Alice Winterhold
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Ooops
🕑 Added 2025-03-11 14:13:22 +0000 UTCSilly me, I went and forgot to paste the text portion of my video post. I’m so professional and brilliant!
So I thought I’d muse a little on going out to the thrift shops, which is pretty thrilling as I’m sure you’ll agree. It’s funny because I see a lot of internet type people posting videos of themselves doing exciting things, more and more exciting things in-fact, like some kind of never-ending game of one-upsmanship; then there’s me who’s writing a blog about going to the Charity shop. Thing is, for me that’s quite a big deal. I haven’t done anything like that in like a year maybe? I’m past the point of feeling sad about it though, I kinda think it’s nice in a way; that I can get such joy and novelty out of such a simple activity. Maybe that’s what makes it into something that people feel like it’s worth watching? Maybe we’re not looking for videos of new and exciting things, we’re looking for videos of people finding joy in something. A joy shared is double the joy, so it goes.
I like charity shops because the objects for sale all have some untold history to them. The Cliff Richard mug collection is a great example of this. Someone out there collected Cliff Richard mugs, why? Were they a huge fan of Cliff? Maybe it was a running joke between friends, some poor sod cursed to Receive yet another Mug of Cliff for their birthday to clog up their cupboard? Maybe they found themselves just owning a small collection of mugs by pure happenstance and ran with it; It’s fun to wonder, investigating the contents of a stranger’s home without being quite so invasive. A museum of untitled unknowns and curios. And you can buy them if you’re so inclined, add your own history to an interesting item.
Yes.
Then there’s the melancholy of wondering how it came to belong to the shop. With children’s toys it’s fairly nice, they were likely simply outgrown by the previous owns and deemed not sentimental enough to be worth keeping. With the more refined items, you know the reason is likely more sombre. I think that makes the item more powerful though, someone care enough about this weird little ornament or book or dvd player enough to keep it in their possession until they moved on, that’s gotta be a pretty strong testimony to the quality of the item if nothing else.
In short, you should try it one day if you don’t already partake, not as an exercise in treasure hunting, but as a little snoop into the life of countless unknown strangers
Comments
Alex
Sounds like a good idea for a short film. The items and the stories. And the story part could drift off into fiction. With your creative mind it would be brilliant.
Kevin Barbieux
I once asked the young lady working at a coffee shop why she was always so happy, regardless of her customers attitude. She said that “happy people make people happy”. That was 15 years ago, and I still vividly remember her.
Samwise
That's a beautiful way of thinking about it. Thank you.
