sophie heawood

Just finished a novel called Room by Emma Donoghue, written in the voice of a five-year-old child trapped in one room with his mother all his life - no, honestly, it’s amazing. I was claustrophic at the start, but not by the end. He makes the spaces wider. Also recently finished Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which taught me everything I ever wanted to know about New York in the 60s and 70s, and the Chelsea Hotel, about committing to your art, and being poor, and being humble, and pure, and all the other things that I’m not.

My lowest point of 2010: When I had been on so many flights for so many days that I had completely lost track of which city I was flying to.  So I got off the plane, walked into the terminal with the other passengers, and then panicked internally.  As they headed for baggage reclaim I instead dived straight into the ladies loos, locked myself in a cubicle, sat on the bog, and got my Blackberry out. I turned on the GPS navigation and kept pressing ZOOM OUT until it went from showing that I was in terminal two to actually telling me which airport I was in, in which world. As I recall it was Phoenix, Arizona, The Desert, The US, The Universe, The Wide Sheltering Galaxy of Gods. 

Of course, there were lower points than that. When my friend in London died of cancer in his 30s. And his devoted wife Geri updated his Facebook page to let us know that that “we lost our Jerome today”, that his battle with sarcoma was over, that she and his family were so grateful for all our support these last few months. By the time I saw the post, only shortly after she’d written it, somebody had already clicked that they “liked” this.

And so I sat there in bed in LA by myself, having just woken up and switched on my laptop, weeping, unable to believe that Jerome had actually gone and died and wasn’t just going to keep posting funny updates about the weird spluttering noises coming from the other beds during chemo night at the Royal Marsden forever. But during those next few days when his death was too big and too unfathomable to rage against, I found myself stumbling around in a sad swearing fury that somebody had “liked” this.

My friend David wants to write a guidebook to social etiquette in the iPhone age. I’m thinking of offering to write the chapter on not “liking” it when somebody’s young happy husband drops dead.

I spend a lot of my life in what Brits call charity or junk shops, and what Americans call thrift stores. In England you go to Oxfam or the British Heart Foundation; here in LA you go to Goodwill or Out of the Closet, (which my friend Ki and I call The Aids Shop, because we are five.) 

Anyway, I’ve been a repeat offender in charity shops since I was about 13 and developed an obsession with wearing oversized blazers that always made my grandmother protest, “Ugh darling, you can’t possibly buy that, a man surely DIED in it.” I suppose if you’re a granny, you know that charity shops are where clothes go when you die, but 13-year-olds with limited pocket money are immortal.

Here is what you should buy in charity shops:

1) VASES. Old dead people always have the best vases and you can pick them up for about dirt cheap. There is literally no need to ever buy a vase in a normal shop ever again. Charity shops are OVERFLOWING with the stemmy buggers.

2) BAKING DISHES that look a bit like Le Creuset casseroles and may in fact be just that if you’re lucky. Also any sort of glass dishes to bake things in. Or trays, or eggcups. But NOT mugs. You must only buy the mugs if you never had a father and need to pretend that somebody in your family went on a corporate away-day to SUNSHINE GOLF TAMPA RECRUITMENT JAMBOREE in 1987.

3) BOOKS about gardening. This isn’t proving so true in America, where the books sections are full of self-help tomes about how to get your meth addict boyfriend to call you when he says he will, but in England you can always score the most amazing books about flowers.

4) BLAZERS, macs and woollen winter coats. Men’s or women’s. Thin enough for tennis or thick enough for Siberia. Always amazing. I think every coat I own comes from a charity shop and people always ask me where they’re from, so they must be brilliant. Unless it’s the stench of death that’s attracting all the attention. Hard to know for sure.

5) Specifically: this season’s camel coats! I’ve just been reading Vogue and it’s full of eulogies for autumn 2010’s camel-coloured wool coats. So I went straight out and found one for ten dollars at a Goodwill in the Valley, and another for 20 bucks in one of those council thrift stores on Fairfax, West Hollywood. The latter one is particularly fine. Proper vintage American and looks like it cost ten times that amount.

In fact, here it is: 

6) ART. Even if you don’t like any of the paintings in there, take a close look at the frame. I often buy crap paintings with a nice frame and just yank the art out of it when I get home. Sometimes I do feel a bit evil, as the picture tends to be of some soggy begonias that someone’s uncle painted while his wife lay in the hospital wearing all of his blazers and dying, dying, dying. But it’s no more evil than wasting your life on the internet, and yet here we all are, rolling in the mud again.

7) DESK LAMPS. I realise that buying second-hand electrical goods gives you the winning card in the How To Die In A House Fire game, but all I can say is that I am Not Dead Yet. Unlike all the men who once owned my coats.

So, all in all. Charity shops are full of death, but a nice sort of death that really wants to come to life again. The world has limited resources - why not buy stuff that already smells a bit?