Miss Thrifty

What do you mean, you haven’t seen one of these before. Well duh. It’s an iPod alarm clock: you pop it next to your bed, click in your iPod and get woken up to the strains of your fave playlist. It’s made of the finest plastic. And it’s yours for a trifling £39.99 ($72). Forget the credit crisis: this is where it’s at.

Seriously, now, I never cease to be amazed at all the old tat that is peddled to iPod owners (i.e. lots of us). The iPod socks were bad enough, and the super-swanky speaker-docking-station-things have yet to persuade me to part with my mi££ions, but am I the only one who thinks that these overpriced accessories are being churned out at a rate of knots – and are becoming increasingly ridiculous in their scopes and price points?

I suppose the thinking is that if these mugs will part with £100 for an iPod Nano, they’ll pay over the odds for anything. Hmm, makes sense. Disclosure: my first iPod was supposed to be a good investment, as we emigrated with it – it saved a heck of a lot of space in our suitcases. But it gave up the ghost within two years, leaving me most miffed. But 5GB worth of CDs on iTunes meant that we have been suckered in, dang it. Our second iPod arrived for Christmas last year. Last time I looked it was not dead.

Anyway, here’s the bank manager-friendly, Miss Thrifty Guide to the ultimate iPod accessories: (more…)

Doesn’t this book look marvellous?

Make Do And Mend was published in the UK in 1943, by the Ministry of Information, at a time when food and clothes were rationed. Every British citizen was permitted one egg a week, a modest cube of cheese and unlimited bread and vegetables. Coupons for clothes were cut from allowance books; enterprising women supplemented these rations with garments cut from curtains, and kohl pencil lines up the backs of their legs, to look like stockings. Their cookware was handed over to be turned into fusiland turned into aeroplanes. (And if all this wasn’t bad enough, their towns and cities were being bombed at night.)  

This frugal tradition continued beyond the Second World War and into the 1950s, when the Manchester Evening News published Take a Tip : a collection of readers’ money saving titbits.

It’s funny, isn’t it? These little booklets have been hanging around for decades, unwanted and unread, gathering dust in attics and mouldering on charity shop shelves while we’ve been out spending and splurging on overpriced frivolites and cheap tat.

Now that we’re headed for a recession - a Depression, even, if the doomiest of the doom-mongers are to be believed – all these pearls of wisdom are suddenly relevant again. With our financial indexes plummeting, our markets in turmoil and our elected representatives banging heads with one another, this seems as good a time as any to revisit some of our forebears’ handiest household hints.

Here are some of my favourites: (more…)