Sadly, while my right foot is now fully better, my left leg’s just not doing what it should be doing, and four months on it’s still broken in five places, with little (or in fact no) sign right now that the bones are knitting back together. This is known as ‘non union’. The surgeon thinks that it’s just because the break was so bad, and apparently this is not common, but not overly rare either. I won’t bore you all with full details of what this might mean, but from the point of view of this blog and challenge it’s had a big impact. While I’ve still been trying to act in normal way, I can’t actually get to any decent run of charity shops without causing myself three days afterwards of ongoing pain. I can’t get to car boot sales and I certainly can’t undertake any out of town thrifting trips right now.

I’m not a ‘quitter’ so it’s been tough for me to take this decision, but I’m ending the secondhand safari early, with immediate effect. I was determined to keep it going, but the reality for me has been that I’ve been more or less just buying everything online for the past four months, and feeling stressed about the ‘need’ to go out on more interesting buying trips.

I hasten to add that this is nothing to do with Christmas being around the corner. I’ve already bought all of my gifts for offspring, friends, family and husband online, mostly in a crazed ebay frenzy. It’s more that for now I need to clear my life and my head of anything and everything that isn’t totally necessary for survival and earning a living and just allow myself to stop and rest. Something I’m not very good at doing.
I’m still hoping to write much more widely about this whole topic next year, and the blog has been a wonderful and invaluable thing to do in many ways. I’ll resurrect it in the new year as a general blog about thrifting culture, but for now I need to bow out and lie down! Please do stay in touch, especially on twitter where you can find me as @shs_suzy
(ps the image here is me and my girls (plus a doll) Hammo.)

I haven’t blogged for a while for obvious reasons (horrendous accident, two broken legs, one of which is choosing not to heal more than three months on. Read all about it here) so I thought I’d give you a quick round up of what’s been happening in the wonderful world of secondhand safari lately. Which is 1: gentle bickering and 2: thrifting

1: The woeful tale of Mr SHS and his stylus.
Four and a half years ago now, when I was pregnant with SHS baby number one I used to lie on the rug in our teeny tiny London flat and Mr SHS would select choice records (vinyl ones) to play to my growing bump while she kicked away happily in my womb. It was fun and special, and a memory that I’ll have forever. Then the stylus broke. That’s ‘the needle’ in non-technical terms. Mr SHS failed to buy a new one. We switched to playing cds to the bump but it was never quite the same. Time passed, the record collection grew cobwebs, the baby grew into a toddler, we moved house to Manchester. Still no stylus. The record player is and has always been Mr SHS’s domain so I wouldn’t have dreamt of interfering.
Our second daughter grew inside me but had to put up with the cd collection for her pre-birth dancing lessons. Occasionally I would nag that perhaps as we didn’t have a working record player then the cumbersome record collection could go, but that idea was shot down in howls of protest.
After about three  years, Mr SHS finally, FINALLY bought a stylus. Hallelujah. Except that it turned out to be missing a part, or Mr SHS had removed an extra part that he shouldn’t have. Either way, it didn’t fit and we remained vinyl-less.
Our oldest daughter is now four so I’ll leave you to do the maths.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago our near neighbour announced that he was selling off his top of the range technics turntable for the bargain price of £20. Mr SHS snapped it up. We have vinyl sound once again. But as the whole point of secondhand safari is about waste management and using up, buying an entire new turntable to solve the problem of not having a stylus for your original one seems somewhat extreme! And disorganised. Just sayin’…
ps: I of course would have much preferred a dansette, like the one on the picture here.

2: Back on Safari
I had every intention three months ago of starting to learn to drive, at the age of nearly 40. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, if I can drive then there’s considerably more choice when it comes to looking at which school my daughters could potentially go to, as the oldest one’s about to reach that age. Secondly, there are a lot of huge and fantastic boot sales in the North west, almost all of which need a car to get to. I’ve found it deeply frustrating to read about other people’s boot sale finds and then I can only make it to very specific ones. So I was all set, with my first driving lesson booked, and my theory test for the day after. Then… boom… the accident happened so that was all cancelled and is still on hold.
The reason I’m telling you this now is that I’ve been literally itching to get back out on some secondhand shopping trips. I’m out of the wheelchair now and onto crutches which is a big help. And suddenly last week I felt such an overwhelming urge to get back on with it that I announced to the household that I may not be back for some time and jumped on the bus to posh, leafy Didsbury: home of many charity shops, stuffed largely with Marks and Spencers castoffs, but some more interesting stuff too, especially for children.
It felt like actual heaven to be out and searching for stuff. It made me realise how much I’ve missed it lately. So much so that come this Tuesday I jumped on the bus in the other direction and headed to my favourite thrifting ground of Urmston, where I found yet more wonderful things: particularly a ton of great photo frames which will form part of Christmas presents to close family, as I’ve been very remiss in keeping them up to date with photos of my offspring.
Now that I’m up and about there should be no stopping me. I’m very busy and behind with work, but I feel the call of those charity shops over the top of all of that. In the meantime Mr SHS had some prime hunting time at the massive Bowlers boots sale with much success so we’re all stocked up now.

When I appeared on Radio four’s woman’s hour earlier on this year, chatting about why we should donate to charity shops I mentioned that I don’t donate to Oxfam as I find their pricing too high. Jenni Murray fixed me with a doleful gaze, which, without the need to speak told me in an instant ‘no, you’re not here to diss specific charity shops. Let’s be nice here. This is woman’s hour and we are entirely civilised at all times.’ I almost felt tempted to change the subject and start waxing lyrical about frosted cupcakes, but stayed on topic and changed tack to espousing the benefits of the British Heart Foundation (I think) at which point Jenni M. smiled happily at me and all felt well with the world. She’s really, really good at that stuff. No wonder she’s held on to the woman’s hour hotseat for so long. It’s not an easy task to keep complete strangers in line live on air.

On my recent trip to Cheadle, Oxfam was the only charity shop that I didn’t bother to go in to. This was largely because the disabled access left a lot to be desired, and I’m in a wheelchair for the next few weeks (repeating myself here…read all about it). But I can’t help thinking that if I’d struggled initially to get into a hospice shop say, or a PDSA then I would have tried a bit harder. I just can’t quite work out what it is, but to me Oxfam seems a little like the corporate fat cat of the charity shop world.

But something’s happened which has changed my mind and set my brain a-whirring. I’ve discovered Oxfam’s online shop. Naturally, being Oxfam I’ve discovered this because it comes up at the top of google all the time as I suspect that many of the thousands made from selling donated goods have been paid out to SEO specialists and the like, but that’s a minor gripe. I’m glad I found it because as an online shop I actually really like it. It’s got a good and wide selection of clothes, homewares, handbags and the usual higher-end stuff on there. But what I found interesting, and I don’t yet know the answer to, is that I didn’t feel the same sense of outrage at Oxfam’s pricing on this site as I do when I go to one of their shops and see items at similar costs. For some reason, a designer handbag costing £35 seemed fair enough on this site. Or a posher high street dress from say Whistles or Warehouse at maybe £20 also seemed more than reasonable. I bought a top by East for a tenner, plus a couple of other tops.
The search function is really good: unlike so many online vintage shops you can narrow it down by size (why don’t vintage shops do this? As a size 16 I don’t want to have to wade through a load of size 8 clothes to find the few items that our smaller post-war sisters didn’t wear out that might actually fit me) as well as by brand. The site is nice, clean and uncluttered and I like it a lot. Oxfam, you’ve gone right up in my estimation.

So, why the difference? Does anyone have any theories about this? And I’d love to know what you think about my aversion to Oxfam. Am I right, or do I need to get over myself?

I always liken it to the trance-like state that people (let’s be honest, usually men, although not exclusively) reach when they go into a record shop and start leafing through what’s on offer in the hope of turning up some totally obscure classic that’s spoken of in hushed voices in the grown up equivalent of teenage bedrooms throughout the land but is rarely seen. In truth these days you can find practically everything on the internet but we obsessives need our weekly rummaging fix, and it’s still way more fun to experience the randomness of proper shops.

So, with the children at their grandma’s for the weekend for the first time we were finally at liberty to put the Red Cross wheelchair through its paces with a charity-shopping trip to the small Cheshire town of Cheadle. We chose Cheadle for the following reasons; city centres are almost always rubbish for charity shopping so our home city of Manchester was out, and we wanted to go somewhere new and unexplored.  But also, because of my present wheelchair-using condition, it was important to go somewhere nice and compact and easy to get to on public transport.

Cheadle is a nice, well-heeled little town (village?), which somewhat  bizarrely happens to be home to a cafe which doubles up as a Himalayan salt cave therapy centre. I  can’t imagine the thought process which led to somebody deciding to open a cafe with Himalayan salt spa in the back room, in the middle of a fairly nondescript 1960s parade of shops in Cheadle, but anyway we went there on the recommendation of the incredibly friendly woman who ran one of the three (three!) branches of Barnado’s, and had a very tasty meal. The counter was crammed with both cakes and the usual mid-range cafe fare, as well as baskets of Himalayan rocks which you can buy for a tenner each. Somehow this didn’t grab us, so we left empty handed.

Back out on the street, with me backseat driving furiously as Mr SHS pushed me around: ‘watch my feet!’ ‘You’re running me over the kerb!’ ‘You’re going too fast!’ it wasn’t really your typical romantic date, but for now our marriage remains more or less intact. The other thing that struck me was that people were genuinely very kind and helpful towards me in my current disabled state. Also, complete strangers smile benevolently  at you a lot when you’re in a wheelchair, which is all very nice but does make you feel very, erm… public. Plus, it was pleasant the first time the community support police officer crossed the road to ask if I was OK when I was waiting outside an inaccessible shop for Mr SHS to emerge, but by the third or fourth time I was starting to feel a little harrassed.

I am able to stand with the aid of crutches so the shopping was a fairly straightforward – if ultimately tiring – affair. The pickings were good in that they reflected the affluence of the area , but were not overflowing with abundance in respect of my own personal taste. I snapped up a silk shirt by Hobbs for £6.99, the inevitable kid’s clothes, including my first ever charity shop sighting of my favoured swedish brand Polarn o Pyret (a pricy, but great quality brand. When I’m not secondhanding I buy a lot of this stuff for my kids. The oldest one wears it, then the youngest, then it’s still in great nick to sell on the get some of the purchase price back). Meanwhile, Mr SHS found an album by Eartha Kitt in the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation shop. Was Roy Castle from Cheadle? Anyone know why this shop is here? To the younger or non-UK readers among you, Roy Castle was a trumpet-playing tapdancer, who presented a long running show in which people tried to win world records on air, not for sport, but for eating the most kidney beans in one go, or paragliding down an indoor ski slope: that kind of thing. I loved it as a child. He seemed like a nice chap, but he died in his forties from lung cancer, even though he’s never smoked.   Back in the shop itself, Mr SHS seemed to think that someone in this same shop had got a little over-excited in the pricing of a selection of punk and late-70s David Bowie singles (priced between four and eight pounds a-piece).

I also picked up a fab tiki-style handbag for just £1.99 to replace my old one which has just gone to the great luau in the sky. This was purchased  from the Barnado’s dedicated ‘vintage’ shop, which unlike so many other ‘vintage’ charity shops, really was wall to wall vintage (as in, old stuff- vintage is such an overused term these days) and nicely decked out to match its wares. Also notable was the St Anns Hospice shop, which is housed in what used to be an old art deco tea rooms. You can’t see much evidence of this on the ground floor, but upstairs – where in the appropriately-dedicated  vintage section is to be found – retains many of the original fittings. This was reported back to me by Mr SHS, as I couldn’t actually get up the stairs!

We headed back to the bus stop feeling satisfied, if not purged. I was gunning for us to hop off in wealthy Didsbury on the way home for more upmarket cast-off shopping, but Mr SHS was having none of it, pointing out that as we’d managed a day of no mishaps or ‘chair tipping’ incidents it was time to quite while we were ahead. In retrospect he was right. Anyway, I’d recommend a Cheadle/ Didsbury run if you’re ever in a thrifting mood as they’re just a short trip on the bus from each other.

Three weeks ago today Mr SHS was away at a family party: the first time he’s been away without us for the two and a half years that we’ve lived in Manchester. So naturally that was the time that the universe decided that I should put the children to bed, step down the one step into our kitchen, and on to one of the children’s (thrifted-of course!) building blocks and into a world of pain. I *think* I probably passed out for a while; I’m not sure as there were no witnesses, but I felt the breaks as soon as they happened. I’m not going to go into it in too much detail here, but that small step led to one leg being broken in four places, and the foot on the other side is also broken. It took two and a half hours of me screaming for my oldest daughter to wake up, as I literally couldn’t move. Eventually I roused her, and at the age of three, in the middle of the night, she had to drag a heavy chair through the house to stand on in the kitchen in the dark to scrabble around to find my phone so that I could call 999.

Cue flashing lights, sirens and the police breaking the door down. All of this time Mr SHS was partying, blissfully unaware as there’s no phone signal where he was in North Wales, so he didn’t find out until 2am when the police were able to phone him back at his folk’s house.

Anyway, that’s cutting a very long story short, but my children were whisked away by a trusted neighbour, I was taken to accident and emergency, which at midnight in Manchester on gay pride weekend was truly a sight to behold and I have many tales to tell! I was operated on the next day as my bones were too broken to heal on their own so needed metal plates, and spent a week in hospital, missing my babies and my husband more than I thought humanly possible. Anyway, by the Friday I’d had enough and we presented a united front to insist that I’d be better off at home. So here I am. I don’t get out much yet! But the good news is that I can now make it upstairs so can reach the bathroom and the office room (a grand term for what’s actually a tiny box room).

In the true spirit of secondhand safari, even though they might not know it, the Red Cross has lent me a wheelchair, which we’ve only attempted a trip out in once so far,  to the hospital, but I’m planning to be a little more mobile next week. I haven’t felt up to blogging or doing much of anything apart from looking after the children as much as I can. Drowsy drugs plus all of my energy going on healing means I’m asleep more than awake right now.

So actual physical thrifting trips will have to stop for a while, as two broken legs doesn’t really fit well with browsing in charity and vintage shops,  but I’ve been missing secondhand safari, so it feels like time to get back on to it. And I need your help! I’ve been turning to ebay too much lately and I’d like to diversify. Could any of you recommend other secondhand sites that you use a lot, and I’ll take a look at those too. I’m especially keen on original and independent ones.

So, I’m back and I’m sorry I went away. I wave my crutches to one and all of you.

ps: the image you see here was a very sweet gesture on the part of Mr SHS who dashed out to the charity shop and bought me some knitting needles to stick down my cast for scratching purposes (which I had to tell him you’re not actually allowed to do) and a book about bone strengthening, as I do seem to have a bad break every time I have a fall. Made me smile… it’s the little things in relationships that show true love if you ask me.

Four months in and as far as actual products go, such as items of clothing, books and dvds, homewares or whatever I’m not really feeling any sense of losing out by not buying news stuff, although I’m missing real newspapers and magazines, as opposed to online ones. When I head into town these days, being unable to buy anything new from ‘new stuff’ shops makes me look at them in a totally different way. I have to say that for the most part, now that I’m not being blinded by the possibility of returning home with bags of stuff that I usually didn’t need, but just felt the urge to splurge, I’m struck mostly by how cheap and nasty so much of the stuff on offer seems. Or the other side of that is that decent stuff seems to be SO expensive.

But the biggest change for me has been my attitude to the sales and sale items. I’m usually a big sales-shopper, refusing to buy almost anything at full price, and feeling very pleased with myself when I bag a bargain. But (and yes of course I realised this already…just not the extent of it) most high street sales these days just now feel like a fraud, and the fact is that some retailers are using them to convince us that something is a total steal when in fact their intention was probably always to sell it at full price for the minimum amount of time, often just in one or a few of their shops, then ‘mark it down’ as a sale item and sell way more than they would.

There seem to be sales everywhere, all the time now, and they don’t mean anything. As an ‘outside’ observer for now at least, my advice is to look closely at the item that you’re planning to purchase because it’s in the sale. Would you have bought it anyway if it wasn’t? And the price that it is right now, not the full price, but the sale price… does that seem like a good price for this item?

I hope I’m not coming across as sanctimonious. I’m as much of a sucker as anyone for a sale, although I actually don’t think I will be any more after this year. Now I need to see whether I can force myself to take my own advice when it comes to wine. Does everyone else do the ‘reduced wine’ thing too? I know very little about wine, apart from that I like dry, not sweet white wine, prefer red in the winter and can taste a good one when I come across it. But I rely far too much when I’m choosing on which wines the supermarket or Oddbins tells me has been reduced by a couple of quid. The SHS house rule is that we don’t buy the ‘half price’ ones, but the ones that tell us they started out at say nine pounds but are now six. Is it really true that these are in fact better wines than the ones that were six pounds in the first place? I’m no longer sure.

So how would it go when we held one in our newly adopted city of Manchester? Well, somewhat predictably apart from an elderly couple who walked away with a Johnny Cash CD, pretty much everyone else who visited our yard sale were youngish, college-educated types. It would seem that for a great many people – even if they might consider going to a boot sale ­- the idea of being seen rifling through their neighbours cast-offs is anathema. Personally, speaking as someone who comes from a working class background, I suspect this has something to do with the kind of working class pride that I witnessed growing up, where people may have been a little hard up but they certainly weren’t going to show it.
I understand where that attitude comes from, but with respect to our yard sale I couldn’t help but feel frustrated seeing some of our neighbours peering over at us but resolutely refusing to come over and have a rummage – particularly as I know they have young children and we were selling some top quality children’s clothes which were being snapped up by more confident and ‘open to the idea’ people. I suppose I just have to accept that thrifting isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but as someone who finds it impossible to walk past a yard sale, charity shop or flea market without feeling compelled to have a scratch around I just find it difficult to understand how anyone could  walk past without even a cursory glance at what’s on offer. Bizarrely, some folk seemed determined not to acknowledge the presence of our yard sale on the street, to the extent of either crossing the road to avoid us or marching speedily by, eyes-front.

Which was a shame, as it was a very sociable event – tons of fun actually – and we got to meet a few more of our neighbours who we’d previously only seen in passing, which was also the point.  Plus we did manage to divest ourselves of a reasonable amount of stuff (books, CDs, clothes, toasters, and our McClaren stroller buggy which served us well but was still in good nick etc.) that we wanted to clear. Meanwhile, our daughter Astrid demonstrated that she hadn’t quite grasped the idea of the sale, by insisting on giving every small child who came by with their parents one of her old toys – which, in fairness, generated much in the way of goodwill, and we happily let her get on with it as it teaches important lessons about sharing stuff, and giving things away when you’re done with them rather than junking them. And amongst the chaps who swung round after seeing our sign in the local mail sorting office round the corner, all of whom left with armfuls of books, cds and DVDs, was one who was DJing at the Fleasy Street event at Chorlton Irish Club the following day. Which was a nice coincidence as we had already decided that some of the money made at our yard sale would end up being spent at that event.
So the people who got it really got it, but it’s going to take a while for this tradition to build up. Who’s up for holding the next one?