I don’t take kindly to people telling me what to do & buy, and how I should be living my life. Particularly not when the bottom line is that they are trying to sell me bigger, faster whizzier things that humanity has done perfectly well without for the last few thousand years… Although I am thankful for some of the genuine advances that we have made over the last couple of hundred years, I think we’ve come too far, too fast, lost sight of the goalposts and shot ourselves in the foot. Which is going to put us in a whole new ballgame before long… This blog records my attempts to wrest control of my own life back by refusing to play the consumer game any longer; by reducing, re-using, recycling and all the usual things. But my main point is that I’m having a lot of fun doing this!

So come & join us around our reclaimed firepit, burning a little wood that was otherwise destined for landfill, cooking dampers on twigs, toasting marshmallows, drinking home-made lemonade and wine from reclaimed glasses and telling tales into the night…

About thriftwizard…

Great-grandaughter of a Victorian blacksmith/engineer, grand-daughter, daughter (twice over! I have a Reverend mother..) & sister of country vicars, with strong family influences & heritage from the Quakers, west-country yeoman farmers & sailors, with Celtic French and a dash of Canadian mixed in, I trained as an analyst/programmer before flinging reason & riches to the winds and becoming a stay-at-home mother and very occasional freelance journalist.

“Thriftwizard…?” It started as a tag from a magazine that commissioned a set of short articles from me on frugal living. But my advice was a little too radical; their advertisers took exception to me telling the readers not to buy things, and the series was “spiked” after the first article. Ah well, at least I got paid! But I took a liking to the idea; “thrift” in its original meaning is far from miserly pennypinching, being closely related to “thriving” and carrying connotations of wisdom & plenty, as well as being a tough little pink-flowered plant that grows best in wild, seaside places. And what is a wizard but someone who makes things happen, one way or another? So when I started to need a slightly more anonymous nickname online, one that no-one else had already picked and was personal to me, it seemed to fit…

You will find me elsewhere online as deMylistrahil (central character from a truly awful fantasy novel I wrote at the age of 14) and AngieC. And yes, it’s my Chickenshed, and Extreme Patchwork, too!