Living dangerously

 

Do you wash and clean everything you give to charity shops? I have been sorting things out in our new house and there are quite a few things I do not need, so I have been giving them to charity shops. I have always felt quite virtuous. After all, I could have sold some of the items for good money for myself. But now I am beginning to wonder.

You see, I have been reading that some charity shops are saying that they are getting many donations that they cannot sell. Some of the items are of ‘not so good quality’ and some are well, to be frank, just dirty, with one head of retails saying that recently there have been washing up bowls donated filled with last night’s dirty dinner plates. Can you imagine packing gravy covered plates into a bag and taking them for someone else to deal with?

It makes me go over in my mind what I last took to a charity shop. It has made me think, were those new(ish) pans, not now suitable for my induction hob, really clean? I am sure they were, but I am going to double check next time.

And I have had a think again about tombstoning I saw last week at the seaside. There was a group of young lads about the age of fifteen and they were all encouraging each other at high tide to jump off the pier into the sea, feet first – and they did to cheers and shrieks and shouts. The adults kept away perhaps worrying about the consequences.

‘No tombstoning’ said the notice on the prom, but they did and this time they were all OK coming out of the sea with shining hair and grins on their faces only to have another go. I did it once when I was much younger than I am now and jumped int a ‘bottomless’ pool fed by the sea at high tide. What an excitement, but what a risk.  I have even seen this tombstoning at a river in full flow just over into Wales near here. I was with my sister and she steered me away from the excitement of the lads because she said, ‘That could be my grandchild’. Youths have died doing this.

We met a lone cyclist on the tow path of the Shropshire Union canal this week she was cycling to Bristol with her grey hair flowing out behind her helmet. She stopped and wanted to chat.

‘I fell in a few miles back with my bike. What a scramble to get out.”

She was dripping wet but undeterred as she pushed on with her old age adventure despite the danger.

(Taken from my column in the Shropshire Star)