Chucking out the throwaway days

BRIGHT young things are busy reinventing the wheel and writing bright young books about how to grow your own veg or cook economically. Fair enough.

Though it would probably take about six months to recoup the cost of the book...

Anyway thriftiness is a state of mind that takes generations to perfect, until that inability to throw anything away becomes bred in the bone.

Sometime back in the Thirties I guess, my maternal grandmother bought some good linen sheets. After the war, when times were hard and my parents were newly married, some of the sheets came to my mother.

When they wore thin, she did what everyone did – turned them sides to middle so the thin bits were on the outside. That kept them going for a few more years.

When they were no good for sheets any more, did she throw them out?

Of course not. Instead, my mother put the old sheets in a suitcase under the bed. Whenever she needed a new tea towel, she just dragged the case out and cut another bit off the old sheets, hemmed them neatly and there you are.

I must have been 20 years old before I realised you could actually go into a shop and buy ready-made new tea towels... Such extravagance!

It didn’t stop there. In the Eighties when I was having babies, there were no Mothercare sheets for their pram or cot. Oh no – not when there were still plenty of bits of sheets in the old suitcase. And when the boys moved beyond cots and prams, the sheets become tea towels and when finally the tea towels were just mere threadbare ghosts of their original selves, they still weren’t thrown out – they ended their days as floor cloths.

Right up until a few years ago, I was still using floorcloths that must have come from my grandmother’s sheets bought back in the Thirties.

Now that’s what you call make do and mend.

So thrift is great and to be encouraged.

But to get it right, you should probably have started about 80 years ago.

EXTRACTS from accounts kept by working-class women bringing up families in desperate poverty nearly a century ago showed that after rent and fuel, their biggest expense was on burial insurance for their children.

Few mothers saw all their children reach adulthood and a pauper’s funeral was the worst shame.

Which puts the current crisis into a different perspective.

IF you have teenagers about to start vital exams, good luck.

You’ll need it.

At this stage of the game there’s no point nagging, yelling or trying to make them cram in a last drop of revision.

The best thing you can do is relax, forget work – and give them breakfast.

A decent breakfast will put them on top form and is said to be worth at least half a grade.

Got to be worth a bacon sandwich and a glass of orange juice, hasn’t it?

But is it real?

SO Peter Andre and Jordan are said to be separating. They met on a TV reality show and ever since have lived almost their entire lives out in front of the cameras, with their every move sold to the highest bidder, even their Stateside sulks and spats, earning them a consolingly hefty pay cheque. A couple for our times.

And now they’re appealing for privacy.

Sad, of course, when a relationship breaks down, especially one involving children.

On the other hand, given their past form, you can’t help a sneaky feeling that their plea for privacy is only a short commercial break – so that they can work out a mega-deal for their inevitable grand emotional reconciliation.

All in front of the cameras, of course. Watch out for the next episode.

Time for a clean sweep in the House

INSTEAD of admitting “It’s a fair cop” and promising to change their ways, what are MPs doing over the expenses scandal?

They are frothing with indignation over the mole who leaked the details and then blaming the press for printing them.

Says it all really. There’s no hope, is there?

A huge hooray for those who maintained their standards and self respect and claimed little or nothing – and unutterable contempt for those who tried to grab every last thing.

Moats! Swimming pools! Christmas tree decorations!

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could just sweep the whole lot out.

Right now. Would it make any difference?

I mean, what have they actually achieved in between all that tarting up of their homes?

The country is in the worst mess it’s been for generations. MPs haven’t done much to make it better.

Doing without them all for a year or so couldn’t really make it much worse.

And at least it would save the rest of us a great deal of money – that we could then spend on our homes rather than theirs.

Mad and glorious

MANY congratulations to the ladies of Rylstone WI. Ten years ago they stripped off for a wonderfully witty nude calendar that raised millions for cancer research, inspired a film, a stage play, and hundreds of other naked calendars which, in their turn, raised millions more for good causes.

And now some of the original group are back again, posing with posh hats, pearls and only a few strategically-placed props for another calendar to mark the tenth anniversary.

In 1999, in their 40s and 50s, they were brave enough. A decade later they are braver yet. Mad and glorious.

Brace yourselves for 2020.

A hot head with no sense at all

DR Alice Roberts is terribly clever. She’s a doctor, a television presenter and can tell an awful lot from bones. Currently she’s on television explaining how we are all originally Africans.

But I couldn’t listen to what she was saying, because there she was with a couple of bushmen jogging through the Kalahari in temperatures of more than 40 degrees, looking as though she was about to pass out – and she wasn’t wearing a hat.

Even the bushmen were wearing baseball caps. Which only goes to show that being terribly clever is all well and good – but isn’t at all the same thing as being just plain sensible.

One law for MPs...

A MOTHER who used a relation’s address so her child was in the catchment area for a better school, might be prosecuted for fraud. Using a false address to gain benefit? Mmm...

clearly one law for MPs and another for worried mothers.

Instead of victimising the mother, wouldn’t the time of the local council involved be better spent wondering why one school was so much worse that the mother was driven to such desperate measures?

If all schools were up to standard, there’d be no need for anyone to play the system. But that would mean the council actually taking some responsibility for the schools and children in their care.

So don’t hold your breath.