Jeanius

As you all know, I'm trying to buy as few new clothes as possible, just as I'm trying to buy as little new everything else as I can. Let me tell you this hasn't been easy.

This morning though as I was pulling my favourite Marc Jacobs jeans out of the wardrobe I noticed to my horror a threadbare patch just gone through to a hole in the crotch. Oh no, diaster! Environment aside, not only can I not afford new jeans right now, but these have only just got really perfect - which is when jeans always start to fall apart.

So imagine my delight when, browsing one of my fave green blogs Eco Street, I found this entry about a company in NYC, denim therapy, which reconstructs your jeans for about $20 a pop. I am so sending mine in, along with my all-time favourite Calvins which I've been hanging on to in the vain hope that something like this might happen one day (you see, they could have been in landfill by now, but thanks to my complete inability to throw any clothes away ever, they will now find new life).

I love this - is a great antidote to the awful disposable fashion thing we've all got ourselves into. As you know, I love Top Shop at least as much as the next girl but make do and mend is surely the wave of the future. To this end, this week I've also customised a charity shop tunic for Dot and reviewed the bags of clothes under my bed and resurrected a few items. Applying the same principal to home furnishings, I've also updated some curtains for our living room with lovely red and white striped ribbon the hubby bought in the UK - pics soon. Beats buying a whole new set, anyway. Am now on the lookout for an old blanket or bit of fabric to turn our bedroom curtains into blackout blinds to make Dot's daytime naps a bit less of a struggle. Will let you know what I dig up.

The Simple Life

We've relocated to the parents' new house in Hampshire - very grand and ideal for playing sardines in - and Dot has received her second glut of lovely pressies. Most not terribly green, I'll be honest, but among them some organic cotton sleepsuits from M&S and Next, of all places (the nearest US equivalent to Next I can think of is...well actually I can't think of an equivalent). Who would have thought it - organic cotton in Next. The last time I shopped there I was in the Upper 4th (last year of junior high) for a kneelength, cowl-neck black cardi. Which, come to think of it, would be rather winter 2006 if someone hadn't nicked it off me at uni...

Anyway, haven't had much time for greening today but over the past few days we've managed to read a few of our favourite Sunday newspaper supplements. This has been a salutary experience.

I've only been through two periods of serious abstinence in my life. The first was when I went travelling in SE Asia in 1998. I took 10 garments in my rucksack for five months away, during which time I spent a total of less than £1000 (including food, hotels, transport - everything). The second is now, when I've vetoed myself buying anything other than essentials (repeat after me: reduce, reuse, recycle), again have a very limited subset of outfits on rotation and am trying very hard to spend no money (for Xmas, I gave Dot a sock puppet I made with the help of the MIL's button tin and some old felt. It's a big hit.) And when I'm upstate in our lovely cottage, (as it was in the butt middle of nowhere in Laos) it's really easy to do - possibly because I'm not reading fashion mags (too much paper), don't have to look good every day for work (though I'm not letting myself go, you understand) and there are no shops to tempt me.

But after a couple of Sunday supplements, you go from being perfectly content with washing your face with Dove and wearing the same five outfits on rotation to wondering if you might not just be able to afford a £200 (that's $400, people) pot of face cream and feeling a whole new wardrobe is more or less essential. There was an article in the Sunday Telegraph magazine comparing what kids want for Christmas to what their parents are actually buying them which made me feel faintly nauseous. Another article in the same magazine talked about how kids' expectations have risen in direct proportion to what's advertised on telly (forty years ago they were happy with a home-made hobby-horse, apparently). I reckon the same thing has happenned to us all.

So my green behavior for the rest of the trip is going to be to try and avoid the fun bits of the papers so I don't feel tempted to go out and buy things I don't need.

The truth is I think I prefer The Simple Life. It's definitely much better for the environment.

More falling off the wagon

So, I had a plan for today’s blog entry. There’s a shop in the UK called Primark which, when I left, sold cheap nylon clothes you wouldn’t be seen dead in and now sells cheap nylon clothes which suddenly all my friends keep turning up at the pub in, saying with a triumphant smirk ‘£3.50 at Primark!’ [that’s $7 to you and me]. So for a while I’ve been planning to just go and just have a little look.

Obviously once I started this blog, I vowed to eschew the kind of cheap disposable fashion Primark sells. Then, yesterday, my mother-in-law told me that, along with Tesco and Asda, Primark had been in the news for paying workers in India £8 a month (http://www.waronwant.org/Fashion+Victims+13593.twl) and therefore having one of the worst human rights records in retail. Clearly actually buying anything there was now completely out of the question.

So I decided I’d go to Primark in Cheltenham today, look around, find it all really tacky, then leave and blog about how virtuous I’d been in resisting the lure of the cheap sinful fashion.

Can you guess what happened next? Yes, it’s true, I somehow found myself walking out of Primark with two £6.50 tops clutched in my sweaty paws (they were in my paws – at least I managed to insist on no plastic bag). I put it down to the preceding six weeks during which I’d forbidden myself, a self-confessed clothesaholic, to even enter a clothes shop. Against this background, Primark was like an open wine bottle to an AA member – just a bit too easy.

The good news is, I tried the tops on when I got home and they look really synthetic and cheap – which is exactly what they are. So I’ll be returning them tomorrow for a refund. Hopefully that’ll get rid of the dirty feeling. And at least I’ll be able to look Dot in the eye when I pop her into her organic cotton babygrow in the morning.

And actually, now I've just read the waronwant.org website, I don't think it's funny that I gave in so easily. It talks about women being paid a third the living wage in Bangladesh to work 96 hour weeks. So that's it. Really this time.

Dreaming of a light Christmas

So we went to the tree lighting and carols in Narrowsburg last night. A smallish group huddled round a smaller tree looking slightly unsure as to who was meant to be leading, and as one contingent launched into 'Frosty the Snowman', another called for 'Jingle Bells', even as a lone soprano warbled the opening bars of 'Hark the Herald'. Dot and I have never been much for American Christmas music anyway, and were more impressed with the mulled wine and grilled cheese sandwiches provided by our friend Michael of the Main Street Cafe and wine shop.

Anyway it was all a bit early for me to really be getting into the Christmas spirit. Not so our neighbours. Overnight, pumpkins and blow-up turkeys have been ousted from front lawns by illuminated inflatable snowmen, nodding fairy-light deer and veritable avalanches of those flashing icicle lights. Restraint is not a much admired virtue and I'm noticing that taste is often in inverse proportion to the size of the front lawn. But I have to admit that, with the long, cold nights and the lonely, dark, wooded roads out here, there's something strangely comforting about coming upon an isolated house ablaze with (even pretty naff) festive cheer.

Which brings me to my own Xmas dilemma. You see, I love Christmas. I'm a real sucker for the carols, the trees and especially the pretty lights. And it being Dot's first Christmas and all, I have this picture in my head of the three of us battoning down the hatches against the bears, coyotes and sub-zero temperatures and snuggling up in front of our wood stove and our twinkly Christmas tree. But on the other hand I know I should be thoroughly diapproving of it all and boycott the lights in a bid to save the planet. I mean, how much bad must all those extra lights being left on all the time do - especially the ridiculously OTT displays described above and summed up by this pic I nicked off it's the environment, stupid (and yes, I know this is Thanksgiving cheer, which somehow makes it even more ridiculous, don't you think?)


But what to do? I have spotted a lovely bit of fir tree abandoned down the road after a neighbour pruned her garden. I think tomorrow I'll pop over with the secateurs and a hacksaw and see what I can contrive from salvaged branches. Hm, a simple fir wreath and a few boughs draped in tinsel recycled from last year could actually be quite stylish in a rustic sort of a way, even without lights. I'll keep you posted, as always.

Don't shop shopping...

So yesterday, the busiest shopping day of the year in the US, Dottie and I had a brilliant idea - we would buy nothing all day (we didn't have the idea till we had in fact bought a cup of frothy coffee, our first this month, from Roasters in Narrowsburg, but at least that was only $2.25.). Our reasoning is that some people believe that western consumer culture is what's at the root of global warming, and also we wanted to thoroughly disassociate ourselves from people like the really annoying ones on the radio who were shrieking about having been camped outside their local mall since 3am to get in early on the day-after-Thanksgiving bargains (they said their fellow campers were now 'like family'. Bonding over the promise of cut-price tumble driers - I think they need to get a life).

Then we got home and found out (on a tipoff from the hubby's cousin Mopsy) that we were as usual either behind the curve or bang on trend, depending on how you look at it, because it was in fact Buy Nothing day yesterday in the US and today in the rest of the world (see Adbusters.org for more info). So we bought nothing for the rest of the day and have also bought nothing so far today, either (not hard as we haven't actually left the house yet. But at least we were both up and dressed by 10. Well, alright, 10.30).

We hadn't really thought about not shopping at all, as opposed to only shopping for certain things, as a way to be green until our friend Circe (check out her brilliant photos at circephoto.com) put us on to the Freegans, a group who found it nigh-on impossible to shop ethically so they've completely boycotted the economic system. Best know for dumpster raiding, they exist entirely on found items or through barter and almost never buy anything at all (Circe followed them on a Dumpster raid round New York one night for a story and said it was a right laugh). The Freegan philosophy is a bit extreme for us to take up wholesale - eating food out of a dumpster is a bit different from the old 5-second rule, and while we don't exactly have a shopping problem on the scale of some of our friends (you know who you are...) the idea of NEVER again experiencing the thrill of the new APC tunic or boxfresh Marc by Marc Jacobs flats is a bit more than we can swallow just at the moment - but it has made us feel better about being too skint to buy very much at all for now (penury as a political statement - brilliant!) and think harder about what we throw in the bin (do you know I once put a pair of Marc Jacobs shoes in the rubbish? Sooo wantonly wasteful and I regret it to this day. That'll teach me).

Luckily there's still Christmas to put things right (adbusters is recommending a buy nothing Xmas too). Our friends and family can look forward to a Christmas morning filled with fairy liquid bottles, empty loo rolls and sticky-backed plastic - lucky old them. (Oh my god, I just checked and not only is Blue Peter still on, but they actually still do all the crafty things. There are even some fairly eco-friendly options, like the compost bin cannily disguised as a dalek or the furry animal hanger, a canny way to revamp an ordinary household item.)

Speaking of Christmas, we're off to the tree lighting and Christmas carols in our local town Narrowsburg. If we were being really good we'd perhaps even boycott this, but it is Dot's first Christmas and hey, we never claimed to be Freegans...