A trip to the charity shop

Lizzie Higgs-Boson writes:

I gave Mary a lift into town, as her shaggy husband was building their new shed and she doesn't drive. She wanted to go around the charity shops looking for an armchair. When I asked her why she needed a new one she snorted and said it was a victim of mad science. Her sense of humour baffles me at times.

I love charity shops. I can't think how people ever managed before we had them. You can give them all your old junk, and you don't have to feel guilty about adding to landfill or throwing away Auntie's awful attempts at needlepoint, because you are Giving To The Needy. The volunteers in the shops sort through all your kind donations (presumably throwing Auntie's needlepoint straight into the skip at the back of the shop, but by then it's no longer your problem), and put the best of them out for sale in the shop. The proceeds then go to the starving in Africa or some other socially responsible and geographically distant cause.

I am mainly a donator of old junk....erm, I mean quality used clothing and household goods. Mary on the other hand is mainly a customer. She buys any amount of books, tea-pots and table-cloths. Judging from the state of her clothes they have mainly come from the less choosy charity shops. The only clothes she seems to buy new are her extraordinary t-shirts. Today she was wearing a white one with the slogan: "LingQ helps bad language users to use it better!!"

She even buys their furniture second-hand. She says there is no point saving up for a new armchair when Minnie will just use it for trampoline practice.

The best charity shop for furniture in Middlehamptonborough (pronouced by us locals as Millbruh) is the one run by the Knights Hospitalier on Long Eel Street. It contains a little tea shop run by the volunteers. This extended our shopping trip considerably, as I have never yet seen Mary manage to walk past a teapot.

Mary seemed usually grumpy over her tea. I asked her if anything was the matter. "My son is channelling the spirit of Albert Einstein, and he's likely to rip a hole in the fabric of reality with his frankly insane time-travel device!" she snapped. "Minnie is slightly more dangerous now she is having actual lessons in hurting people instead of just working it out for herself. I'm being impersonated by a dead Swiss person. And my LingQ stats are way below Steve's now." She moodily ordered another toasted muffin.

Oh dear. I do hope Mary's not heading for some kind of breakdown. She works herself much too hard with all these foreign languages she learns. I should ask the school counsellor to keep an eye on her.

It took her nearly the whole morning to choose a large, well-used arm-chair covered in eye-watering chintz for £8. Of course it wouldn't fit in my car, which meant that it needed to be delivered in the back of a van driven by a twitchy man called Sid. The charge for delivery is £15, but Mary did a complicated bartering deal with Sid involving lime pickle, tea cakes and mulberry jam, and he agreed to drop it off on his way home for free.

When we got back to the Dunwiches' house Minnie and her dad were sword-fighting armed with chisels. In the house my son Stanley, James and that nice little Jay Bee were sitting eating barley sugar and reading copies of the Beano from the 1950's "for research". "We're going at six!" said Stanley. "Merlin's on. That lot at CERN will all be watching the TV so they won't be paying too much attention to the instruments. It's our best chance of avoiding detection."

"Can we have marmite sandwiches and apple pie to take with us, Mum? asked James.

"If you tear a hole in the fabric of the universe I'll....make you join the scouts!" Mary snarled, and stomped out into the kitchen. I promised to fetch Stanley and Jay at 7pm and went off home.

I don't know how Mary manages to live among such chaos. These imaginative types really do seem to live in a different world from the rest of us.