Andy Richardson: Behold the ingenuity of the hoarders
Hopeless hoarder. Those two words sum up this writer, no doubtless many readers.
They explain why the shed contains three claw hammers, a roll of vintage string, unused shovels, spare pieces of skirting board and 13 half-pots of paint.
Covid-19 has created the perfect storm. With the DIY shops closed and spare time to spring clean, hoarded items are relevant. While the world searches for string, vac pac bags, wooden trusses and a treadmill; I am in abundance. Plants have been trained, skirting boards fixed and paint applied to walls. Now I just need to find a use for four cordless screwdrivers – none of which has a charger.
It is not just a great time to be a hoarder, it’s also the perfect time to be bald. While the young resemble cavemen and distressed women wonder what happened to their stylish coiffeur, men with male pattern baldness relax.
As a global shortage of masks takes hold, people are making their own. And so supermarkets have become classrooms for anthropology as DIY-maskers hit the shops. One man in a mobility scooter wore a clear plastic bag over his head with a tiny breathing hole, a woman fixed a conical party hat to her nose, looking like a Christmas Party attendee who’d been on the sherry. A man wearing yellow washing up gloves wore a paper bag with two slits pushed through for eyes while an ingenious shopper – presumably an inventor by trade – ‘wore’ a 10 litre water bottle, with the bottom and back cut out for his head and neck.
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The best, however, were two Americans whose photographs appeared online. One wore a full scuba diving suit complete with oxygen tanks but sadly no flippers. Another wore a latex suit, high heels and a gas mask, which had previously only been worn at weekends in the privacy of her own home. Was that what Donald Trump was talking about when he told people to improvise?
As people look back on the weirdest March of all time, poetry is flourishing with traditional verses given a new spin. Thirty days hath September; April June and November. All the rest have 31; except March, which had 8,000.
People are also spotting design faults in items we believed were faultless. One man asked: Why don’t toasters have a window so you can see how toasted your bread is?
