A recycled lifestyle…

I have so much I want to share with the world! Or at least, with those of us who live in places cursed with the blight of modern technological society…

I’m sure my much-loved friends & family look at me and wonder where they went wrong. Living in their tasteful Home Counties houses, tending their bamboo & decking gardens, driving their well-chosen, high-MPG, depreciation-proof cars, reading all the right-on, slightly subversive books and buying all the politically-correct, ecologically-sound stuff… and then there’s me, zooming around in a ramshackle imported MPV, straw-strewn boot stuffed full of pallets, elderly sewing machines or Freecycled goodies, indolent cats asleep on every windowsill, chickens running riot all over my ex-lawn, overgrown garden dripping with fruit, herbs and saladings, cupboards full of homemade jam (as if we didn’t have a perfectly good supermarket up the road!) and hordes of teenagers, some of them mine, who don’t seem to want to tread the well-worn path to academic excellence, student debt repayments, respectable careers & solid pensions…

There’s no accounting for it!

I don’t live entirely outside respectable “normality” but I’m struggling now to stay cheerfully within its bounds. Somehow life keeps pushing me towards a different lifestyle; one where the unquestioning, unceasing acquisition of tawdry new trinkets and timewasters is no longer fulfilling, but has come to seem an obscene insult to my intelligence and ingenuity. It’s not just lack of disposable income that is sending me down this route; it’s becoming a joyful challenge not to buy anything new until all other options have been explored & discarded. I’ve tried Compacting for a year, and couldn’t quite do it because so much of our stuff is just plain worn out, and suitable secondhand replacements for our situation aren’t always available locally, but I can’t just stop now – I’m hooked.

So please raise a glass to my endeavours! Preferably one of the 6 lovely green-stemmed lead crystal wineglasses I rescued from our local Recycling centre earlier today; we were clean out of decent wineglasses. I’m afraid the homemade, homegrown wine is all gone, though; I’ll make more when the cherry plums & rosehips ripen. I’m off to bed now, to try out the almost-brand-new Freecycled mattress I picked up earlier to replace the 15 year old one…