A lifetime's supply
Recently I was at Hobbycraft and was buying, amongst other things, glue sticks for the glue gun. The cashier very helpfully pointed out that the fifty-pack, rather than the twelve-pack, was better value. "Thank you," I said, "but that would be basically a lifetime's supply of glue sticks."
It's taken me well over fifteen years to use the glue sticks we had. They've moved house three times. I suspect they weren't even all used and we do still have glue sticks - it's just my wife isn't very good at looking for things. Fifty glue sticks would, at the current rate of crafting, take me to well over ninety years old. My niece would inherit them.
The data plan on my phone, for which I pay £10 a month, is now 20gb. I use about 500mb of that. It is, essentially, unlimited data. On the old-fashioned pay-as-you-go system that would do me for over three years. I get unlimited calls but on a previous plan 100 minutes was basically unlimited calls. When I was a kid we had to wait until after six for the cheaper phone rates. When my mum was at university she had to ring home from the payphone in the street. Instant communication, access to all the world's collected knowledge - this is magic.
I often joke there's enough paracetamol stashed around our house to take down a horse. People died for want of this stuff. It's 30p a packet. I've got LED lightbulbs sitting in my cupboard with a combined 60,000 hours of bright, non-smelly, non-smoking light and I might never use them because they can't be switched on by my voice. Henry VIII would have lost his tiny mind.
My mum, like many, has a 'spare bits of wood' collection in her garage. She recently triumphantly told me she had used some to edge a jigsaw puzzle tray for my nephew. Great! Forty years of collecting wood to use a metre of it. This is a mentality of people old enough to have had ration cards, I tell myself.
A friend needed some jam jars for a party. My wife asked if we had any spare. My moment had come. I arranged all the jars in the kitchen. "Where the hell," my wife said, "did all these come from?" I probably cannot tease my mum about her wood collection.
I've been framing some of our art and got some frame tacks and framing tape. If I don't lose them that's it, that's a lifetime of framing supplies. Hanging onto stuff is the rub, especially when moving house and in smaller places. Some stuff doesn't keep well - perhaps the tape won't last all my life. I have housed a big pack of envelopes for several years, long beyond the glue going bad. Now I have to sellotape them closed. If I ever finish that packet I shall be buying them singly from the Post Office as and when I need them.
Wellness influencers have ruined the word 'abundance' for me but my goodness, there's no other word for it.