Never Cut String

-


Gillian Tett in this weekend's FT writes of her Great Aunt's fastidious habits in recycling as a matter of course, rather than ideology - an attitude ingrained in her generation's collective psyche through the privations of two World Wars and the Great Depression. I was talking to friends the other day of my memory of one of my maternal grandmother's regularly-used aphorisms: "Never cut string!"

She used to keep a special, cylindrical tin on a shelf at the cellar-head, which had a hinged lid with a tiny aperture at its centre, finished with a minute, hollow spigot, and through which the loose end of the recycled skein of string held inside the tin would emerge. My Nan would religiously unpick all the knots from the string holding any parcel together to reclaim the fullest possible length of cord, which would then be knotted neatly to the end of the skein in the tin and its end pushed through the spigot for re-use as necessary. I'm pretty sure the tin was a piece of my Grandad's handiwork: again some recycled object saved for future re-use.

It seems only logical to someone of my generation, well within living memory of the parsimony of necessity that my Grandmother's generation employed, that an awful lot of our environmental problems could be alleviated to some extent by such a careful re-use of resources - the general thrust of Tett's piece being that this attitude tends to come around every couple of generations either out of simple expediency or an emergent frustration with whatever wasteful status quo obtains.

I, like my Dad and his forebears have an inherent reluctance to throw away stuff that can be mended and made useful again. His old Myford lathe is the latest in a long line of restorations: just because it's nearly ninety years old doesn't mean it should be scrapped for something newer: far from it, that piece of kit will continue, with TLC, to give good service for another ninety years, and probably an awful lot longer than that - such a contrast to the computers, phones and TV's we routinely take to the tip every couple of years.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Sister Ray

-
Image
Ray Keats - aka Ann Key - local artist & family friend, died this morning. She'd been ill for some years, but never let it get in the way of her work or of tending to the massive network of friends, colleagues and fans she had accumulated over the decades. Her house on the High Street of Rachub, just below where we live - a former cockle factory(!) - bought many years ago when she and her late husband Ronald moved here from Manchester to set up home in Yr Achub, is currently still home to her paintings and drawings, and the front window displays her work, including the last drawing she made in hospital, just days before she died. Her good friend Colin has been a diamond in her latter years, looking out for her and just being there when she needed him. She will be much missed by this tiny community of ageing bohemians up here in the hills, but suffice it to say, George, her cat, will be well looked after now she's gone.
Read more