Getting something for nothing has never been so satisfying…

I’m not sure I want to share this, given it may well mean there will be less for me. But in the era of freecycling over eBaying; the spirit of coming together in times of economic adversity, I figured there should be enough for us all to gather in the harvest of the community yield.

So I’ll let you into a local secret. There really is such a thing as a free lunch. Having set my seven-year-old daughter and her friend up with a community shop (well, a small table in front of the house), selling a vast array of pieces of broken plastic, within an hour they were £1.80 in profit. I wasn’t sure how they had managed to accrue this sum, until I realised they were selling my freshly delivered Riverford Organic fruit at 50p a piece, which I think was fairly cheap, given a fruit box is around the £9 mark, and I’m sure there aren’t 18 items in the box (unless you count grapes individually).

Anyway, armed with the said £1.80, we went for a stroll around the block to see how we could spend this hard-earned cash. First we came across the two heavy-duty rubbish containers just past the bridge on College Road, which are regularly deposited with fresh flowers. The best time to do this is early in the morning, before 9am, or just after a holiday. On this particular day (it being post-Easter) we managed to get hold of four floral displays, all arranged in oasis, which must still have at least a weeks beauty left in them.

Next stop, the library. We dropped off our borrowed books in the new computerised borrowing/returns computers (I’d still rather speak to the friendly librarians who have now been relegated to a back corner at the far right of the building) and picked up a new set of Lemony Snicket – for nothing. Outside Smiths (Eulabee) we dropped off a bag of worn, and too small, clothes in the Traid bin – you have to give something back too, you know – and then legged it (with our knackered old shoes) to Brown Edwards and Co shoe shop on Chamberlayne Road, who are taking part in a shoe recycling scheme to help reduce landfill and support the work of the Variety Club Children’s charity.

Our final, and most profitable destination is the bins behind Tesco, which, I must confess, can be a mixed bag of delights or horrors. This time we were in luck. Along with the J-cloths (there always seems to be loads of them) there were a couple of bags full of chocolate muffins, slightly squashed donuts, part-baked bread rolls and crumbly croissants. It has to be said, most of the fare here is predominantly bread-based. But sometimes you can get lucky. We’ve had about 30 bunches of bananas in the past and a couple of Mr Kipling’s finest. But today we went home with the croissants, sliced them all up and made a delicious bread-and-butter pudding. Oh, and we found a penny on the floor too.

So we went home with flowers, books, food and £1.81.