Smartly turned out

I have absolutely no interest in fashion. As far as I'm concerned, clothes should keep me warm or cool according to the season, and be reasonably comfortable. End of.

Part of this is down to my upbringing and the time that I grew up. My mother chose my clothes. They had to be hardwearing and functional. I was the oldest, so I never wore my sibling's cast-offs. I did however wear other people's cast offs if they fit. Growing up in the fifties in a small seaside town, there were no washing machines or launderettes. Clothes had to be washed by hand and wrung out using a pre-war mangle. I had one school shirt when I went to grammar school. I'd wear it all week and it would be washed at the weekend ready to be worn again the next week. When the collar wore out from all the scrubbing, it was either unpicked and turned over and resewn, or a patch was sewn over the frayed material. Clothes were basic and functional and certainly not fashionable. My mother insisted in kitting me out in corduroy jerkin and shorts. I wore shorts until my legs got too hairy. It was the norm.
Clothes were expensive. They were expensive compared to how much I earned. A cheap shirt cost fifteen shillings (75p), a good one was a guinea (£1-1s). A cheap off the peg suit cost £10, which was one week's wages.
I needed a suit to work at the bank. My parents paid for my first suit. It cost £10. My second suit cost a bit more. I went to Burtons for it.

There was a Burtons in every town. I went to the branch in Portobello Road. Their buildings are very distinctive. They always occupied a corner site and they almost always had a snooker hall upstairs. The former Burtons site in Kettering is now an Estate Agents, with a night club upstairs.
I went to Burtons one Saturday and was measured for my suit. He asked me if I dressed to left or to the right. He had to explain what it meant. Then I had to choose the style of suit. Finally I paid a deposit and the suit was ordered for me.
Burtons had a huge factory in Bradford or somewhere like that where they made up the suits that had been ordered in the local shops. A week or two later I called in and tried my suit for size.
It cost me £30, three week's wages.
My next suit was off the peg, and cost £18 from Burtons. I never bought another for years.

Because clothes were expensive you tended to wear clothes until they wore out. The habit tends to stick with you.
In the early 70s I used to wear loon pants. They were made of cotton and were died in bright colours. They cost about £2.50 a pair. A nice grandad tie dye T-shirt cost about the same.
It wasn't until the late eighties that clothes started to come down in price. And as they became cheaper, people began to throw them out before they wore out.

About ten years ago I had a job working for a recycling firm. I'd clock in at six o'clock in the morning at the site in Wellingborough, and together with a driver's mate would drive a white van to the designated collection area. I started off in Colchester, which was about a hundred or so miles away and took about two hours to get to. We'd buy an A-Z map and choose an area to work in. We'd spend the morning walking the streets putting bags through the letterboxes. Our target was 1000 bags per day, assuming we could find 1000 houses that hadn't been visited. After a month or more we'd walked every single street in Colchester and every village within ten miles.
Every afternoon we'd drive to the location that we'd visited two days earlier, this time we drove around looking for the bags that had been left out. Once we'd collected all the bags we drove home, had the van weighed on the weighbridge, emptied the van and clocked out. The next day we did more of the same.
Our target was one ton of clothing per van per day. Some vans went to areas that produced more. Others produced far less. It must have made money, even with all the miles involved.

Some of the clothing was packed into large canvas bags that were sewn shut and loaded in an unsorted state into lorries and transported to eastern Europe, where the clothes were sold to a poor population. This was prior to the enlargement of the EU. Some clothes were sorted into types, eg cotton, silk, wool and went to be recycled. Some customers would order say, a hundred pairs of used denim jeans, or fifty large ladies overcoats and these would be packed and despatched. Clothes that were given away to charity found their way to market stalls in Africa. The Organisation that gave its name and added credibility to the operation received a percentage of the cash raised in this way.

We performed a vital role in the economy. Many people (but not me) love shopping for clothes. Inevitably they run out of storage space. A charity bag would be posted through the letterbox and it would be filled with unwanted or unloved clothes, thereby releasing space for more purchases and keeping the tills ringing in the high street. A small fraction of the clothes collected would find its way into the charity shops of the organisation named on the bag, but it tended to be the very best stuff. Once a week we'd send a van to these retail outlets to take away the unsold clothes and bring fresh stock in. Almost all the clothing collected got reused, resold or recycled.

Until now. The problem is that clothes are now too cheap. I paid £3 for a pair of jeans from Tesco. If prices had risen in line with inflation that would have been around £90 based on 1960s prices. I don't do fashion, I don't do designer labels, I do do comfort,and they're uncomfortable I'll throw them into a charity bag. Most clothes are produced in the far east. Most of them are made from man made fibres, which can't be recycled. Clothes that sell for a pound or two when brand new have no resale value and can't be recycled so go to landfill. Transport costs mean that the foreign markets have dried up. It costs too much to send our unwanted clothes to Africa. The Africans can buy their clothes direct from the factory, as we do.

I stayed with the collection vans for about three months. Inevitably the longs hours took their toll. I was being paid by the hour, so I was earning well enough. However, I was supposed to be a musician and songwriter and while I found that walking the streets was a great way of working out song lyrics ( I wrote one of my favourite songs while tramping the streets of Wivenhoe in Essex), I didn't have any time to get into the studio to record the songs. I wanted to record another album, so in the end I packed the job in.

I'd walked every street in Colchester, Haybridge, Malden, Mersea and all the surrounding villages. I also walked the streets of Hereford and Ross on Wye. I discovered that every new housing development looks the same, irrespective of local architectural styles. Bland bland bland.