Last Sunday the Captain and I went to the recycling centre with a boot full of dustbin bags. While we were unloading, we espied some wood leaning against a railing and began to salivate. Wood does this to us, on behalf of our our hungry stove. Please could we have it, we asked the unloader and re-loaded it into Vivian. More wood was sighted and given readily. Within a few minutes, other Sunday recyclers were bringing us bits of furniture, broken beds, dismantled kitchens. A woman placed a bundle of satiny, white, 2x4s into my arms as tenderly as if she was handing me her child. After a butcher's block irresistibly appeared, it's sweet, soon to be non-owner went home and returned with the matching three-metre work surface of the kitchen he had built fourteen years ago. Another chap recognised us as belonging to " that big purple boat" and introduced himself as a neighbour with a cruiser in the hard-standing. The following day, true to his promise to bring his wood to us instead of the recycling centre, he turned up with a bag which kept the library warm for a day.
How kind people are. Those who take the trouble to recycle in the first place are pretty much guaranteed as friendly as their eco credentials suggest and, like us, are glad if their discards and pre-loveds can have another life - even if that life is to be consumed by fire.
Sitting in the car queue on the re-run, the Captain sighed over a Christmas tree stand (I'm afraid I wasn't very sympathetic) and an interesting looking box being carried to the bins and was in an agony of disappointment that he hadn't beaten the supervisor to a 60s chair.
I jumped out and loitered by the parking bay to await the arrival of a load of planks we had seen sticking out of the back of another vehicle.
Linger long enough and you could furnish a home.
Or find a net to catch flys and wasps...
Here is a place where someone's junk can become another's treasure.
Here, where no money changes hands and the transaction is sealed with a smile of pleasure, the rule is, that until an object is actually in the tip, anyone can claim it. For here, salvaging is a matter of enormous satisfaction and delight as well as a matter of ethics.
The captain and I like nothing better than foraging in skips, acquiring ownerless objects from streets, scrabbling through pyres. There may be laws about such things but in any event, these are some of the treasures we have gleaned...
wonderful decorations...
wine rack, unfortunately,sans wine...
Our Little Ship will be a fantasia of styles and objects inherited, found, given, reclaimed. In the visual arts, bricolage is a French term meaning a construction or creation made from a diverse range of available materials or things.
Yes, Davenham is a work of art.
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