Recessionary thrift comes packaged with the gift of time-proof language

EVERYBODY on their way to work in our office last Thursday passed an odd combination of a couch and the broken-up elements of a wooden bed on the footpath, neatly stacked against a fence.

To be picked up by garbage collectors, someone presumed. Since when, someone else asked, does the Corpo pick up couches?

I didn’t get involved in the discussion. I was too busy going back and forth in the rain, nicking the broken bits of wood and stacking them up behind my desk to take home later. They would, I knew, be particularly good for creating a little aerated stack in the wood-burning stove, so that the papier mache briquettes I make out of newspapers would burn better. The only surprise was that I didn’t encounter any competitors. I hadn’t expected to meet anybody eager to remove the couch, but had expected other wood-collectors. There’s a fair few of them around, these impoverished days.

Admittedly, I was a scavenger long before the downturn, unable to pass a skip without climbing in and seeing if it held some abandoned treasure, which it often did back in the boom years when buyers had their new homes gutted without bothering to check if they contained brass door handles or unwormy side tables. In those distant days, eight or nine years ago, I was always bird alone as I clambered around in other people’s skips, usually at dawn or after dusk. (I have some shame. But not a lot.) The only people who would stop were helpful folk who’d slow down, lower their car windows and offer to assist, on the assumption that the skip itself belonged to me.

“Did you throw out something accidentally?” they would enquire. Told that I wasn’t the owner and was just on the hunt for anything useful, they would behave as if I was a bad smell. It’s the same today when they see me picking up fallen branches from trees after a storm. Either they can’t get their head around the heels, business suit and tree branch accessory or else — and this is my working assumption — nobody loves a bag lady.

Me, I love being a bag lady. I wish I could do it full-time and run bag lady courses on the side. What satisfaction can compare with sitting at a blazing fire that’s cost you nothing, under a multi-coloured canopy of damp clothes hanging from your Sheila Maid that are drying up there without adding to your ESB bill? Even the firelighters are recycled freebies; dried orange peels donated by my sister, who eats so many oranges you’d think she spent her days swinging languidly from tree to tree in a rainforest.

The man in my life quite likes the Sheila Maid, a ribbed wooden contraption with a pulley which allows it to be lowered while you load it with freshly washed clothes and then raised again, high overhead when absorbing rising heat. I did notice, in its early days, that he looked happiest when it was hanging with sheets, pillow cases, and tea towels. Something about a serried rank of underwear bothered him. So I took to drying underwear on a string in the bathroom.

One advantage to drying sheets on the Sheila Maid, over and above the way it saves money compared to using the tumble drier, is that I spot holes in them. Someone once said that when you learn to ride a bike, you never lose the skill. Ditto with darning. Many an evening, you will find me, thread box beside me, thimble on finger, darning the bed-sheets. A hybrid between my own parents and Peig, I am, these days. Chirpier than Peig, but, let’s face it, that wouldn’t be hard. Even Richard Boyd Barrett is chirpier than Peig.

The New York Times yesterday mocked Mitt Romney for talking as if he was still in the “well-mannered era of soda fountains”. To avoid swearing, he tells people to “go to H-E-double hockey sticks”. To describe how he feels about his wife, he uses the word “smitten”.

The recession is having the same effect on me. When someone leaves a door open and allows precious heat to escape the house, I find myself on the verge of echoing my father’s question: “Were you born in a barn?” It was like his signature tune, he gave vent to it so often. Long before I had a clue what a barn was, I knew that my father’s tune was shorthand for heat conservation. But then, my grandfather was so obsessed with the same objective that his budgie picked up on the repeated instruction. In among the little bird’s random greetings and endearments would come the sudden order: “Shut the bloody door.”

Recession doesn’t just revive old language. It revives old methods, too. Harbouring a vague memory of parental talk about “haybox cooking”, where a boiling casserole inserted into a thick wooden box lined with hay that would hold and return its heat, I researched and found that arguably the best modern equivalent was an insulated picnic carrier filled with styrofoam bubbles. Get your stew to boiling point first thing in the morning, seal it tightly into the carrier and by nightfall the casserole dish is filled with a ready-to-eat meal with leftovers for freezing, the insulated container having allowed it to continue cooking throughout the day, like a slo-cooker but unplugged.

I convinced myself I was saving a fortune on electricity by this method, until the day the big Le Creuset cookpot slipped out of my hands, exploding on the tiled floor and sending spuds, meat, and onions everywhere. I was picking carrots out of the light fittings for weeks. Who knew that cast iron, hitting a hard surface, shatters as easily as china? Not only did it destroy several days’ meals, but it also made nonsense out of all my totted-up savings. Replacing it will have to wait for a car boot sale like the one where I bought the pressure cooker which now regularly fills the kitchen with the interminable hiss I always associate with my mother’s cooking.

NONE of this makes a blind bit of difference to the direct debits that dog our lives, but it’s at least environment-friendly. Plus, there’s an obscure satisfaction to imagining all the money theoretically being saved, and new possibilities constantly present themselves. The cats, for example, have been downgraded to a cheap foreign cat food that’s probably made from diseased roadkill, but they’re not turning up their whiskers at it. So we’re winning on that front. We’d do even better if we could persuade them to eat the wildlife they bring in, but Cats for Dummies has nothing to offer on this front, and giving out to a cat (as the man in my life does with frequent fluency) doesn’t seem to have much of a payoff.

If any reader has persuaded their cat to eat, rather than showcase, its kill, I’d love to hear how, because if I could nudge my two into ingesting one rat apiece per week instead of envelopes of prepared food, it would allow me to replace the Le Creuset by 2014.