Today would have been / should have been my brother’s seventieth birthday. He never even saw his sixtieth. Significant birthday’s missed or never reached. When we were kids, both of us having birthdays in the same week in January, our parents would leave some of the Christmas decorations up, the non-specific streamers, for our birthday parties. That was back in the day when parents didn’t hire a play centre and invite a whole class of children to the party. There would be enough friends, and siblings, and maybe a cousin or two of the right age so that you could organise a good game of musical chairs or musical statues or pass the parcel. And everyone got a piece of birthday cake to take home but there were no party bags as such with extra sweets and a toy of some sort for each guest. Life was simpler!
Yesterday the youngest grandchild came for the morning. This is becoming a regular feature. I have turned into a regular babysitting grandmother after all! My daughter brought, along with a small boy, a number of things that need a stitch or two. I am the go-to person for small repairs. Somewhere along the way she seems to have missed out on that bit of her education. Her eldest daughter, on the other hand, is very good at darning socks. She sends photos of the darns she has completed. I have my grandmother’s darning mushroom. I know who to pass it on to when I decide I have no further use for it.
My daughter may not be much good at doing repairs but at least she arranges for repairs to be done rather than simply throwing put a garment because of a small hole or tear. Throwaway clothing is a major source of rubbish. Here are some facts.
- 350,000 tonnes, that’s around £140 million worth of used but still wearable clothing goes to landfill in the UK every year.
- This equates to more than 30% of our unwanted clothing currently goes to landfill.
- We Great Britons send 700,000 tonnes of clothing to recycling centres, textile banks, clothes collections and to charity each year.
- That’s enough to fill 459 Olympic-size swimming pools.
When I was a child we used to send unwanted or outgrown clothes to jumble sales, usually organised by the local church. It worked as a recycling system but was occasionally a bit embarrassing if you came across someone wearing the dress your mother made for you the year before last. Maybe taking stuff to a town centre charity shop keeps it a bit more anonymous. It was certainly odd to see the flamboyant coral-coloured hat I wore to my son’s wedding in the window display of a charity shop in Uppermill a couple of years ago.
The other modern problem with clothing is that we wash everything more often than we used to. This is surely no bad thing in itself but according to scientists who know about such things there are so many synthetic fabrics used in clothing these days that whenever we wash them, especially in modern, efficient washing machines, we send a load of micro-plastic particles down the drain. These get into the water supply and into the food chain. No wonder we are all made up of so much plastic!
Some even say that we should not wash denim jeans at all, something I find hard to accept. Many-times-washed denim is much more comfortable. Time was you would not want to be seen in an obviously brand new pair of Levis. They needed to be washed a few times to make them look a bit careworn and faded. Of course, what usually happened was that they reached the perfect level of fading and then sprang a hole in the knee. This was, of course, before it was trendy to walk along with designer rips in your jeans!
The façade of an old building is often subject to a preservation order but beautiful floors are just thrown away. What a waste!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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