiness, she would insist on keeping the new one. Being willing to give away the old one (in the new box – I know, I’m a bad person, but at least it hasn’t been scribbled on) at least means one less thing to squeeze into our over-cluttered home.

So, for all these reasons, I’m taking a stand. I’m not adding to the pile of plastic duplicates killing the oceans one toy car at a time. I’m taking a risk, and seeing what happens. After all, we’ve got The Cowgirl’s own party in a couple of weeks. If they are upset, they can always do the same back to us. You know what – even if they’re not upset, I do actually hope they do the same back to us.