Days of wine and roses

‘The price of a pint is going up again,’ one old codger would announce. ‘So long as it doesn’t get scarce,’ would be the inevitable reply, shot back in a manner suggesting that he was the first one to think up such a witty response. It seemed that people could live with a culture of scarcity so long as it did not involve essentials like alcohol. In recent weeks I find myself cutting out unnecessary trips by car and making the most of each journey. The old culture of scarcity has kicked in again in a conscious way. The motivation for this has been the rising price of a tank-full of petrol for my modest Volkswagen Golf. I’m thrifty by nature and as country people say, I “didn’t lick the pot for that”.

A generation has grown up in a culture of abundance and people are wondering how they might cope if the economic rug is pulled out from under our feet. There is a set of survival skills that have not necessarily been passed on because of the relative plenty of recent decades. There has been an absence of struggle to fulfil the basic aims of life and there is a subsequent lack of satisfaction and of ability to cope in difficult circumstances. One employer told me recently that he cannot find tradesmen who are problem-solvers. Difficulties are passed over to the next person or on to the next level of management rather than tackled and sorted out. This inability or unwillingness to solve problems in the work-place is replicated in the family life of those reared in the culture of abundance, he said. That is why, he reckoned, we have a high suicide rate, especially among young males and an increased rate of relationship and family breakdown. Those who struggle together develop bonds that are not as easily broken.

There is a set of skills and habits that has not been passed on to those reared on abundance. They have also been spared much of the humiliation that sometimes came with the saving and recycling ways of other times. There are very few children or young adults now who have worn hand-me-downs. The days of ‘first up – best dressed’ have long passed. I remember once wearing pre-worn trousers that had been patched at the knee. By the time the hand-down trousers reached me, the patch was somewhere between my knee and my ankle. I needed to eat ‘another bag of flour’ as people used to say, before I stretched enough to ‘let the trousers down’ and bring the patch back to its original position on the knee. The irony of pre-stressed jeans and torn designer trousers on sale in contemporary high-street shops at premium prices does not escape me.

Some of my own frugality was learned from a pair of unmarried aunts whom we often visited or stayed with. They had been ‘in service’ all of their lives and their housekeeping skills were as formidable as the parish priests that they ended up working for. Their meagre ‘carbon footprints’ were more than offset by their recycling skills and ‘green’ credentials. They were eco-warriors before their time. Both were naturally thin and tall and their spare-ness spilled over into diet and food-preparation. They would live ‘on the clippings of tin’ and they could make a filling meal out of meagre food resources. One of them used to knit woolly jumpers for her nephews and when we had ground holes in the elbows, unravelled the cuffs and used the back of the sleeves as handkerchiefs for runny noses, these pullovers would be taken back for washing and unwinding. The woollen thread would then be re-used for making multi-patterned rugs for the floor.

My father had inherited the thrift-gene as well. In our youth he used to make clothes for us on an old Singer sewing machine. Another of our aunts was resident in Donegal at the time and she used to wear heavy tweed coats. She was a cigarette smoker, rarely taking the ‘Gallagher’s untipped’ from her mouth while she worked. This gave her shock of white hair a yellow fringe and the falling ash from her cigarette used to occasionally burn holes in the lapels of her coat. My father would take the spoiled coat, cut out a new pattern and make a smaller school-going coat from it for us. He also cut our hair with hand-held clippers. This was something of an ordeal as no matter how well the clippers were oiled, they nipped the hair on the neck and pulled lumps out when they got clogged. Still, it saved going to the barber shop where more than the clippers were ‘well oiled’. I used this cost-cutting measure later in boarding school when, as students, we trimmed our own hair with razor-blades held firmly behind combs with our thumbs. This was immediately after asking our parents for extra pocket-money for haircuts.

Grandmother, on the other side of the family, was famously thrifty. Her bed-sheets were made from flour-bags and the bed-cover was patch-work quilt. Heavy coats were used as extra bed-covering on winter nights. Every scrap of fabric was used up and made to look beautiful in the process. At night she sewed lace-work to earn extra cash. Even her recreation was productive. Like my paternal aunts, she had no problems with obesity though she was familiar with concepts like ‘hot-dogs’ from her time in America during the ‘roaring twenties’. There was little problem with refuse. Anything edible was re-cycled using inventive ways of presenting old food in new guises. What became inedible for the family was passed on as food for the animals or fowl outside. ‘Wilful waste makes woeful want’ was the ‘mission statement’ in her kitchen.

How horrified they all would be to see people paying a small fortune for plastic bottles full of water or to hear that the price of a tank-full of petrol now costs the price of a small farm. The people of the developing world are similarly scandalised by our decadent lifestyles and aside from any economic shocks that we might be in for, there is the awesome possibility that they will rise up some day and judge us for our greed and for the extraordinary ‘wastefulness’ of our society, as the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, described it recently.