Three things

We need less things, or at least we need to use the things that already exist on this over-cluttered planet.
When nipping into the hyper-market this morning to buy a packet of yogurt culture (yes, intelligent stuff, yogurt) I felt a familiar panic creeping up on me. This one store on the edge of a small town in France, (one of about 36,000 according to Wikipedia) has an aisle just for yogurt about as long as a bus. All those pots - all that plastic . . . and then there's the 'bits and bobs' aisle, even more scary; the stuff you can't even eat - just made for . . . I don't know, looking at, removing dust from - large silver apples, hideous giant retro wall clocks, a thousand 'make-your-life-easier' plastic kitchen gadgets . . .
Any car-boot sale or 'vide-grenier' you might go to will be full of this crap, so why not buy it there for a fraction of the price, or perhaps don't buy it all.
The vast world treadmill we are on, producing all this unnecessary junk must somehow be ceased.
I know nothing of business but it seems to me that if all the people currently forced to make plastic Santas holding signs saying 'this way to the North Pole', Frankfurter slicers, glow in the dark toilet roll, pistol-shaped ketchup dispensers and all the rest of it were to be employed making parts for solar panels, cladding inner-city buildings with mural vegetation or making recycled paper, or . . . a billion other actually-needed things it would be a lot more useful and less soul-destroying. Like I say, I know nothing of business, but I do know about the satisfaction in coming across good quality second hand stuff.
Last week in our local recycling emporium I found this lovely little sofa for twenty euros: tad dusty but really comfortable and plenty of life in it yet.



And today's finds in the junk shop after reeling from the supermarket's football pitch of stuff, two perfect-nick old teapots for a euro each.

Life stages, recycling, and moving on

We've just passed another one (life stage): our son's BAC, French equivalent of A levels in the UK.
He and I just spent a day sorting out his room to prepare for the following stage, and in doing so threw out (recycled!) at least a tree's worth of paper.

                         

                                                  Three years worth of studying, in paper

An odd thing to consign all those words, maps, verbs, sums, crossing out's 'could try harders' and 'very goods' to newspaper or whatever the sludge of paper will become. I can't remember my own similar stage and binning all the A level stuff; maybe I burnt it all in some sort of 'moving on' ritual.

                                         

                                                             three years worth of manuscripts 

I have, however, just thrown out a car-boot's worth of manuscripts from my various books which was slightly more traumatic than Ezra's heap of exercise books - still, I've kept a couple of each, and I have the real books. There has to be a purging point after all . . .

                                      

                                                            two years worth of train tickets

Emptying Ezra's bag was probably the most interesting part of this mass clearing out operation. In the bottom I found a sort of geological layer of train tickets - every journey from about the last two years; to and from Carcassonne. We almost kept them as an art piece but then . . . didn't.
Onward and forward.