I’ve often laughed at those who are voluntarily extremely frugal. But in a world of dwindling resources, aren’t the real weirdos the ones throwing yacht parties and sending Katy Perry into space?
H
ere’s a silly season story for you: a 51-year-old woman in the German town of Spaichingen in Swabia is under criminal investigation on suspicion of filling watering cans from her neighbour’s water butt. The total estimated value of the purloined water: €0.15.
It’s wonderfully daft. She allegedly hid behind a bin to evade detection and, according to reports, the police declared, with Solomonic gravity: “Once it is in the barrel, [the water] no longer belongs to the heavens.” Who knows what motivated this nano-crime: a moment of midlife madness? Some kind of grudge? But water is metered in Germany so there might a kind of extreme parsimony at work (Swabian housewives are legendarily thrifty, apparently).
Extreme frugality can be quite funny. Not the kind motivated by financial hardship, which is as unfunny as it gets (and deepening and widening in the UK, with “Dickensian levels” of child poverty being reported by the children’s commissioner). But the other kind – the Uncle Scrooge variety, where people choose the teabag-redunking, loo-roll-square-counting life – is presented as an entertaining personality type, the kind you might see spotlighted on a Channel 5 show (perhaps set in Yorkshire; after all, my people aren’t famous for their largesse).
