Don't bury your bras

Textiles have become the fastest-growing waste product in the UK. About 74 per cent of the two million tonnes of clothes we buy each year end up in landfills, rotting slowly (or not at all) in a mass of polyester, viscose and acrylic blends. Where is Steptoe when you need him?



Another charity bag flopped through our letterbox this week. Unless they are collecting stuff to sell in their charity shops, it's best regarded merely as a way of clearing out clutter if you can't be bothered to go down to Oxfam with your old duds. Or preferably as a binliner. If you read the small print you may spot that the collector for the Lithuanian breast screening project with its pink ribbon isn't a charity at all, although their website seeks to reassure people "that their clothing donations will only be used to fund worthwhile, bona fide charities" - in Lithuania. Even if this week's bag is supporting a pukka UK registered charity, you may find that they get very little out of it.

This one, for example, is in aid of Childline, an organisation that has helped thousands of children with no-one else to turn to. The bag gives details of the charity, with their helpline prominently displayed and the charity registration numbers as required, and the details of the company which actually operates the collection on their behalf. Childline will get £50 per tonne. A tonne is an awful lot of "clean, good quality clothing... and bric a brac". Cambridge Oxfam might well charge £10-£15 for a dress, more for a designer label. See also the Salvation Army value guide. Unsorted mixed used clothing is being sought by a merchant in Bedfordshire this week at 50p/kilo (ie, £500 per tonne). And old bras can fetch up to £2,500 a tonne.*

As far as I know, Childline doesn't operate any charity shops, so this kerbside collection partnership with a commercial organisation is a low-admin method of raising funds that wouldn't otherwise come their way. But you'd be making better use of your resources to give the clothes direct to a charity shop and make a donation to Childline. You can afford to be generous. 50p would be twice what your 5kg bag of castoffs would earn in this particular charity bag scheme with its promised rate of £50 per tonne.

Charitybags campaigns for greater transparency in the field. Their website is a trove of information.

We estimate that around £20 million income is lost by genuine charities each year because of misleading, bogus and poor-value "charitable" house-to-house collections of clothing etc in the UK. Many of these collections are illegal.

You need a local authority licence to collect door to door for charity, even just clothes and bric a brac. Some charities (eg Age Concern, Oxfam, Red Cross, RNLI etc.) have a national exemption, but they are supposed to inform the local authority when they are collecting in their area. Some may have a local exemption granted by the police. If you want to hold a jumble sale for your scout troop and collect door to door for it, this is the route you'd take.

Of course, jumble sales and charity shops fulfil a social need for the purchaser as well as providing income for the charity in question. And a low-guilt solution to the overloaded wardrobe.

But where there's muck there's brass. Second hand clothes from Britain end up on markets in Lithuania and Belarus, and much further afield. According to UN Chronicle,

An estimated 40 to 75 per cent of used clothing donated to charitable organizations end up not in the hands of the needy in the West but in busy markets across the developing regions, such as in sub-Saharan Africa.

It's not the end purchasers I have a problem with (and they are probably being ripped off) but the dodgy operators.

At least with Steptoe, you knew who was going to benefit.

Whatever you do, don't let it go to landfill. (A very old paper, but the principles still apply.)

*On African markets. Apparently Africa lacks an inexpensive, good-quality bra manufacturing industry. (Check the link - it's a fascinating insight into what happens to old clothes.)

Baffleboard

A present from my sister, acquired in Bordeaux market. This is her photograph. She understands me very well.

Made in China of course. Just look at the size of that car! (Click image to enlarge.) I imagine the manufacturer had overstocks as he had so few orders from the catalogue. Alas, no instructions were included, but I'm just being greedy.

Chapeau

Was in Ribérac, down a back street. The shop was shut, with its grille down - you can see it in the photograph, along with the reflection of the wall opposite. The model is in a dream within a dream: she's not real; she's in a shop; the shop is closed. She is beyond reach, and from another time.

National treasure

In the National Museum in Cardiff there's a gallery round the foyer, given over to Welsh crafts: glass and pottery, silverware and so on. Some of it's fine, but it doesn't interest me much, or at any rate, not as much as it should. Perhaps it's because I'm not feeling 100%. Slipware, oh please; it's nice and homely, but the decoration, the use to which it's put, hardly merits place in a museum. Most of the stuff would be better off in someone's house, being used. What is there about it to be stared at, wondered at? The skill in making? Yes, but it seems skill without purpose: the purpose is curtailed, we are looking only at a small part of the thing's reality. Our imagination must supply context and use, imagine an owner, or at least the hands of the user: this is what it's like to hold, this is how easily it pours, feel its heft, the sound it makes as you place it on the kitchen table. How the light strikes it among the apples and red peppers. The morning sunlight slanting in through the half door, the light reflected off the river, wobbling and shifting.

Somehow it's much easier with something from the past. Contemporary craft is so self-conscious.

And there is a cabinet of de Waals. (That doesn't merit an apostrophe as it's a standard museum cabinet.) Instantly recognisable: two of his tall swaying cylinders placed, I'd have thought, slightly too far apart, and some shallow nested dishes, wide, with straight sides, very thick. Some are nested with their sides touching, some randomly, but they look untidy and haphazard rather than studiedly random. They look as if they have been put in the case by someone other than the artist, someone who's just collected some examples of his work. I can't explain it. If I knew that de Waal had installed it, I'd pay the arrangement a different quality of attention. Instead, they seem to be tired, denatured, uncontextualised. They're pieces in a museum making as much sense as something dug out of a garden when we don't know where the garden is or what the thing is for. The presence of the pots is only part of their meaning. And how naked they are. We can see them, see into them - all except the tall ones, which have their unknowable interiors. Perhaps under the dishes there are marks or colours we will never see. I'd like to think so. And there are no titles - simply 'Edmund de Waal' and some dates, I forget now. I should have made a note. De Waal's captions, titles, are part of how we read his work. So again, I'm wondering if this is after all an installation, if he's deconstructed the museum exhibit to leave the thing stripped down like this, bare, devoid of meaning and context (the title is literally 'con-text'), the unknowable just creeping in when you think you've drained it of meaning. But I doubt it. It's too obvious: it looks as though the museum staff have been able to do that anyway, all by themselves.

Chopsticks

For my recent birthday, my sister bought me chopsticks. They are probably illegal. They are certainly very beautiful: ivory, long, elegant, with silver tips and banding, and a silver linking chain. The on dit is that in more interesting times, hosts gave their guests silver chopsticks to demonstrate there were no poisons in the food. Or at any rate, no poisons that would turn the silver black.

There are Chinese hallmarks I can't read. I'd guess the chopsticks were made some time in the last 150 years, but can't be more precise. A hunch would place it about 1910. I'd love to know.

We went to the local Chinese restaurant tonight. Even on a Thursday, Mike's is full. The food's not bad - when Ziang Zemin visited England a few years back, he landed at Stansted and (allegedly) had a takeaway brought to him and his entire entourage from Mike's.

The staff are attentive and friendly. They recognise regular customers, which of course flatters us. Mike, a long time from Hong Kong, suave, diamond stud in his ear, moves among us as easily as a pike through reeds. Tonight, there are maybe 50 covers, of all ages, all white, all casually dressed; they have local accents and don't look rich or posh or intellectual. And all are using chopsticks. We've been coming to this restaurant since it opened. Before Mike bought it about 10 years ago, it was much more pretentious than it is now. And how times have changed. 20 years ago, 10 even, and at least half the clientele insisted on western cutlery. Tonight, the under-10s and the grannies are all using chopsticks expertly, unselfconsciously. This is a minor cause for celebration.

I was tempted to take the fancy chopsticks along to ask Mike to decipher the hallmarks, but glad I hadn't - he was too busy and the lighting was anyway too poor. Mike and his staff are the only people I know who can read Chinese (whatever Chinese language this is) so they're the only ones who can tell me it reads: 'Golden Carp Restaurant: Thieves Will Die a Lingering Death'. When we bought an umbrella stand from him a while back, he started to translate for us the poem embossed on it, which seemed to be exhortatory of courage and altruism - then stopped, saying it was all too difficult: each word in the poem had so much cultural baggage that an English word couldn't represent it, there was a whole history there. How he'd learned this at school, but couldn't put it into English though it was very beautiful... I wanted to hear more about all this but as usual he's in demand, his cellphone earpiece hanging over the ear that doesn't have a diamond: deft, very busy.

I'm astonished not to find anything on Google Image. Perhaps if I spoke Mandarin... if I were techno-savvy, I'd be able to post a photograph here. As it is, you'll have to imagine them. Remember how ivory is coveted for its gem-like purity of colour and translucence, as well as for ease of working. How silver is malleable, forgiving, and how soft its brightness. And think why anyone would want to chain a pair of chopsticks together. Aren't they interchangeable? Is someone going to steal or lose one and not the other? Can't the staff count?