Experiments in Living

Oh dear, it looks like Twiggy has stepped in something nasty with her latest ad campaign. After supplementing her pension promoting M&S, the sixties pin-up has her image all over the new Olay adverts. Olay is made by Proctor and Gamble (boo-hiss). OK, so Twiggy is free to decide who she takes money from as we all are, but it is more than slightly hypocritical given her previous support for Uncaged’s Hurtful Essences campaign. Herbal Essences are manufactured by, you’ve guessed it, Proctor and Gamble.

From one of the Hurtful Essences flyers (Twiggy seems to have vanished from the website):

I support Uncaged’s Hurtful Essences campaign to highlight Proctor and Gamble’s unnecessary testing of beauty products on animals and to encourage Proctor and Gamble to end all animal tests for cosmetics. ~ Twiggy.

The leaflets are being redesigned so as to no longer feature Twiggy, as stated in a news release from Uncaged. I guess everyone has their price…

Come to think of it, I never did receive a reply from the letter I sent to Proctor and Gamble several months ago expressing my concern about their animal testing policies. I’d like to say I was surprised.

Tags: animal testing, Proctor and Gamble, Twiggy, Uncaged

Continuing from yesterday’s post about my July Challenge, it seemed rather timely that Zen Habits is also covering the less stuff issue, although from a slightly different angle. Yours truly is all about the money (and not spending of what she doesn’t have) and the worrying effect of junking yesterday’s stuff into landfill to cause problems for the people of tomorrow.

As Leo wisely points out:

This obsession with stuff leads to owning a lot, having a lot of clutter … and yet this stuff doesn’t fill our lives with meaning.

No it doesn’t, but we have been brainwashed into thinking that it does. There is something deeper going on here, an inner need that stuff won’t fill. The need is to connect. To feel part of something.

The whole capitalist system is built around the more-better-best model which encourages competition rather than collaboration. This is why the government is trying to encourage us to spend our way out of recession with such sleight of hand tricks as quantitative easing and the VAT cut. What if we all stopped spending money we didn’t have and just bought what we needed? Horror, calamity, the economy would grind to a halt! Errr… hello?

Perhaps now is a good time for some alternative market models. I don’t know. I’m a linguist, not an economist. But even I can see that the current models we have are unsustainable and will just end up devouring themselves like the sub-prime lending did in 2007. The “recovery” needs to consist of something more creative and radical than just building the old sand castles back up again.

Tags: capitalism, Clutter, economy, money, stuff

Welcome to July! Again! It’s nearly two years since I started this blog, who’d have thunk?

Everything has changed, but nothing has changed, if you catch my drift. As usual, I am trying to do the right thing environmentally and this month I have decided to challenge myself to Buy Nothing New.

Exceptions to buy nothing new:

Food and drink

Toiletries

Petrol and essential car repairs

Services

Note that I said it is the buy nothing NEW challenge. It’s not about living some kind of zen-like monastic existence, but about saving cash and reducing energy consumption and waste production. I’ll also be having a good old look at my groceries shopping list and I’ll see if there’s a way to reduce spending there. This week I’ve been organised and got myself together with packed lunches for next week so that should save me about £10 a week on buying lunch in the refectory.

Tags: environment, frugal, money

So, moving on from my last post about television, I bring you some commercial advertising. Yes, there is some irony here, but we have to do what we have to do. No nasty meat on barbecues or anything like that, just the new Evian commercial. It did make this hardened cynic laugh too, which is always a bonus. I think this is the sort of ad which would work best at cinemas when everyone is there to enjoy the film, so I wonder if I will be seeing it on the big screen soon?

I was reading the blurb that the advertising people sent me and I can’t believe that it’s ten years since that synchronised swimming “Bye bye baby” ad. Time goes so quickly. Weirdly enough, ten years ago I was living just down the road from Evian-les-bains in Annecy, which is a beautiful city to visit at any time of year.

Tags: advertising, babies, Evian, video

Reality TV

It turns out that one of my biggest experiments in living was one that I hadn’t actually planned. When I moved house, back in March, I had no furniture or anything. To cut a long story short, after I moved out of my ex’s house back to my parents, I ended up selling him everything at a knock down price, to save the hassle and expense of removing and storing it.

This meant that I pretty much had to start from scratch. Over the last few months I have been buying bits and pieces as I can afford them, essentials such as a bed and a fridge/freezer came high up on the list, closely followed by kitchen table and sofa. One thing that I have yet to acquire, however, is a television set. It didn’t set out as some huge political or lifestyle statement to not have TV. I know many people choose not to have one for some good reasons. As time has gone on I have not felt that my life or home are deficient for choosing not to have one. Perhaps when the long winter nights close in I will feel differently.

People find it weird, to say the least. But then people find my being a vegan weird

So what do you do with your time if you don’t have a telly? Confession time: I never had TV when I was a student either, except for the final year when I lived in a shared house. And that year we didn’t even watch it that much, apart from Pop Idol on a Saturday night, which both dates me and proves the point that telly was not adding much value to my life. And that’s the point, what does having a television add to your life?

Since living on my own, I have to make the effort to get out of the house and not be some kind of hermit, which would be my natural tendency. Having television would hamper that effort. Not having a television has given me evenings where I have had time to pursue other interests such as joining local activities, going out for walks on the long evenings, chatting to friends on the phone or internet, getting more involved in the local veggie scene, writing letters, cooking and baking, reading novels. All lovely things that I would not bother doing if I was sitting spud-like in front of the box.

If I do decide to buy a television, it will be because I want to get one for a reason, not “just because”. That’s a crap reason for doing anything, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Do you have a TV? Do you watch it much? What kind of programmes? Am I missing out? Please comment!

Picture credit: Striatic on Flickr

Tags: popular culture, television, TV