MAKING GOOD AGAIN
THE FRENCH GET INTO RECYCLING
From October, the French government will start subsidising clothing and shoe repairs. You will be able to claim €6 ($7) for having new soles and heels, and €25 ($28) for relining a coat or taking in a pair of trousers. The government will invest €154 million to the fund over the next five years.
All this dovetails with the increasing popularity of such TV shows as Antiques Roadshow and those YouTube films of scavengers hunting down treasures in remote barns and people in workshops returning them to usefulness. Scott Fitzgerald had a point when he described us as “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Those of us who can’t hit a nail in three tries or use Superglue without sticking our fingers together can only watch in awe as rust is eradicated and ancient innards made to move again.
The Australia in which I grew up was a culture that recycled. Younger kids wore hand-me-downs: clothes formerly those of an elder sidling, resized in varying degrees of expertise. J.G. Ballard, who brought up three children after his wife died, said that the secret of keeping up with two fast-growing daughters was a staple gun and a jar of fabric glue. As for shoes, naturally you had them re-soled and heeled, not to mention adding small crescents of metal to heels and toes to reduce wear even more. The click click of those on pavement as girls played hopscotch is one of those evocatively Proustian sounds,
How far back to you want to go? Medieval scribes wrote on vellum – hairless animal skin, too precious to be used only once. Old texts were scraped off, sometimes leaving the faint outline of what had been there before. Such documents were known as palimpsests and the knife used to scrape the skin a lunarium – words not seen much today outside Trivial Pursuit, and seldom even then.
But thinking of writing makes one wonder: this plan is all very well for tailors and cobblers, but what about the arts? Are writers and musicians any less deserving? What about some help for those novels that publishers have rejected, or that never got past a first draft? Will the government sort out the last act of that unfinished play, or even just find a rhyme for “Nietzsche” for our limerick about self-determination? (Well, if you think that’s hard, try “Kierkegaard”.) They should take a cue from Joe Dante’s witty film Gremlins II, where the sleazy TV programmed offers Casablanca – “in color, and with a happier ending!” Hamlet and Ophelia happily married? Macbeth and Macduff sharing a round of golf? It looks like the French have done it again.
“You’re going to have…..a baby?”
There's a snob element to re-soled shoes that doesn't apply to used clothing. An old suitcase, briefcase, wallet or saddle have class, as do well-kept hand-made shoes, but a suite with a shiny seat impresses nobody. Something to do with the animal nature of leather? (I like Woody Allen's joke. "This wallet belonged to my grandfather. On his deathbed... he sold it to me."
I do remember those steel tips on the heels and toes of shoes -not mine though. My parents were not from families wealthy enough to do that. However, there was a shoe iron in the garage for resoling shoes. I cannot remember it being used so may have been my grandparents who passed it down. My Grandmother made my mother's clothes and my mother made mine:). My "Aussie aunt" worked for a top salon in Collins Street, Melbourne as a beader so may have had access to fabric. Many memories rising after reading this post.