WALDEN’S WORLD

Hair salons? No, it’s charity shops for me

If you were out and about in west London yesterday, you might have spotted me walking a large plastic unicorn down a high street … en route to Oxfam.

Fernando has served my daughter well but, after two years, this interactive toy’s “merry melodies and phrases” make us both want to put our fists through a wall. Even “rhinos are just fat unicorns” now fails to raise a smile.

Fernando is just one of the lockdown outcasts to be donated to my local charity shops as they reopened yesterday. And I made a point of showing the bags lined up in the hall to my husband before I dropped them off. Because only once I’ve decluttered the house will I feel allowed to re-clutter it with the junk I intend to amass this week. Not for me the late-night queues seen in Oxford Street on Sunday as 20 million Britons prepared to indulge in “spreetail therapy” across the country. I know from previous lockdowns where to head first; Oxfam, Cancer Research UK, the Octavia Foundation, Fara and the Royal Trinity Hospice.

Not only will you be helping the high street recoup the £30 billion lost to Covid, but you’ll be able to snap up Chanel jeans for £20 or a Majolica water pitcher – in the shape of a giant frog – for whatever they care to charge. And if that isn’t the definition of happiness, then the knowledge a little girl, somewhere, will be inflicting Fernando and his “merry melodies and phrases” on her unsuspecting parents is.