The weather has
been quite miserable for days, overcast and dominated by a misty insistently
rainy atmosphere – not enough to use an umbrella but plenty to get wet. I assume this sort of weather is appreciated
by mosses, lichens, and other creeping fungi, but yours truly prefers a bit of
sunshine! Just to make my cup runneth
over, the weatherpeople predict snow for tomorrow. And as usual, the frogs, who never listen to
the news, have arrived in the pond, ready for spawning. It never fails; a cool period in spring is
followed by a few milder days, and the feckless amphibians pile into my garden
pond with amorous intentions. Then, as
soon as they have laid their eggs, the weather turns cold and half the eggs
freeze. I used to run out and rescue a
few clumps of frogspawn and keep them in a glass bowl in the Mouserleum
(lean-to conservatory), but I got fed up with their fecklessness and now they
are on their own.
Days like these
make me feel vaguely depressed, so I decided to cheer myself up by visiting
Headington, the Oxford suburb just up the hill from where I live. It boasts an impressibe number of charity/thrift
shops, and thus constitutes a massive attraction for a thriftshop queen like
myself. Besides, I needed to buy some
moth killer strips – I killed two of the little monsters yesterday, and that
always means WAR!!!!!
To this end I
wended my way to the Headington Homeware Shop of the Ford family. They have run the shop since 1964, it is the
sort of shop featured in old fashioned children’s books, and whenever I need
anything in their line of business I go there first – I’d hate for them to go
under. The shop is located in Windmill
Road, quite central, and has anything from paint to baskets to cooking
implements to garden bulbs to, you guessed it, moth-terminating supplies.
‘Thou shalt not
suffer a clothes moth to live’ is the foremost principle of housekeeping in
the Home of DB, and every four months or so I purchase paper strips impregnated
with moth poison to hang in my wardrobes, and sticky-sided pheromone traps to
distribute around the house. More than
ten years ago I had an infestation, courtesy of Liberty and it
has taken all these years of dilligent murder to reduce their numbers to negligible. But the little monsters are incredibly fecund
– relax your vigilance for just one season, and you are back to square one. Not for nothing are there entire chapters in
old house-keeping books on ‘The Moth Menace!’
Anyway, I buy
what I need, get permission to shoot a few pictures, and move on to the main
purpose of my visit: “The Headington
Charity Shop Shuffle!” It basically
consists of going from one charity/thrift/second hand shop to the next searching
for high quality, yet dirt-cheap, items of apparel. This is one of my all time favourate past
times, ever since my friend Marybeth inducted me into its secrets back in
Portland, Oregon. After decades of Doing
the Shuffle I have a wardrobe full of wonderful cheaply bought clothes.
Way too many,
actually, I frequently feel the need to declutter things a bit. Which is wasteful and futile and very very
stupid, and really I should stop. The
thing is, I am a Hunter & Gatherer at heart, and in winter, when I can’t
pick flowers or blackberries, I feel the need to funnel my gathering instincts
into other channels, and shopping in charity shops is perfect. For those of you who don’t indulge in this
particular past time, let me explain.
A charity/thrift
shop is a shop that gets all its merchandise for free from people who donate
them – when you pass these shops early in the morning you quite often find bags
of things propped up against the shop’s door, left there by donors on their way
to work (I do this myself quite a lot).
The people who work in these shops are volunteers who work for
free. All the goods they sell are fairly
cheap, which is great for poor students and frustrated Hunter Gatherers like
me. And all the profits go to a good
cause. So whatever money I spend in
these shops, I always have the excuse that I am helping a good cause. And when I am tired of the things I have
bought, I put them in a bag and give them back to the shop – who sell them
again.
Because these
shops are so cheap, it is actually not a bad way of spending one’s time. It is cheaper than most other entertainments,
like going to the movies or to London to visit a museum. Also, the clothes they sell are a lot more
varied than the ones one can buy in the shops.
If someone’s grandmother dies, all the old lady's clothes are given to a
charity shop. If her daughter decides,
after years of trying to lose weight, that she will never fit into that
gorgeous dress she bought five years ago in the hope of slimming down into it,
she sends it to the same shop. And her
daughter, who refuses to wear anything for longer than a season, routinely
sends her entire wardrobe to the shop as well.
As a result the shop can sell clothes from the last thirty or forty
years! If I want a pencil skirt, or
anything high waisted, I don’t even try buying it in a regular shop, because
they are currently unfashionable – but the charity shops usually yield up one
or two.
These shops are
also good when one wants to try out another style or colour. Buying a new item just for an experiment is
prohibitively expensive, but for a few pounds one can usually get something
useful in a charity shop to try out.
This week’s haul consisted of one long woolen red cardigan (made in
Germany about fifty years ago, I think), one red silk & linen pencil skirt
(brand new Hobbs), and one mad green scarf – I probably will not wear it often,
but could not resist those greens! All
for £12. Not bad, eh?
PS It is called the ‘Shuffle’ because one has to
shuffle/rummage through an awful lot of clothes to find the ones one wants – that’s
the fun of it!
