Revolution or tradition?

I am fortunate enough to live in a very international city, surrounded by people from different parts of the world. For the people around me, the choices I am making as part of this simple living journey have different associations and connotations than they do for me.

For me, simple living is my revolution. It contrasts with what I suppose I could call ‘the family average.’ As a teenager I spent a fair amount of time knitting and doing cross stitch, rather than getting drunk in the park. (Don’t get me wrong, I did my bit of getting drunk as a student, but that’s a different story. And I still crocheted my first blanket in my last year at uni.) When my mother refused to teach me to darn my socks (“Just buy some more!”) I taught myself using the 1940s Make do and mend booklet.

This is just one thread of our family story, not the whole story. We also used to pick strawberries to make our own jam, and my mother taught me how to knit and to sew, so there are many useful and precious skills and values that were taught to me, but I am unusual in focusing so much on these things, and I think it is fair to say that while my family would say they share many of the values behind simple living, I am the only one to prioritise them and identify them as a philosophy in quite this way. It certainly feels like I’m making a different choice, even if the underlying principles are not really that different.

For my friends from different backgrounds, it’s another story. I first realised this when I met one of my closest friends for a cup of tea in café. We were drinking hot chocolate, and in Belgium they always put a little sachet of sugar next to the mug. (Because, y’know, it’s not sweet enough already…) She put her sachet in her bag. When I asked why, she explained that she always took these unused sachets of sugar home and kept them by the kettle for use in tea or coffee. It’s already paid for in the price of the drink, after all, so why waste it? 

This frugality was rather unexpected, my friend is not struggling to pay her bills, always dresses in high quality clothes, and often goes out for dinner, to the cinema, to the theatre and so on. I was intrigued, but of course it all made sense when she started talking about her childhood growing up in 1980s Poland. As she put it, ‘child of communism.’ They always had to be careful with what they used, not necessarily because they were poor, but simply because so many goods were hard to come by. She told me how much she used to enjoy darning socks (enjoy!), and shared a number of tips that her mother used – old clothes turned into rags for cleaning, for example. For her, these tips and tricks are things she is glad she doesn’t need any more, but she can use them when she wants to. They’re not something to be rediscovered, there’s no reskilling involved – it’s just an attitude of not wasting.

So of course, I offered her my sugar sachet, and now whenever we meet for coffee she leaves two sachets up. (Neither I nor my boyfriend drinks sugar in our tea/coffee). I also started thinking about frugality differently. My friend is not a spendthrift, but even when she’s out having fun, she’s making sure she doesn't waste anything she pays for.

It’s a similar story with my boyfriend, who comes from South America. I see this with how much money he thinks is a reasonable amount to put aside for the future. My parents encourage saving – but they encourage putting a little aside each month, to enable you to buy a new coat or go on holiday later in the year. 

For my boyfriend, who remembers economies crashing and Presidents changing so fast you could blink and miss one, who saw businesses collapse and jobs disappear, saves to be independent. He doesn't take it for granted that he will always have a job, or that the government will step in with assistance for those struggling, and he knows that the worst can and sometimes does happen. He saves so that if a crisis comes, whether that’s ill health or a family emergency or losing a job, or something bigger, we can weather it a little more easily. 

It’s dramatically changed my saving attitude too. He suggested – and I agreed – that a sensible ‘buffer’ or emergency fund should contain enough money to enable you to survive for a year without income. If we both lose our jobs tomorrow, we have twelve months – time to look for a job. Time to sell our house if we have one, and move to somewhere smaller with a lower rent. 

This attitude is contagious – I am also much more careful with money generally now, much more aware that the world is less secure than it seems from inside the Western bubble, and aware that just because life is good now doesn't mean it always will be. That doesn’t mean we hole up in a nuclear bunker and prepare for the apocalypse, but it does mean that I appreciate what I have now much more, knowing that it is not certain, not automatic, not a right recognised by the impersonal universe.

For many of my friends and my boyfriend, many of the aspects we are discovering as part of a simple living journey – living with a budget, reducing waste, mending rather than discarding, planning and saving for the future – are not new concepts but basic tenets which are known to, even if not practiced by, most people. While some people in the more developed world might consider that this simple living approach is weird and alternative, to much of the world, this is just basic life skills.

On my mind: We haven't changed as much as we think

This is a Friday photo feature that anyone with a blog can join. To take part, post a photo on your own blog, write a short caption explaining it, and link it back to here from your blog by saying you're part of "On my mind". Please write a new post, don't link to an older one. When you've done that, come back here and add a comment below, with a link to your blog.

This is my first 'On my mind' post, and I am joining Rhonda from Down to Earth for this. I have just this evening arrived home from my travels in Finland and Estonia, of which more later. One of the main themes of the trip for me, as we looked at buildings and museum collections and landscapes mapping history from prehistoric times to the present day, was how little cultures really change. The earliest finds include objects which you could still find in a bathroom cupboard - combs, mirrors, razors, tweezers. The gap between modern and prehistoric people is not so great as we think - we essentially use many of the same tools, we just have more high-tech versions of them.

Which brings me to this:

I hope you can see it. The pictures aren't great but I couldn't use flash. It's chewing resin, and it's among the earliest pieces of evidence for the presence of humans in Finland.

It's 9,000-year-old chewing gum.

Long time no see

So I've been a lazy blogger for a while, despite the huge volume and diversity of thoughts and reflections I wanted to share. But hopefully I'll get around to posting a few of them up in the next month. I think blogging is a muscle - you have to exercise is regularly, or every entry feels like hard work! So I'll start myself off small and work up. Today, I am starting with a book review.

Kate Morton - The House at Riverton

This book is about the relationship between a young girl who goes into service in the Edwardian era, rises to become a lady's maid, and leaves service after a dramatic event in the family in which she seems ambiguously invovled. The story follows her recollection of the events of her youth, prompted by a film being made about this family. I really, really enjoyed this book. In fact, I read it in one day because I couldn't put it down. I wouldn't call it a challenging book - there was more than one intended surprise which could be seen coming from miles off - and one or two of the characters were a little simplistic, but they were all very sympathetically written, and minor characters worked well as cameos even where they were not given much depth. The author built up the tension very well, however, and by the final show-down I was absolutely gripped.

I mostly came away from the book with a sense of the romanticisation of the relationship between servant and mistress, and of the lives of people in service generally. There was very little about the relentless labour, and much more about the sense of being privileged to work there. It does seem odd that certain historical periods and contexts draw so much more focus in novels, film and tv than any other - the golden age of the English Country House, the Tudor court, 1066 and the industrial revolution seem to cover most areas. Odd that we see so little of, for example, Anglo-Saxon life or World War 2, or Restoration England. Maybe I should write historical fiction to even up the gap...

OK, slight tangent there. Anyway, it's a thoroughly enjoyable book but will not rock the foundations of your being.

Do you see that grin?

That's the grin of a mad person, as my parents will readily tell you. I'm back home for a couple of days during the half-term holiday, and I've taken this opportunity to treat myself. Ignoring the bag of half-complete crochet projects, the piles of yarn waiting to be worked, the stacks of fabric and patterns, I embarked on a completely new craft - spinning.

Spinning is something I've been interested in for a while, if only for the historical world it seems to open up. For centuries, nay, millennia, spinning was a constant in the lives of women. While you're gossiping, you're spinning. Rocking the baby to sleep? Spinning. Hence the distaff sex (a distaff being a stick used to hold unspun, prepared wool). At university, I studied fairy tales, in which the symbolism of the wheel or spindle is more complex than might at first appear. I learned how to spin at a Viking history event in York, aimed at people approximately ten years younger than me, and I've been dying to have a proper go ever since. Thus the purchase of a spindle and some wool.

I've actually got a spinning wheel upstairs - it's very old, bought from a local charity shop by my mother for my 21st birthday (best present ever!) but before I work out how or even if it works, I wanted to learn the basics with a drop spindle. Which is very appropriately named, I find. But the great thing about spinning is if you make a mistake, it's relatively easy to fix it (although very hard to fix it neatly).

Now my yarn is thinner and more even, with fewer slubs, and I'm starting to plan all the fabulous things I can make with it. I really should finish my last blanket before I embark on a new one, shouldn't I? But craft isn't supposed to be sensible!

The rest of my trip has thus far consisted of crossing many things off my to-do-list (currently several years long) and enjoying the very welcome luxuries of: Georgette Heyer, bath-tubs, Haagen-Dazs ice cream and my own, fabulous bed. In various permutations and combinations.