Contents

Thanks to Andrew, whose prescient idea this book originally was, and who once tried, thriftily but unsuccessfully, to get my children to play with peg dolls (‘See they wee pegs? That’s all youse need tae play fer ooers. Hey! Come back! Och, youse are spoilt wee bastards, just like yer maw’). Huge special thanks to lovely Sophia for feeding and clothing said children while I typed, and for providing them with better play materials. Giant thanks also to Laura Wheatley for being an ace researcher; to the unbeatable combo of Georgia Garrett and Juliet Annan for everything; and to Jenny Lord for her help, insight and dazzling efficiency. And thank you to Sarah Fraser for this beautiful design, and to Debbie Powell for her wonderful illustrations.

Introduction

To say I’ve never found the idea of ‘cutting back’ particularly appealing would be something of an understatement. I am naturally extravagant; I am also naturally spectacularly crap with money, regardless of how much or how little of it I earn. It’s an unhappy combination that has, for two decades, resulted in complete dependency on my overdraft facility and on assorted loans, and in long periods of a panic-denial-panic cycle. Let’s just say I’ve come across my fair share of bailiffs over the years (one year they appeared on 23 December, which was nice. I was out shopping). When it comes to money, I am Fiddling While Rome Burns made flesh. Or rather, I was.

In 2007, before I decided that I really needed to get a grip once and for all, I was served with bankruptcy papers – not for the first time, but for the most inescapable, disastrous one. I had two books in the Top Ten bestseller charts at the time. It’s not that I can’t earn money, or that I don’t earn enough of it. It’s a complete inability to manage money, full stop – and, to be frank, an inborn lack of interest in doing so: money, schmoney; sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t – whatever (it’s perhaps no coincidence that my father died a double bankrupt and that my mother’s attitude to money is, shall we say, quite breezy). This romantic and deluded view works fine(ish) if there’s just one of you, but it has rather limited appeal if you have a family – children to clothe, food to put on the table, bills to pay because if you don’t the baby gets hypothermia, that kind of thing.

I’ll get back to all of this in the relevant chapter, but I think, embarrassingly enough, that, genetics aside, my calamitous approach to finances stems from some bizarre notion that I was too ‘creative’, too ‘carefree’ (ha!) to concern myself with the rather naffly bourgeois issue of money management. Just as I used to see being fat as being indicative of having a wonderful appetite for life (as well as buns), I think I subconsciously saw my financial idiocy as a sign of a rather charmingly bohemian easy-come-easy-go approach to life in general. I know: it’s pathetic. Also, I am forty-two years old. I’ve got over lying in the bath pretending to be Ophelia, but, clearly, not over thinking money is, like, really, really square.

I share all of this rather intimate information to pre-empt the obvious accusation about my writing this book: i.e. that it’s all very well for a well-paid, relatively successful middle-class person who lives in a lovely house in a lovely corner of London to write about thrift – pull the other one, Marie Antoinette, it’s got a Sèvres cowbell on. But actually, my investigations into – and eventual embracing of – thrift have their roots in necessity. It dawned on me that nothing was going to improve unless I made fundamental changes to my spending habits. You may not have been served with sinister legal papers or become blasé about bailiffs, but it’s a rare bird these days that doesn’t feel a little belt-tightening might be in order, what with recession, mortgage rates, the credit crunch, the rise in the cost of living, and the disconcerting feeling that your profession and income ought to result in a rather more comfortable, less stressful lifestyle than your current one.

Walking-money-disaster aside, my new-found love of thrift also has its roots in a strange and unfamiliar feeling that has been creeping up on me incrementally over the past few years. I am a child of the 1980s: I believe in consumption, conspicuous or furtive. I love shopping so much that I wrote a whole book about it.^∗ I have no guilt about the number of handbags I own. Many of my generation despised ‘hippies’, and by extension despised ‘hippieish’ habits such as recycling, or reusing wrapping paper, or buggering about making compost, or wearing second-hand clothes, or knitting your own socks – hey, why not macramé your armpit hair while you’re at it, loser? We were (much too) proud of our cash and of the things it could buy, even if, in retrospect, our attitude smacked rather embarrassingly of defensiveness and disengagement: well, I earn more than you, so that must make me better than you, right? (Wrong, wrong, wrong, and incredibly twattish to boot, though much of my generation couldn’t see it at the time.)

But anyway, hippie-contempt aside, as the years passed even I succumbed to imperceptible greening – my older children, by the way, were miles ahead of me on this one, and my four-year-old sips her carton of juice and then sticks it in the recycling bag without being asked. I started finding myself peculiarly irritated at the amount of plastic used in supermarket packaging. You know the kind of thing: you want apples, but the apples come in their own pre-moulded plastic tray, with a layer of pre-moulded plastic foam to protect them from ‘bruising’, as though the journey home involved riding bareback through the Kalahari. Then I got a bit of a bee in my bonnet about plastic bags, because I kept seeing them depressingly out of context: on beaches, in trees, in the sky, on water. And because I read all the papers every day for my job, then I thought that it was really pretty shameful and just plain ugly to be shoving said papers, several trees’ worth, into a bin liner every week.

I started noticing that we chucked a lot of food away as well, and I didn’t like it. I knew the starving children of the world wouldn’t starve any less because I was binning sprouty potatoes or stale bread, but the binning didn’t make me feel good. With no famine on the horizon and shops within walking distance, why was I buying too much food week after week? And so on. Little by little, I became greener. We’re talking eau de Nil, or chartreuse on a good day, rather than darkest forest green, but there was a perceptible shift in my attitudes to things I’d taken for granted for years. I began to mind about waste. The question of waste didn’t keep me up at night, but it lodged itself in my consciousness and made itself at home. Today, I can’t imagine not recycling – it’s just what you do; and I can’t imagine merrily chucking away perfectly good food either. Or being mean about hippies. And it’s interesting to note that they have turned from being easy-to-ridicule figures of hilarity – grubby-looking, with Peruvian knitwear – to rather admirable conscience-prickers and, well, pioneers.

At the same time as all of this, I began to find my own conspicuous consumption slightly nauseating. Not all the time, obviously: I understand, and dearly love, the thrilling kick of pure pleasure that comes from buying a lovely dress, or indeed a lovely holiday, and I’m not into self-flagellation (or into wearing hideous clothes, no matter how worthy). But there was, it slowly dawned on me, something really rather gross about wanting something and buying it, just like that – thank you, Amex, and sod the consequences. I’m not talking about buying hairgrips or Tampax, but rather about spending two or three figures on something that I didn’t remotely need, on the basis that it made me happy and therefore why not?

Now, I know I am EXTREMELY FORTUNATE to be able to have done this at all, and I know most people don’t just wander into Selfridges and think, hmm, what to spend my hard-earned cash on today? And I know I sound spoilt, but I’m trying to be honest. Besides, the Selfridges scenario plays itself out nationally every Saturday afternoon and during many a weekday lunch hour. The amounts of money may be smaller, the destination may be the local high street, but the instinct is the same. It says, ‘Let’s go shopping’: i.e. ‘Let’s buy random stuff we don’t actually need.’ Five years ago, buying stuff I didn’t need was my idea of bliss. I liked the process and I liked being the kind of person who is able to buy themselves (and their friends and family) presents. I still like presents, but these days my treat of choice comes from a yarn shop in north London, not from the Chloé concession in Selfridges, and if I want to give someone I really care about a present, I may actually – gasp! – make them something. And here’s the clincher: I would consider the something as chic and stylish as anything a department store could have produced. Chicer, sometimes.

That’s another thing that has changed with the passing of time. If someone adult had given you a home-made gift a few years ago, you’d have thought, aah, bless, and shoved it in a drawer. If someone gave you one this afternoon, you’d be delighted. One of my favourite recent birthday presents was a beautifully knitted lurex scarf. Not only had the friend who made it gone to the trouble of sitting there knitting for me, but she’d had some little Cash’s name tapes made that said ‘Made for you with love by Alison’ in red curly writing. The woman’s a lawyer; she doesn’t have much spare time. Her partner appeared at my house with a cake he’d baked and lugged across half of London. They could have gone anywhere and spent any amount on my present, but it wouldn’t have made me feel a fraction as delighted.

So: feeling poorer, feeling greener, minding more, realizing that you don’t have to be a professional to be able to make things with your hands and that making things with your hands is unexpectedly and wonderfully rewarding. There’s another component to the thrift U-turn and it is to do with snobbery of, I fear, a very middle-class kind. (Actually I don’t fear at all – I’m so over having to apologize for being middle class.) It is this: if, as is apparently and slightly mysteriously the case, half the world and his neighbour are holidaying in Barbados and toting huge Marc Jacobs bags around while flicking their expensive caramel highlights, the currency of such goods becomes, to our eyes, devalued – which is just as well, as we can’t afford them any more anyway. Things aren’t as desirable if everyone has them. What’s good for democracy is bad for uniqueness, for feeling that what you have is special and worth cherishing. Democracy also vulgarizes: things become common in both senses. Individualism is the loser.

Call me an atrocious human being, but I don’t want to be like everybody else. I really mind about the things I surround myself with and I want to feel that they are special, significant and meaningful. What I’m describing is, if you will, the difference between dining off bangers and mash on prettily mismatched plates, in an unfitted and individualistic kitchen with a pot of rosemary on the table, and dining off foie gras on Wedgwood in a ‘designer’ apartment which has gold taps in the bathrooms and orchids by each place card. For some of us, everything’s gone a bit gold taps, a bit orchid. What we’d like is some authenticity, some individualism, some soul in our lives. I can’t believe I’m going to use this word (I shall go and macramé my ’pits in a minute), but: some integrity. Less surface, more content. Less doing-it-by-numbers, more originality. Fewer shallows, greater depths.

Enter thrift, or at least a manageable, workaday version of it. The greatest surprise to me while living my new thrifty life is how much fun it is. Well, actually no. The greatest surprise is the amazing amount of money it’s saving me a month: it seems almost incredible. The second greatest surprise is the fun. The third, unexpectedly, is the genuine pleasure I find in making do and mending, in being creative, in thinking about little things properly, in affording small domestic concerns the same attention as I afford Newsnight – in a real and useful way, not in a ‘Let’s Play Ironic Retro Housewife’ way (though when the Doris Day moment strikes, as it occasionally does, I like it very much).

And the fourth surprise, no less important, is the sense, long lost and now regained, that I am doing my bit. I understand that my bit is very small and that, globally, one First World person’s idea of thrift is another Third World person’s idea of unimaginable, obscene luxury. But we all do what we can and it’s got to be better than doing nothing at all. I’ll never be a full-on eco-warrior, or become a fan of those hideous light bulbs we’re all supposed to switch to even though they make everything look disgustingly ugly, and I’ll always choose indulgence over sanctity. Give me a farm, a private income and some staff and I’d be delighted to be greener-than-thou and fully organic (marry me off to Louis XVI while you’re at it, or maybe Sting), but the reality is I’m a single mother of three with serious demands on my time, and if that sometimes means spaghetti hoops on white toast or half an hour’s peace courtesy of PlayStation, or plastic toys rather than artisanal wooden ones, so be it. This is not a guide called How to Be Green, or How to Be Good (and nor is it a guide called How to Be Mean. I despise meanness. If you want to learn to be mean, stop reading and go away – you’re banned). If you want to read about the kind of thrift that involves saving rubber bands, bundling them up and turning them into balls to give your children for Christmas, or if the idea of spending two hours filing in forms to get 50p off something appeals, or if you’re a fan of coupons, this is not the right book for you. It’s not about cheese-paring. It’s about living well, for less.

But if you’re interested in living well and stylishly, in valuing beauty, in saving money in unexpectedly satisfying ways and in feeling like a useful member of the human race at the same time as enhancing your life in dozens of little but significantly pleasing ways, read on. You have nothing to lose but your overdraft – and nothing to gain but a fresh look at the true value of things, yourself included. This is why, even if Euro Millions chose me to be the lone and especial beneficiary of its largesse, I’d still think twice about dumping the lifestyle changes described in these pages. Being thrifty makes you feel good about yourself, and you can’t put a price on that.

Food

This seems the obvious place to start. We all have to eat and I can’t be the only person to have done a normal-seeming supermarket shop and literally dropped my jaw at the bill. Worse, you do the huge supermarket shop, have a funny turn at the total, donkey the bags back home, unpack a pile of stuff – and find that, once you’ve taken out the dishwasher tablets and the laundry detergent and the loo paper, it only really fills two shelves of the fridge and might last you three days tops. How did that happen? And how did we get to the stage where, shamefully, a couple of the perishable things bought on Monday end up in the bin by Friday?

Sensible Supermarket Shopping
and How to Do It

The excellent www.mysupermarket.co.uk works like an ordinary online supermarket. You fill your trolley with stuff, but, brilliantly, it then works out whether you’d be better off shopping at Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Ocado (Waitrose) or Asda, based on what you’re buying. The differences can be startling and it gives you further ways to cut your bill as you reach the checkout. The site is updated daily with the latest offers. You can then buy online and book a delivery with any of them apart from Asda, who don’t deliver (but you can print out your shopping list from the site and take it there in person, which is better than nothing).

You can compare and review own-brand products from Aldi, Lidl, Co-op and Asda at www.supermarketownbrandguide.co.uk. It is often (but not always) the case that own-brand products are essentially the same as branded ones: X company, for instance, makes its own line of posh chocolates, but also produces only marginally less posh ones for Y supermarket. Own-brand products aren’t in the premium/Finest/ultra-organic league, but when you’re talking about a can of tomatoes, that isn’t necessarily a disaster – or even a problem.

We all, I think, have particular anxieties about food and thriftiness. In our heads, it’s tied up with economy mince and a depressing sort of joylessness – we don’t like to think of ourselves as economy-mince kinds of guys. Who does? I make no apology for the fact that I eat only organic meat and eggs, and usually (but by no means always) buy organic veg too. I can’t countenance feeding myself or my children intensively farmed junk-meat; I’d rather just be vegetarian.^∗ I don’t do convenience food either. Not only are ready-meals nutritionally deplorable and full of dubious, fattening, bloat-causing, mood-altering crap, but they are unbelievably expensive compared to something fresh cooked from scratch ^† (talk about a giant con – they’re bad for you and expensive. Where’s the ‘convenience’?). Having said that, I don’t eat meat every day – or even every week – and I buy judicious cuts: see pages 40–41.

This isn’t a book about being on the breadline. But there is, we need to realize, a middle path between those Value tins and going mad at the deli counter with the Parma ham. Not that there’s anything wrong with some of those Value tins (or with tins in general, actually). Some contain undelicious, unfanciable things, but if you need chopped tomatoes to make a sauce, frankly the Value tomatoes aren’t going to ruin your recipe: ditto baked beans, ditto canned salmon. It doesn’t do to be too precious, either financially or as a human being.

We’re told time and time again by fashionable television chefs that cooking is all about the spanking wonderfulness of our top-quality, ultra-premium ingredients. This is true up to a point, but not nearly as true as they’d have you believe. Feeding yourself well is also about being a good enough cook to transform base into gold. There is nothing intrinsically impressive about a £15 super-chicken being an amazing thing to eat; I’m rather more impressed by someone doing something marvellous with the free-range chicken thighs that were on special offer.

The post-war generation may have been used to never throwing a single scrap away, and, my older friends tell me, to making endless amounts of stuffed pancakes and rissoles, and eking out Sunday’s roast for a good four days beyond, but those of us who have had the luxury of always living in relatively affluent times can feel quite panicky at the idea of stretching things out, or of feeding four people for a fiver. It’s going to be grotty, we think. It’s going to taste cheap, or look cheap, and makes us look as if we live like students. If we’re attempting to feed friends rather than partners and children, that anxiety gets ratcheted up a notch: feeding people is, after all, about generosity and largesse, about providing for loved ones. None of these qualities really go with cutting corners, we think.

I wouldn’t be so sure. Some of my happiest suppers have centred around the baked potato and rough red wine model, and my natural preference is still for a slightly ponced-up version of the same: really delicious macaroni cheese and home-grown salad, say, rather than anything that smacks overly of the old Cordon Bleu, or that is presented in stacks, or that comes with its own jus. The British have such odd attitudes to food, or perhaps just such recent attitudes to food. It doesn’t seem an especially wild generalization to say nobody cared at all until about 1950 and the advent of Elizabeth David (granted, they’d had a couple of world wars, plus their aftermaths, to contend with. But the disastrous culinary aftermath doesn’t seem to have applied to the French, or the Belgians, or the Italians, or the Spanish, so one is forced to conclude that the British just didn’t mind that much about what they put in their mouths).

This nervousness is particularly manifest in relation to ‘entertaining’. For some reason, a surprising number of people still feel that a ‘dinner party’ is preferable to a kitchen supper and requires, to be successful, linen napkins, stiff little flower arrangements and expensive ingredients, to say nothing of giant amounts of effort. Actually, what it requires is excellent company, the kind of friendly food everyone likes to eat and copious amounts of wine and water – tap, please: it’s free and it tastes good. Bottled water has had its day, in terms of both the money it costs and the plastic it uses (plus, not to be alarmist or anything, but you might want to Google ‘plastic water bottle + antimony’). If you’re really worried about drinking tap, install an under-the-counter filter – it’ll pay for itself in a few weeks and you won’t contribute to landfill. Try www.freshwaterfilter.com. If you’re concerned, as some are, about chemicals from plastic filters leaching into the water supply, try a ceramic version, as used by the International Red Cross: www.naturalcollection.com/natural-products/pure-water-in-natural-terracotta.aspx.

The evenings we remember aren’t the ones where the meal was Michelin-standard but rather the ones where the food was cosy and comfortable and everyone laughed a lot. So the first thing to do is to relax and stop approaching the question of what to feed other people as though it were a military campaign, or a personality test that would reveal all sorts of deep secrets about you, one of which being that you’re cheap. Nobody cares, or if they do you need to get yourself some new friends. And if Michelin-standard cooking is your thing, you needn’t feel crippled by a lack of expensive ingredients. Au contraire, aside from anything else, it’s what cuisine du terroir is all about, with its dependence on local ingredients and peasant traditions.

The notion of thrifty food sounds so mean and pinched, but the fact of the matter is that being thrifty does not have to mean an end to abundance, merely an end to waste and excess. And when I say waste and excess, I mean waste and excess – a THIRD of all the food we buy goes to waste. This is not good for the environment, obviously, since all the energy that goes into producing, transporting, packaging and storing the food is also wasted, and it is really not good for the pocket either. Or, frankly, for morale. There is a brilliant website, www.lovefoodhatewaste.com, that concerns itself with all of this, and with finding really ingenious solutions. It has, among a whole slew of other things, tips on getting portion sizes right and on the best way of keeping, freezing and using up leftovers, and provides you with free recipes that centre around using up stray vegetables and other bits and bobs that might otherwise be headed for the bin. Just select the ingredient you have left over, be it potatoes, carrots or cheese, etc., and up pop any number of suitable recipes. Genius.

I must detour at this point and recommend two wonderful books. The first is an absolutely brilliant little volume by Gill Holcombe, a mother of three, called (deep breath) How to Feed Your Whole Family a Healthy Balanced Diet with Very Little Money and Hardly Any Time Even If You Have a Tiny Kitchen, Only Three Saucepans (One with an Ill-fitting Lid) and No Fancy Gadgets – Unless You Count the Garlic Crusher. It costs £9.99 and is published by Spring Hill Books. The hearty, honest, family-friendly recipes are delicious and she means it about ‘very little money’ – the weekly meal planners at the back of the book include shopping lists with costings (for 2007) and average out at about £30 a week for a family of four (and she only uses organic meat. QED). I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

The second book you may want to look at is, maddeningly, £25 – do have a browse before you buy, or ask for it for a present, though to be fair it is practically encyclopedia-sized. But it’s also a marvel in its way. Called The Kitchen Revolution (Ebury), its premise is to return to the days of good housekeeping, save money, time and effort, and put an end to waste. The premise is achieved. This is a foodier book than the previous one, but not poncily so. It is quite prescriptive – you get a weekly shopping list (averaging £50–60 for a family of four and which, brilliantly, you can download online, print and take to the shops), out of which the authors, Rosie Sykes, Polly Russell and Zoe Heron, show you how to make one big meal from scratch, two meals using leftovers, one cheap seasonal supper, one meal largely from your larder, one big meal to freeze and one pudding. It’s pretty impressive and a very good idea if you want to cook seasonally/thriftily but don’t really know where to start, or don’t want to think about it too hard and just want to be told what to do. The book takes you through all fifty-two weeks of the year. I think it’s marvellous; I’ve been cooking from it throughout the writing of this chapter and we’re eating really well and, as promised, saving considerable amounts of money.

Seasonal Food

Anyway, eating more cheaply. The best place to start with all of this is by eating seasonally – it’s fashionable, it’s thrifty, it tastes good because the food’s ripe, ready and plentiful, and is less likely to come with giant air miles attached. There is a table below showing what’s in season when, but really the best way of finding out is simply to go to your local shops, be they independent or multinationals, and see what’s cheapest. Eating seasonally enables you to eat luxuriously: for instance, the asparagus that cost a fortune one month is less than half price the next, and making hollandaise isn’t expensive. It’s also worth keeping an eye out for gluts of things like tomatoes and courgettes, buying a great big load of them – street markets are the best place to do this – and turning them into sauces, soups, chutneys, pickles and so on. To find locally produced food, go to www.bigbarn.co.uk. Also check out www.bbcgoodfood.com each month for recipes which use food that is currently in season.

Box Schemes