23 May - charity shops

In all the years of shopping in charity shops I’ve never seen any of my old clothes used for a display. Oh... that would be because I never take a bin liner to any shop. I keep everything for as long as possible and then maybe do a car boot sale with a friend. There’s a name for people like me and it’s not hoarder because that does not give the extent of the actual ‘sickness’. For a start the stuff then has to go far far away (well I don’t live near any of the sites of large car boots), then half of it or more comes back with me and lies in purgatory on the shelves on the landing or in my most recent acquisition, the lock up. Fancy paying a monthly fee to store old stuff, clearly a huge waste of money.
I learnt this at home. We don’t have charity shops there but we have the church and they collect, usually for African missions and I always wondered what use they would have in Africa for our winter clothes and old ski boots and stuff. I know it can get pretty cold at night but you can’t ski. In recent years I’ve imagined our discarded stuff in Serbia, where it wouldn’t look so out of place in both sizes and styles. Of course I know it mostly gets pulped or the recipients would be pretty smart, we were/are an affluent town, good quality fabrics are valued. And do recipients get fussy? Do they ever say ‘Oh no, Oxfam, please no more charidee clothes from Germany, only from France and Italy thanks’.

But it’s because my mother kept everything that I could find 3 to 4 yeas later a handbag that I simply hated when it was given as a present. Now I use it all the time. I’ve also found an emerald green satin 80’s top I gave my sister for a possible NYE outfit about 15 years ago. It came from a charity shop in the first instance. Last year I took it back to London and it was a hit with jeans and other 80’s accessories like er. white ankle boots. No, seriously, I didn’t buy those, not second time around. There’s a limit to being a disco mummy. I mean I am not a mummy but disco is a word I recognise. In fact in its full title of discotheque!

As the house gets bigger and we daughters are not there anymore with our stuff, the more my mother wants to clear out wardrobe and trunks and suitcases. Why I ask? There’s lots of space now. But I know why. Somewhere she has her/our favourite baby clothes. She gives me some for my goddaughters having lost hope to see them on a grandchild. They wouldn’t be appreciated anyway, these exquisitely hand-stitched, kind of starched baby copies of grown up dresses she wore. Must have taken hours to craft them. I loved being dressed like her, the concept of mini-me was alive and well then. You can see us in the photos. I wonder if I tried to pose as her too, but that would have been impossible, though a 3 year old surely can subconsciously mimic. In my mind’s eye my mother was more grown up, but in those photos she’s 25 when I am 3, just a kid playing at families, lonely at home waiting for husband to come back after regular 14 hours days.

Just remembered that in a box somewhere there is a letter I’d written when I was 30 addressed ‘to my daughter to be’ and for her to read when said daughter would be 13 and in it she would have read that mother was not the ‘You’re not going out like that young lady’ dragon that she seemed, but a person very much like herself, only in a different style of skirt, top and accessories, or one would hope so, but maybe it was going to be exactly the same style? Check latest copy of Elle etc, full of hippy chic peasant clothes, all tiered long skirts and generally stuff that looks out of place in cities. Anyway, all irrelevant as no such daughter exists.