The Recycle of Life

Did you know that this week is Recycle Week (excuse me - #RecycleWeek)? Neither did I until I saw a tweet from Norfolk County Council exhorting us to bring our huddled mattresses, sofas, rusty bikes, bottles, old boots and so on to our local Recycling Centre.

I view our local Recycling Centre as a kind of Temple. Yea! I bring Libations, Sacrifices and Offerings in the form of my unwanted worldly goods and leave spiritually cleansed and uplifted.

At the risk of sounding as smug as environmental campaigners tend to do nowadays, we at the Maison des Giraffes have cloven to the ReUse/ReCycle ethic for many years. We grow some of our own veg, have chickens, and put our food waste in the compost heap, the wormery, or indeed feed to the hens. Much of our furniture comes from charity shops, eBay, Gumtree or my shed, in which I repurpose old bits of furniture into creations that Mrs Gee charitably calls 'rustic'.

Should we be tempted to acquire Storage Solutions to store our Stuff, I recite the Zen koan - Have Less Stuff.

We can has solar panels.

Although we have yet to grow our birkenstocks or knit our own muesli (our car runs on diesel and I still fly to places, though these days I try to bring my own wings), we like to think we are Doing Our Bit.

Now that the Offspring have left home (for all that they keep coming back), Mrs Gee and I find ourselves in a state of Zugunruhe which takes the form of redecorating and decluttering on a near-industrial scale as we attempt to lead a simpler life.

We find much satisfaction in our Zen Recycling, so much so that we take delight in the smaller things of life. I have a suspicion that this matures with age. Some years ago, when Offspring#2 was small, she asked me what we were going to do one given Sunday. My eyes lit up.

'I'll tell you what we are going to do,' I said. 'First, we are going to the Recycling Centre. But wait - it gets better! - after that, we are going to the allotment!'

'That doesn't sound very exciting', she replied.

'At my age', I said', that's all the excitement I can stand'.