It's Christmas night and the kids are in bed. Mark is reading about Darwin, and I've just finished trimming the torn edges from the used wrapping paper, which I then folded neatly and put in the wrapping paper place. What has happened to me? Firstly that I have a dedicated storage facility for gift wrap, and secondly that I keep the old stuff. Mark says he remembers our first Christmas together, way back in the mid-90s, when he had to stifle his natural instinct to save used paper, for fear that I would think it ... I don't know exactly, nerdy? Unnecessarily parsimonious? Now here I am trimming already reused and - if it's ours - recycled paper. How the profligate have learned austerity.
The thing is, I keep thinking that the world is changing in line with me, and suffer continual pricks of surprise when I find it's not so. Just a few weeks ago, I went to a movie with a friend and her sister on her birthday (Atonement, again: hell, I even reuse films). We went back to her house for the present-giving ceremony. I was I was pleased with my effort, which I thought prettily combined decorousness with ethics: a lovely old cup and saucer that some clever person had found in a charity shop and turned into a tea-scented candle, so reused and, in a sense, recycled. I had wrapped it in a piece of pre-used - though not overly crumpled - tissue paper. Purple, I think. Anyway, my friend's sister looked at my wrapping and creased her - rather perfect, Oxford-educated - brow. 'I'm afraid that I couldn't use paper again,' she said. 'It would take half the fun out of unwrapping a present.'
I think I used to feel like that. Before I got smug.
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