Eco audit: something old, something new

In my teens, I became the owner of a rather particular waistcoat. It had belonged to my great grandfather. It has a wool front, and satin back. The buttons are the bit I like the most – and it is still in my wardrobe, even if it is really too big for me to wear.

I’m not a huge clothes person. I’d better say that at the start. I’m not going to tell you that I have loads of vintage items, because I really don’t. There is something of the ‘got to be up to date NOW!’ of fashion that I recoil from.

So why think about second-hand clothes? Because there is something special about them. Like trying on a wardrobe item for a theatre show, that you know has been worn by others before you – and will be worn by others after you. The history is part of the appeal.

I performed a peculiar form of rebellion in my teens. I decided to look more like someone from a Victorian or Edwardian period – at least in part. (I think the main influence was the Anne of Green Gables mini series, but I certainly had a much-loved blouse with leg of mutton sleeves, rather as the Anne characters wore.)

So round about the time that I discovered the joys of shopping in Oxford, I also discovered second-hand clothes shops. I bought a dark-green greatcoat that I wore and wore.  A black felt cloche hat (that was more to do with watching Peter Wimsey on TV, I suspect), even though it didn’t really fit the shape of my head.

Later, at university, I discovered the delights of second-hand velvet jackets – although the fit I found meant you couldn’t move your arms much. As long as you could be around others, and avoid hailing a cab or making sudden dramatic gestures, you were fine.

Clothing is one of those eco areas that I am coming to later on. I don’t tend to buy many clothes, and I was schooled by my mother to look for better quality material, so that ‘so cheap you can throw it away!’ movement mostly passed me by.

I realise it is very trendy to buy vintage. In fact, trying to sell genuinely vintage clothes can be tricky, when clothes shops are full of them. So should I be looking to buy what’s already there – or buy better of what’s new?

Some of my favourite clothes have been second-hand ones – but then there is that aching moment if they don’t fit, or develop holes, and you can’t genuinely replace them, because there’s nothing like that available now.

I am trying to contemplate fabric in a different way for the future.  I’ve enjoyed reading about using second-hand fabric for craft projects – that appeals to me out of frugality, and the general joy of second-hand shops anyway.

I’m looking at where I might make eco choices where I do buy new – like whether to buy fabric made from something like bamboo rather than cotton, for replacing bed linen. (It would be good to see what the feel is like first.)

I have also looked at where items can be repaired, rather than replaced, with somewhat variable success. Maybe I need to hone my sewing skills some more, and finally get round to learning some more mending techniques.

When they called it the rag trade, how long did they plan for clothes to be worn, anyhow?

Eco audit: making things

Back in the mists of time, it is said that people made things.  Their own clothes.  Their own shoes, even.  They grew and they hammered and they painted and they basically made their way in the world, themselves.

Today, we tend to forget that.  We recognise that things have to be made – but we seem to think that there is a race of super robots in China that actually make all the things that we can no longer make, but still need. Or something like that.

Where does making things begin? With example, I suspect.  With realising that it can be done, by seeing others do it.  By hearing stories, even, of people making things – and finding out that you don’t have to buy them in a shop.

My mother in law is a case in point.  She makes things – pottery, mainly.  She grows things. She grew up with a father who made many of her clothes (a tailor by trade) and a mother who knitted most of the rest.  Her father also made her bedroom furniture.

So to make things is normal. And I think I knew some of this in my teens.  But we have increasingly forgotten that we can make things – because a) we enjoy being able to buy things and b) because we are all too busy to make things.  We think.

In fact, I suspect that when we do make things, we derive pleasure several times over – from the making, from the using, from the sustaining ourselves, and even (if that thing we make lasts) from the multiplied memory of all of this every time we use it.

That thing we have – it entered our lives in a particular way.  It was purposed.  It was laboured over, perhaps.  It is prized – certainly. It is enjoyed – without question.

Some of the making in my own family happened more before I have clear memories of it happening – but I know it did.  My father did wood working – he made my dollshouse, my brother’s boat for the bath, the wooden sledge for heavy snow (thank you, Blue Peter, for the template), and my garage.

The garage I remember, because I helped to make it. I got to paint the roof, in thick black paint.  When it was finished, my father hung a string of tiny paper flags in the window of the garage. The roof comes off to take cars in and out.  (I don’t entirely remember  why I had a garage – I wasn’t into cars in the same way Dan was – but I love the garage in its own right.)

My mother made clothes for herself, and for me. She made curtains – in fact, all of our curtains at home are made by her. She knitted – and has picked up knitting needles on behalf of the youngest, in recent years.  And now both of them return to growing things – taking up an allotment again, growing more of their veg, as they did in the past.

Interestingly, a balance is shifting in today’s society.  There seems to be more and more handmade stuff.  Crafters’ markets, the popularity of Etsy selling handmade items, people’s blogs detailing what they make and salvage – they are on the increase.

There is an eco aspect to this: because we are also more likely to hold onto something if it is clearly ‘made’. And we are prepared to spend our own time making – which fits quite well in that category of making your own entertainment.

Sometimes, we come across items that strongly remind us that they needed human intervention. We have in our house a sheepskin rug which a relative made herself, many moons back.

She no doubt kept and fed the sheep in the first place.  She learned how to cure the skin later.  And now we have a rug, passed on to us more recently, which is clearly a made item. Still warming toes. Still going strong.

There is a balance.  We need to know where our skills are at, to begin with. I’m not setting out on the path of the sheepskin rug, but I can think about what I know I can do – and perhaps what I can reach towards, over time.

Part of my autumnal blog reading included lots of craft sites, lots of how tos.  I didn’t set out to read those – I found them along the way.  And they reminded me of the pleasure of making, of using your hands, the materials you have to hand.

This year, I asked for money for my birthday to make things.  I’m starting with some cross stitch, to make a needle book.  I may go on to sew some things.  There has been a request for a quiver, to house a collection of wooden ‘arrows’.

I’d quite like to make that myself. And now, thinking about it, there is the further pleasure even before the making.  That of contemplating making, considering how to do it, how to bring a project like that together.

No instructions. (No manual, either.) Equally, no timescale by which it has to be done – only a desire to make something. Something that will last.  Something that will do the job.

Something that makes me smile, even before it exists, as I type these words.

Eco audit: shrinking then growing

No, I’ve not given up on the blog.  But the arrival of builders, and the shrinking of available space (because everything’s piled up in the rooms that are available), means that there’s not much headspace for words.

But still.  I want to keep going on this month’s series – while also being overtaken by what’s current in the flat, and how those two things might come together, in words.

This post’s title reminds me of Alice, combining her ‘grow bigger’ and ‘grow smaller’ intake to try to get to the right size.  She found it hard.  So am I, right now.

I wrote earlier this month about the difficulty of reducing – buying less, consuming less.
The other side of the coin is what we do with what we’ve already got – we may commit to bringing less in through the door, but do we also reduce what we have, and keep it that way?

I am thinking of my teenage self, focus for this month’s posts.  In my teens, I lived in one house for a long time (all of my secondary school years, anyway).  And I got a chance to put down roots – including in the space I lived in.

We use our homes to ground us, as well as to say who we are. I found it hard to let go of clutter in my room, in my teens – because it summed up who I was, but also the stability I wanted.  This was partly that teenage search for identity, partly the result of moving house a lot, and having to keep changing things.

At that stage in life, I was happy to buy my recycled paper, lecture my parents on recycling, and make what environmental decisions I could.  But reducing what was in my room? No thanks.

Now, we’ve lived in one place for the longest time I’ve ever lived in one place.  And with the build, it feels like we are simultaneously still at home, and also moving house.

Why should this have an impact? Because moving also does things for you on the eco front.  It allows you to reconsider what is around you, and what you take with you into the new place.

Coincidentally, I have been reading more about living with less – not just from an environmental point of view, but to reduce stress.  What I’ve been reading is purposed at reducing stress for kids, but with benefits for the whole family.

So what’s preoccupying me is: once the new room is ready, do we just shlepp all the piled up stuff into that space? Or do we use it as an opportunity to think again about what we live with?

For various reasons, we’ve been living without access to a certain amount of stuff for some time.  It’s been piled up in the study, and I made decisions on what we needed to get at, and what we could live without for a while.  So in fact, that helps in making decisions – because we know we’ve genuinely done without it for a time, and it’s been OK.

We are collectors in this family, (all right, hoarders), but we are also recyclers, repurposers. We are shrinking right now, in our living space, in order to grow into a bigger space once the building work is done.

I don’t know what that will look like.  But I hope that we can make the right decisions to help us all ‘grow’ when the whole flat is available to us again.  I think that growth will be different if we can agree to live with less, and to keep going that way.

Wish us luck.

 

Eco audit: cooking your own food

Back to food. (No surprise there.) I’ve just been watching a video which talks about how influential food buying habits are, because of the frequency of them, for all of us, every day.

So it seemed as good a point as any to come back to food, and what we do with it.  And equally, the times when we expect to arrive, all ready, as though our kitchen was a replicator on a space ship.

In my teens, it’s fair to say, I wasn’t cooking much of my own food.  Doing rather ambitious amounts of subjects at school, music in lunch times and after school, some part time work, some babysitting even…no, I was firmly in the role of being a food consumer only.

But on the occasions when I had space to put something together, I could. A brunch for one on a Sunday, snacks after school.  I might consume rockbuns with as much alacrity as my (then rapidly growing) brother, but I also knew how to make them.  The recipe was internalised, I could operate the mixer, and so on.

I was in the generation which had cooking at school.  That helped.  I was also in the generation where you could buy some stuff ready made, but that tended to be around biscuits and cakes.  You might open a tin or a jar, on occasion, but you would still expect to cook an evening meal pretty much from scratch.

Jump forward a few years to starting university.  Having had a year out between school and university, I was put in a student flat  with others who’d (mostly) done the same.  Six of us.  One regular sized fridge.  One cooker.  Not much money.  Time to cook.

And so the cooking continued.  As these things do.  Day by day, year by year.  When you’ve got your head over a saucepan, you may not realise the revolution taking place in the supermarkets in the meantime – where it becomes easy not to cook.

Ready meals may have been there when I was in my teens – I don’t know.  And I’m sure many wise words have already been written about the generation that wasn’t taught to cook, and the impact for them, and their children.

I also know how much food education is part of schools now, way beyond what I knew at school – where crops are sown and harvested, and the children learn to cook with what they have.

I admire the effort to connect it up – even while I struggle with the increasingly heavy-handed vetting of food that they eat, via Five a Day Committees and Healthy Snack wallcharts in classrooms.

My teenage self would be astonished at just how many foods you can buy that require no cooking, just heating up or assembly.  Not just the tins and bottles, but the pre-cut veg, the chicken breast cut to stir fry size.  The pre-grated cheese. And the ready meals, stretching off into the distance of the supermarket aisle.

When I started this series, I declared that I was preaching at myself, not others.  I suspect the declaration has slipped a bit.  Some of my eco habits have waned, and can cope with a bit of a dusting off.  Others I suspect have remained, and grown stronger over time.

But. I am also a parent. I have been a full-time office worker.  So I do get why it is convenient to have things that are quick to prepare when you are exhausted – not just for me but for small tummies that suddenly turn ravenous.

The thing that feels harder about all the pre-prepared stuff is just how much of it is swathed in plastic. (Yes, back to my packaging hobby horse.) And, quite frankly, how small some of the portions are.  There’s no point avoiding cooking when you get hungry and practically need another meal after the first one.

There is a scene in the film The Fifth Element where the female character is learning about the new world she’s in.  To fuel all the learning, she puts a plate and some capsules in what appears to be a microwave, presses a button, and take out a full plate of food, steaming hot.

Some days, when my culinary sap is not rising, I wouldn’t mind.  But the further along that route we go, the less we understand what we are putting into ourselves – let alone caring where it comes from, how far it’s travelled, how it was grown or farmed, and so on.

In my childhood, you might still get chided for not eating all your food: ‘think of the children in the world that don’t have enough food’.  I’m glad we’ve moved beyond these comments as an unsubtle way to get children to eat (whether they like the food or not).

But there is an echo in those comments of wartime experiences, of life often being one where food is not so plentiful. And yes, when we walk in the modern cathedrals that are supermarkets, it is hard to remember that there are many places where food can be hard to afford, or even to find, in the first place.

I can still challenge myself again to look at what’s in my supermarket trolley, and work out how many of the items I could make for myself.  And see whether I tip the balance a bit more. I may not knit my own muesli – but at least I think I could have a go.

 

Eco audit: country mouse

These days, it’s quite trendy to holiday in the country.  As countrified as you can.  Glamping.  Staying on eco farms.  All that sort of thing.

One of the great gifts my parents gave me was to take us somewhere in the country for our summer holidays.  Not quite off-grid, in modern parlance, but sometimes, that too, if there was a storm and a power cut.

If you have a family bolt hole to go to, that doesn’t cost you to use, then of course you use it.  Even if it’s several hundred miles from home, involving two or three ferries, and lugging most of your food with you.  Perhaps especially because of all that.

I’ve written before on holidays to Jura, and I will no doubt keep writing about it.  I have a theory that Jura ensnares the first in each generation in particular.  My dad has it; I have it.  His brothers, mine – they’ve been, they know it it, but they don’t seem to go as crazy for it.

Perhaps it’s that second child thing – more sociable, more gregarious, and more likely to notice that somewhere is wild and a bit remote. The oldest child, perhaps more influenced by parents, tends to pick up on their thing, not always that of their own generation.

Staying in a cottage (latterly one that is well equipped) isn’t roughing it.  I appreciate that.  We did have a go at camping as a family – a couple of goes, actually – but we used existing camping sites, and still felt it wasn’t quite us.

The more important issue, though, is going on holiday and not necessarily expecting all mod cons.  When we went to the original cottage on Jura, there was no TV.  The cottage was small, really one bedroom which I had to share with my brother, and the sitting room, which included the not very comfortable sofa bed where my parents slept.

So you were either all in one room – which of course happened as soon as there was lots of rain – or outside. Which was just as well, because the point of being somewhere so beautiful is that you really want to be outside.  (Except when the midges are out.)

Nowadays, it’s what people pay good money for – isolation.  They may well want to be somewhere where their phone doesn’t work; where there’s no internet access (and maybe also no squabbling over gaming privileges).

And what do you do in such places? You go for walks.  You get wet.  You come home again and eat your way through lots of cake.  You play board games.  You sulk when you lose. Your parents remember to leave the door unlocked again (at least partly to avoid seeming like the total incomer.)

You play at the beach as often as you can, building sand castles, attempting to dam the little burn that runs out across the beach and into the sea. You go out in the dinghy, and learn to row.  You learn to fish on a small line off the back of the boat – at night, if you’re really lucky (and if your mum has packed enough chocolate digestives).

You do I-Spy books and collect points for spotting seals, sea otters, different types of deer. You build driftwood boats out of whatever wood you find on the shore, and an old potato bag.  You make smaller boats out of reeds along the shore, and sail them off the jetty.

You do the grand day trip to the next island – and go for walks there.    You go to the bookshop and buy more books because you have already read all the books you’ve brought AND any extra books that have been sent in the obligatory parcel which has to be sent to you while you’re there.

When I think about it, it sounds remarkably like what I was trying to sum up in a recent post, on making your own entertainment.  And in some ways, in my childhood certainly, it probably wasn’t so different from day to day life anyway.

What I’ve noticed through so many of these posts is that when there’s not much money, it’s actually easier to be a bit more eco.  Time as a student reacquaints you with this, as can time as a parent.

But in the background, expectations move on.  Society demands that your holiday bolthole come with internet access.  That you still get a power shower.  And in some ways, I know why camping wasn’t the family thing – because when you finally get a holiday, you might just want a bit of comfort.

We are trying, for our part, to offer some of the same in our own family.  To go to Jura, and to another cottage, nearer to hand but still reasonably in the wilds.  Where the days spent at the beach are still the highlights, where jigsaw puzzles get a bit more attention, and where you wake up the wee one to show them the night sky without pollution.

The environment is there.  We just have to slow down enough to remember it.  And, on holiday, we might just manage it.