Week 12: sharing - is it quids-in for parents?

The overwhelming answer is, yes.

It's estimated that the average parents spend £327 on clothes for their one-year-olds.

Not us: I've scratched my head thinking of new items we've bought for Gwen this year and, apart from tights and socks (or presents from friends and relatives), everything she wears is second-hand. She never looks shabby; at this age, children grow out of clothes so quickly that even third- or fourth-hand clothes can look brand new.

Austin and Gwen wear clothes passed on by their older cousins; NCT friends; D's boss, whose daughter sports some impossibly chic garments; and anonymous benefactors, who put notes on sites like freecycle saying they'll leave a bag of children's clothes on their doorstep for whoever replies first (I've always found these to be in good nick, and there are often some good-quality brands included).

I get a regular shopping fix at NCT nearly new sales, but I reckon that, at those, I've spent no more than £50 on Gwen over the past 12 months. Throw in £30 (probably an overestimate) for her hosiery, and that means we've forked out £80. That's £247 less than the average parent.

Ker-ching.

The people behind sharing website Streetbank (which has just launched a whizzier new version of itself) estimate that, in London, the average Streetbank member has over £7,000 worth of stuff available to them from neighbours within a 1-mile radius of their house. I can well believe this, given the books, ladders, gazebos, furniture, cycle repair, cups of tea (!) and whatnot that people have offered, through Streetbank, to loan or give away in our area.

And that's just the beginning. We also save money by gleaning items off the street, through online forums, the aforementioned freecycle, and networks of friends. Over the last couple of months alone, we've managed to furnish our house with a double bed, a single, and a bookcase/display unit that would all otherwise be clogging up landfill sites. They look as good as new, and, if bought from retailers, would have cost hundreds of pounds.

We're not alone: Jen Gale of My Make Do and Mend Year has kept a running tally of the money she's saved over the year of her experiment in buying nothing for a year. It's worth a look, to see what unnecessary spending can be avoided with a bit of effort. And Frugal Queen has documented her success at paying off a huge mortgage, through dramatically changing her lifestyle.

Of course, we're lucky enough to live in an urban place that - while not being full of wealth - does have enough money around for some people to feel able to give away possessions that have served their purpose. And we have regular access to the internet, which is something often lacked by the people most in need.


But, if you know where to look and have the means to do so, there's plenty of free stuff out there, up for grabs.


This week, I gave away some toddler clothes to my one-year-old nephew. Like all thrift-o-philes, D and I dress our daughter in gear that has been outgrown by her older brother. But a few items are too boyish for even us liberal-minded parents to stick little Gwen in. A top sporting a scooter with a registration plate reading 'BOY1', for instance. So, these items are winging their way to Gwen's cousin.


Now, back to scouring the streets for more goodies.....

Week 7: the sunny day

Is it easier to share when the sun is shining?

For week 7 of Our Time of Gifts, I decided to chase up Wilhelmina, the Australian actress whose radiant demeanor brightened our rainy Spring day when she came via Streetbank to help weed our garden. I'd finally got round to finishing the job she'd started, and had uprooted a huge poppy plant, along with several aquilegia. It seemed a shame to consign them to the compost, so, on a baking hot morning, I dropped them round to Wilhelmina's house.

A gift that was easy to give, with a sunny smile offered in return.

Since starting Our Time of Gifts, I've been looking into the collaborative consumption movement. It's based around the notion of a sharing economy, where gifts, favours and goods are exchanged. Sometimes this is done for cash (like ride sharing, where people offer space in their vehicles through organisations like BlaBla Car); at  other times, something similar is offered in return (like a house-swap, where people go to stay in one city while giving their own home up as a 'free' holiday rental). And then there's the good, old-fashioned method of just passing something on for nothing. Through freecycle, for instance.

The 'sharing economy' movement seems to have taken its firmest foothold in relatively affluent countries; places where there is a lot of sun, like Australia and New Zealand, or the Western coast of America. All the people that I've met from these areas shared similar characteristics: an easy smile; a relaxed, optimistic demeanour; and - at least on the surface - an open interest in others. Even complete strangers.

Us Brits, on the other hand, are notorious for our "icy exterior", remarked upon by Shareable blogger Chelsea Rustrum when she visited London for the recent LeWeb conference on sharing.

We are a dour, sarcastic nation who complain when it's cold, then moan when the sun shines too brightly. Our cultural heritage foregrounds the kitchen-sink drama; our cinematic exports include the gritty, conflict-riven films of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, and orphaned, misfit wizard Harry Potter, whose teachers and classmates have a habit of dying around him.

We are gloomy.

The free and easy road trip, with its hitchiking and sofa-surfing, has never featured greatly as a rite of passage in this country. It's just too damned damp and drizzly here. In sunnier climes, where the sharing economy is being touted as the next big thing, setting off with a small backback to roam wherever the road might take you, has long been the norm for young adults.

Does this make a difference to these people's ability to trust in the generosity of strangers; to throw themselves into the hands of fate, and offer unconditional help to others?

Or is the UK's manner of sharing just different to that of Wilhelmina and her kind?

Week 6: the Street

This week, I gave stuff away through a recycling method I've come to love since moving to London 13 years ago. Some might call it flytipping, but I prefer the phrase 'sending it to the street'.

Sending it to the street involves leaving unwanted items on a garden wall - with a note, if you want to make it really obvious that people aren't thieving when they take the goods. Even better, you could leave your stuff on the pavement itself, although this is likely to annoy neighbours and passers-by (especially if it's a large item, like the children's slide we once gave away in this fashion).

Having said that, we've never had to wait for longer than a few hours before the stuff has been taken. Even - and please don't try this at home, as you probably will be arrested for flytipping - when the item in question was a used mattress. We vowed to just leave it outside our house till nightfall, so that it didn't make the place look messy. But within a few hours, a passer-by had claimed it for their own.

We've done well out of the street. On our road, there are several families with children just a little older than ours. We often come across toys that are in very good condition, which have simply been outgrown. And the other day we picked up a manual lawnmower and a natty watering can. We've even furnished our front room with a (new-ish) sofa our neighbours didn't want to lug to their new pad in the country.

The general assumption that anything left outside is up for grabs, can be misused. My cousin's broom, for instance, was taken when she went inside for a ten-minute tea break. The brush was inside the garden wall, so this was a pretty clear-cut case of stealing, but the people involved would probably have claimed they thought it had been sent to the street. And, when my partner D accidentally left our own pushchair on the roadside in a sleep-deprived moment, we knew there was barely any point in returning to see whether someone had delivered it to to the nearest house for safekeeping. No, it was gone, to the first passer-by that understood the law of these parts: send something to the street, and within a short while it will be on its way to a new home.

Ironically, the street law was broken this week, when I tried to give away some mint for Our Time of Gifts. The plant (part of the abundant colony in our garden) was so withered and shrivelled within an hour or two, that nobody deemed it worthy of picking up. So instead, I sent something to the street via a different method: a charity bag.

This form of giving is easy (at least, it is where we live). Once a week (on average), a bag is delivered through your door, from one of a variety of different charities. If you have any unwanted items on the list, you just pop them in, leave them at the roadside on the day indicated, and they magically disappear. It's like taking clothes to a charity shop, without having to go much further than your front garden.

There have been reports of phoney collectors roaming the streets in vans, collecting the bags of used clothes, shoes and (sometimes, depending on the charity) bric-a-brac that are destined towards recycling centres. To be honest, if you were the sort to choose a life of crime, I'm sure there must be more profitable scams than driving round in a white van, looking for bags of old shoes. But, like the police suggested, I dutifully checked out the charity whose name was printed on the flimsy plastic: Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, a bono fide charity whose cause I agreed with.

This time, the street accepted my gift, graciously and swiftly. Natural order had been restored. People in our local streets could now rest easy on their passed-down mattresses, and second-hand sofas.



Update: today (5 Aug), the street regurgitated a gift for us. This shoe rack - perfect for storage in our shed - was dumped just outside our house. Sweet.