THERE’S being thrifty, but your mum went to disgusting lengths to prevent waste. Here are some of her frugal ways that still give you the shudders.
Scraping mould off bread
Bread is a famously inexpensive staple in every culture, but gold bullion to your mum. Your weak disposition was to blame for your food poisoning, not the traces of green mould on your cheese sandwich. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, she’d say, but now even a slightly stale loaf makes you fearful, which doesn’t feel like a sign of strength.
Making leftover meals
You left your least-favourite foodstuffs on the side, only for them to become a burnt, congealed mess served up next day. Not too bad if it was bubble and squeak, f**king terrifying if it was a ‘stew’ made with gravy granules. Like Jaws, who knows what horrors lurked in the deep? The kicker was that this habit probably only saved 4p per meal.
Hand-me-down clothes
Being the baby of the family had its perks, but not being forced to go to school in your sister’s hole-filled Matalan polo shirts and out-of-fashion clownish shoes. Naturally you were mocked, class contempt forever burned into your subconscious like a brand. Yes, your brother’s cheapo C&A trainers have a lot to answer for. It was character-building, claimed your parents, who just wanted to save money for a big Sony.
Owning a compost heap
Nowadays visits to garden centres trigger hideous Nam-style flashbacks of collecting your football from a pile of stinking organic matter smelling suspiciously like a drain. Your mum’s twisted creation was a rotting housing estate for maggots, supposedly to recycle discarded vegetable peel for gardening, which acted more as a reminder of nature’s nightmarish life cycle of death and decay, something you dwell on miserably in your 30s.
Trimming sprouted potatoes
Like a facehugger bursting forth from a Xenomorph egg, the sight of a stem growing from an old potato did not bode well. Your mum keeping those straggly cut-offs in a box looked as if she was harvesting a new alien colony, while you were expected to eat the ‘perfectly fine’ original offender. The potatoes by now had very high toxin levels, but back in the day that was just being a fussy eater.
Having you finish your plate
Eating every last morsel as if you were on death row haunts you to this day. For the crime of wanting a bowl of trifle without finishing your soggy green beans you were forced to funnel every drip of lumpy turkey Bisto down your gullet. And in a cycle of cruelty you do it to your own children, with the added incentive of telling them if they don’t eat those ten remaining peas global warming is their fault.
