I’m 61, and I’m in love with a tee-shirt.
I mean love in the sense of ‘being deeply committed and connected to someone or something’ rather than in any even deeper or even weirder way. I came to understand that this was love, the other day, when I found myself running a virtually empty washing machine so that I didn’t have to wait a week to put the shirt back on again, after I had already worn it for the two previous days.
It’s a strange one, as it started life in unhappy circumstances in a shop in Calle Lavalle, Buenos Aires, after I had just been robbed of the pack on my back, which contained a couple of old spares.
Somehow, that tee shirt and I combined to complete the book I was writing over the next ten months. In some irrational way, it just seemed to me that the days when I wore it were days of progress, and its pale blue form has been on my back for a third of the days since I acquired it.
Tee shirts are odd like that. Some time ago, I read a book called The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy (Pietra Rivoli, John Wiley and Sons), which I heartily recommend if you’re interested in how your and my species complicates simple things and messes them up. It traces one specific T-shirt back through the supply chain- the retailer, the wholesaler, the importer, (all in the USA) the manufacturer, (in China), and the cotton grower (Texas), and comes to the conclusion that that $5.99 white T-shirt with a flamboyant red parrot on it had crossed the Pacific (twice) and been subsidised by one government or another at just about every stage of its production. No matter the simple joy of the girl for whom it had been a present, it had managed to be in the centre of a trail of irrational behaviour, unfairness and- every now and again- sheer dishonesty.
In the second edition, she traces the travels of that shirt forward, investigating what happens to it once its owner has tired of it and placed it in one of those clothes recycling bins you find in American mall car parks.
The answer, sadly, is that it joins 50 million or so others, gets bailed up in a giant warehouse in New York (subsidised, of course) and is sent off to Tanzania in East Africa in a container to help clothe the grateful locals, and in the process kill the domestic Tanzanian textile industry stone dead. Ironically, no one, not even a red in tooth and claw capitalist, not even the Chinese, can compete with a freebie.
It’s one of many examples of the danger of kindness, like Paul Theroux’s description in Dark Star Safari of the havoc that the un-thought through Peace Corps projects wreaked on the Malawian infrastructure back in the sixties, and all the other examples that you and I can think of that may or may not be connected with Bob Geldof.
Here’s one more, and it drives me bonkers every time I think about it.
There are 8 million cats in the UK.
Those cats kill 27 million songbirds each year (RSPB)
One in fifteen households have membership of the RSPB
Which points theoretically to about 2 million songbirds being killed each year by cats belonging to members of the RSPB.
In an ideal world, these households should save the £60.00 membership fee and just let their cats get on with the job.
70% of every bird on earth is now poultry, basically being bred for us to eat or harvest eggs from.
It seems to me that the other 30%, comprising about 11,000 species last time I looked, deserves a bit more conservation, especially here in the country that helped invent the term.
A collar with a bell on it would work.
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