Change of Use

This blog was a great New Year Resolution, but in the last 4 months I've got rid of a lot of stuff, and haven't photographed it.   As usual, a format just becomes a source of guilt when you are unable to adhere to it.   So I have decided that I will photograph items I am getting rid off, when they are important, and something I'll miss.   I'm going to post a number of photographs of my old "hippy" clothes.  Mostly they are torn, worn out, and have no future other than rags.  I wish I did patchwork, but I doubt whether I'll take it up now.

A selection of defunct clothes -
on top a rather fetching pink blouson,
below a silk kaftan from India which I wore as a night dress

The hippy cheesecloth trousers with
Indian pink trousers beneath

A skirt I made myself! Our of fabric
 I bought in S. Africa,
 fabric imported from E. Europe and sold to Africans

A red shawl from India, now a moth hostel.
Sad to see it go, but I'd stopped wearing it.

A cardigan, a poncho?

This is rather a nice garment, I have had it for about 3 years.  It was given me by a friend who had lost lots of weight and was discarding her fat wardrobe.  I was the lucky recipient of several very nice things.  Although I like this, I have never worn it.  Every time I think I will, I find the colour is too dull for me (how can maroon be duller than black?  Dunno, but it is).  It doesn't quite hang right (too small!!!???) or the fringes get in the way.

I occasionally put it on indoors when it was cold, but frankly I have other things that do the job better (shawls, throws etc, even my dressing gown).  It seemed a shame that it was "born to flower unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air" so I thought I would give it to a charity shop.  Then today, I had the ingenious thought that I would see if Angie (who cleans for me) would like it.  She usually wears black (since her husband died a year or so ago) but I pointed out that after a year the Victorians permitted widows to wear grey, white and purple as well as black.  She was delighted by the pocket, so I hope she will keep it and wear it a bit and not hand it on to the 40p/kg clothes merchants.

Flip flop

There they are, an old tired pair of flip-flops.  For most of my life I've had flip-flops.  I had my first pair when we went on holiday to Italy in 1966.  They were bog standard ones, white uppers with straps in red, blue or yellow, and matching soles.  Flip-flops sustained me through teenage summers of love and sulking, and I still wore them at university.  During the 80s it was almost impossible to buy them, except in seaside towns, but the technology had improved, they often had ribbon straps which were more comfortable and they came in slightly different colours.    At some point, probably about ten years ago they became extremely fashionable and could be acquired with massive amounts of decoration, flowers, ribbon, metallic surfaces etc. They also became far more expensive - often up to £15 for a really outrageous pair - probably more in London.   This was during the hey-dey of Glasto-chic, when everyone wanted to dress as if they were at a rock festival (allegedly).  This included Sainsbury's customers and while some of my more flamboyant flip-flops came from TK Maxx, this pair came from Sainsburys.   I bought two pairs, the others were blue striped and wore out first.   A close inspection will show that these have not worn out - but I am chucking them because my feet are old and require more support, and I actually find the toe post painful and itchy, so they have lost their raison d'etre i.e. of allowing me to feel young, free and reasonably speedy.

I don't know if you can re-cycle flip flops, perhaps as underfelt? - so they may have to go straight into the bin and thence, presumably, to landfill where they may survive for future archaeologists.

Fans for the memory

This is one fan, showing both sides.  I was given three fans a while ago by a young Chinese student staying here.  One was hideous, and I gave it to a charity shop an age ago.  Of the remaining two, one has a landscape on it, one has peonies.  Today I decided I preferred the landscape one, but I think this is the one I took to my cousin Strat's funeral.  It was a hot day in July.  I tried to get a translation of the text, but the cousin I asked (Ben C) said his Mandarin wasn't up to it.   I hope it doesn't just say "Fans R Us - the Sin Qin Fan company for all your personal ventilation requirements".  I'd like to think it was a piece of classical poetry - or even a quote from Mao (probably not).  Sadly I'll probably never know.  

We used to have a lot of foreign students visiting, until 2015, when we decided to stick with AirBnB.  They could be very interesting, but mostly they were just teenage boys, with few opinions and little curiosity. Some of them brought "interesting" gifts - some welcome (chocolates and biscuits and honey), some of dubious value (coffee table books) and some interesting but never likely to find a home here (wind up windmill musical boxes mad of bamboo, a cut out picture of a cat, a Ukrainian lucky charm).   Fans are sort of useful, but I already had 3... and they are seldom necessary, unless one goes to the theatre in the summer a lot. They don't wear out and need replacing either (not in England anyway). I suppose they are an "acceptable gift" because they are attractive, pleasing and inoffensive.  

This makes me reflect on how many of the things I will be discarding this year are gifts.   Over the last few years I have been happy to get rid of items which are gifts from people I no longer see.  I had a particular friend who used to give me regular birthday and Christmas presents (and I her) these were nearly always objects that seemed a bit clunky to my taste, or with a design that wasn't in keeping with my austere standards.  It was a delight to dispose of them and feel I didn't have to keep them out of loyalty.

Year Zero, Day 1

Good bye to all that  Day One

Like everyone else in the affluent world, I've been thinking about decluttering, because we have far too much stuff, and also because the threat of house moving in the event of a possible separation does tend to clarify the mind wonderfully.   I am very attached to a lot of my stuff, but there are also items that are endlessly being moved from place to place never finding the place that's right, because really, there is no right place.  

Two ideas have come together: I heard someone say recently that one should get rid of one item a day. Years ago when we wanted to get rid of the kids' toys someone else suggested we photograph them before getting rid of them, then the boys could always have the memory years after they had grown out of the toys.   So, this is the beginning of a 365 day blog on the topic.   This is a test post, I needed to see how easy it is to use my tablet to photograph things and upload them here. It is extremely easy. So here is today's object. My old shoes:

  These shoes were bought in 2009, early in the year, at the Clark's shop in our local shopping mall.  They cost, incredibly, about £35 - reduced?  I was wearing them in April that year when I went to a rather fateful private view in Oxford.  They are Clarks shoes and were really comfortable for the first few years.    I stopped wearing them in winter 2014/5 by which time they had been mended about 3 times, and the upper was tearing away from the base of the shoe, again, and the cobbler refused to repair them again.  I wore them all the time.  They weren't in the least lovely.  For a while I kept them near the back door for use in the garden, but they were too far gone - my feet got wet, the unlovely rubber clogs were more practical. 

I don't know if this picture does them justice - the backs weren't crushed like that - I was using them to slop about it indoors before I finally decided that my slippers were better.    A couple of weeks ago I bought some new winter shoes.  They are less lovely to look at than these, being lace up Hotters with thick soles and a slight hint of "surgical boot" about them.  They were also ludicrously expensive, £80, reduced from ninety-something.  Why?  But they have cushioned insoles and are supportive in rather tight way.  

The old Clarks accompanied me all over the place.  Tthe tales they could tell... well, no.  Mostly they were on my feet, under the desk, while I wrote and wrote and wrote. They have been to Madrid and on a couple of day trips to France, but otherwise they haven't been much further than Oxford.  Now they will go to the shoe recycling bin in the Cannon Road car park - and be taken thence to a place of execution.  Oh dear, the pathetic fallacy - one really must avoid it, if one is ever to throw anything away.