Don't ask an alternative lifer for recession advice

ANOTHER LIFE :'NOW IS the time to skin the lawn. Stack the tiles of turf under the laurels, where they will rot down nicely for the seed-bed. Meanwhile, there are raised beds to dig and leaves to be gathered for winter compost . . . " That was this column, in October 1981, with advice to the people of Mount Merrion on growing vegetables to meet hard times.

"Are things so bad," this newspaper's leading article had asked, "that we all should, as in wartime, try to keep our own hens, plant our own spuds, dig our own turf? . . . The alternative lifers may counsel that we should . . . make sloe gin and blackberry wine . . . " For sloe gin, as I had to point out, you needed the gin to start with.

Another Life of that time makes wry reading. There were the Vineys, in the early experiments of a "simple" life, while too many people beyond the mountains were having austerity thrust upon them. Thrift, as we came to realise, is something of a luxury: the really poor can't afford it.

But at least we'd both had early training. In our childhoods - Ethna's in rural Cavan, mine in wartime Britain - thrift was the perfectly ordinary grist of domestic life. We had both slept on worn sheets that our mothers remade sides-to-middle. I went to school, somewhat shamefaced, in a shiny silver mackintosh my father had tailored from a piece of barrage balloon.

The great gulf in experience between the affluent, urban young of today and the reality of past recessions comes across now in fragments overheard from radio: "We'll just have to do without so many lattes" - or the presenter of a farming programme on cheaper cuts of meat referring to "our parsimonious grandparents". She meant thrifty but couldn't dredge up the word.

The American Depression of the 1930s breathes from the pages of a little yellow book sent to Ethna by an emigrant grandmother. The Golden Rule Book was published in 1933, when almost 16 million Americans were drawing home relief. It drew on the letters that had flooded into a nationwide "thrift suggestion" contest. One New York businessman reckoned that the average man of his class could save $70 a year by shaving himself instead of paying a barber, and another $12 by shining his own shoes instead of paying a (black) bootblack. What was to happen to barbers and bootblacks, he didn't say.

Along with sensible low-cost menus to ward off malnutrition came many suggestions for supplementing family income. There were practical ideas for canning garden surpluses and offering book-keeping services, but also the young lady artist drawing picture-maps to help the weekend guests of the wealthy find their way to country houses. A business wife cut out bridge luncheons and theatre parties and her husband mowed his own lawn, but, rather more authentically, was learning to mend her son's sneakers with a patch from a tyre-puncture kit.

For the American middle class, thrift in the Depression was using coloured tablecloths to save on laundry bills, but also stuffing a cabbage with minced meat and making it last two days. It was rubbing glycerine into a hot-water bottle to prolong its life, turning the collars of shirts, and framing last year's Christmas cards to make this year's Christmas presents.

Thrift - or the fear of it - begins to loom again and one wonders how well equipped for it are the Celtic tiger orphans. Many are using more thrift than they know, having eagerly mastered DIY skills that for the middle-classes were once too cheaply hired to bother with, and with power tools and freezers to help.

The present crisis should be grist to the proponents of local currencies and skill-bartering schemes to help insulate communities from the spasms of global capitalism.

THE TROUBLE IS, of course, that thrift and self-sufficiency are toxic - to use the new word - to the modern economy, in which consumption is the engine of employment and growth. For a couple of decades, until age and comfort caught up with us, we were very poor citizens indeed, buying few goods and services and paying very little VAT. Our goats, ducks, hens and bees worked away for a pittance and paid no tax. What we sowed and harvested we consumed ourselves, thus denying the nation the multiplier effect of added value and transport.

So alternative lifers are the last people to offer sound advice in a recession. We should have been out there with everybody else, borrowing as a way of life and helping to create the debt that makes the capitalist world go round.

EYE ON NATURE

I was strolling by the River Dargle in Bray while a group of school kids was in the park with their teacher. I heard the teacher say: "Look, children, it's a heron!" One boy shouted to his pals "heroin, heroin!" The teacher said: "No, no, it's a heron," but the boy kept shouting "heroin, heroin!" Maybe we should think of a different name for that bird that was minding his own business, standing quietly on a rock.

Billy Byrne, Bray, Co Wicklow

For several weeks, in the evening time a flock of about 300 pied wagtails have descended on my garden, eating flies in the grass and on my car.

Tony Tobin, Navan, Co Meath

It is an unusually large flock. There must be a plentiful supply of insects.

I have noticed over the past month that almost every horse-chestnut tree across both Ireland and southern England has had its leaves drying up from the edge inwards - not changing colour in the normal way. Is there an epidemic?

David Heap

Britain has had an epidemic of bleeding canker in horse chestnut trees but withering leaves sounds more like an attack of the leaf miner Cameria ohridella.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo; e-mail: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address