I have just come back from a cycle trip along an oft cycled path. So oft cycled we have now scored three items of useful clothing, in three weeks, from the same area of fence which borders York racecourse. This is a prime location as drunken racegoers are often in their very best clothes and tend to fling them round their heads while whooping and staggering back to the train station. And dropping them it would seem.

I now have a Danish designer top and a  hoodie and today, we scored a grey Gap cardigan. Only the Danish top can I actually wear. The hoodie is for a man and the grey Gap cardigan is one of those silly tiny things that just sit on your shoulders and aren’t meant to button up. (They aren’t, are they?)
Gutter-hunting mum is not selfish with her finds. Hoodie and Gap cardi are in the wash as I write and will be passed on to a friend and someone very small in due course.

They may just go straight to the charity shop though. I have discovered friends are occasionally not as grateful as I feel they should be when offered something that has originated from an old fence.

I have found many many many things in ditches and gutters – as well as fences – and memorably, a few months ago, in a holly bush by the road. You try holding onto a large and heavy bike with a child cackling: “Mummy’s in the hedge” to the passers-by while reaching through thorns for a sad rag of black material. Which turned out to be a reasonably nice if little smelly T shirt which has now found a good home. (I was vague about its place of origin when passing it on that time).

I’d like to go back further and give you a list of all the useful items I have found over the years, but Old Mum’s memory is a shocker. Here’s the ones I can remember (from the last few months in other words):

1: Racecourse wardrobe as described.

2: Broken toy truck. This morning. Location: Verge on road near my house. Condition: Not great but it still has four wheels and is pleasingly mobile. It also makes an interesting rattling noise when pushed and is able to support clods of soil as it moves. It is currently our Favourite Garden Toy.

3: Nice H and M zip up top with a leopard on it. Age 10-12. Original Location: Bench at Local park. Condition: Pristine and smelling faintly of teen perfume. Suspected origin: Nearly Teen girl with too much pocket money or too big a clothing allowance left it behind on the grass when lolling about discussing One Direction with her friends before spotting another friend in another area of the park and running to see her screeching: “Oh My God I Love You Sophie eeekkk” and then forgot her other friends and went off with Sophie. Having enough other tops at home not to bother returning to look for it (and silly parents who easily forgive and do not make her clean windows up and down her street until she has earned enough money to buy herself a new one) there it stayed. End location: The only 10-12 yr old girl I know lives next door. I passed a really nice blue spotty Next top (It was another racecourse fence find, I forgot that one)  to her mum last year who, possibly not feeling there were many options open to her in the moment, said thank you and appeared grateful. I have never seen little girl next door wearing it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned I’d had to beat it with a stick in the garden to get the mud out of it…

4: Large rosewood document box. Location: By a bin on main road in York. Condition: Great and turned out to contain 25 bamboo garden canes which was a bonus. Suspected origin. Person moving house just couldn’t bothered with item left behind as Removal Van chugged off into the distance. Usefulness: Is main toy box container for everything of train or car origin.

5: Gardening gloves, a whole wheelbarrow (an interesting one. Couldn’t get it on my bike so relayed location to gardening friend with a car and donated it by proxy), spanners, a claw hammer and 3 boxes of A4 paper (slightly damp with a couple of slug colonies under the lids). Location: Various. Condition: I have always been disappointed by the condition of tools. I spot them poking out temptingly from tufts of grass, wheel my bike closer, do the snatch-and-shove-into-bike-basket manoeuvre and later find them rusty, sometimes with essential bits missing. But the rules of the road mean I cannot simply fling them back into a new tuft as I continue on my way. They must be disposed of properly. That’s the pay back.
Suspected origin: Literally off the back of a lorry. The reason you see so many pairs of work gloves in verges, for example, is because the workmen throw them onto the back of the truck with a whoop, as they mop their weary brows at the end of a long day, and then zoom off at speed to the pub. Balanced precariously on the top of a lawnmower, digger, loads of rubble, the glove doesn’t stand a chance.

I am not a litter collector. I am a resourceful person who finds treasure amongst the chaos. It is my reward for cycling everywhere. I find jewels in verges. People speeding past in their cars see nothing at all. (The reason I mention jewels is that for some years, as I cycled a particular route – 24 miles each way setting off in the dark down country roads into the city, through rain and hail and so on – I drifted near to Gutter Obsession. When I found myself stopping to undo stinking old chip wrappers (I had built up in my head a complicated scenario where a newly engaged couple had a ferocious row in the car on the way back from the jewellers, and the lady had flung her new platinum ring, still wrapped in swathes of tissue paper into the verge as they sped past) I told myself I needed to be a bit more discerning. I banned myself from scanning verges for a whole week.

6: Extra large Peter Storm green anorak. Location: gutter in Kings Cross. Condition: rain soaked and covered in leaves. Suspected origin: Fell out of car window/back of bike, a rambler threw it away in disgust when reaching Islington and seeing far superior anoraks on the backs of rich residents: Total. Twenty years on it is still my anorak of choice. I LOVE it. It goes everywhere with me and has a million uses. Only yesterday it double up as picnic blanket and animal rescue gloves when we came across a frog with bleeding feet in the park. (It had been strimmed).

(Interesting note: When I found this anorak  I was earning an absolute fortune on national newspapers and magazines. Poverty was not the reason I fell upon this free item with such gusto.)

A note about Skips. There is less of a moral complexity surrounding Skip Ratting. It is less underhand. But I do very well from them and cannot resist a hunt. This week for example I found an iron plant holder in the shape of a penny farthing sticking out temptingly from a skip full of old planks.

Hesitating a little as it was a skip in a very narrow residential street with the residents just a curtain twitch away from observing, I leaned in a bit closer and was greatly encouraged by a rubbish collector who was emptying bins nearby:

“Ger on with you, ger it took,” he called. So I did. I was an interesting sight. Cycling along with a large bicycle sticking out of my bicycle basket  – made further surrreal as I was on my way to the bike shop for new brake pads so at one point was actually in a shop full of bikes with a bike in a bike basket. On a bike.

Anyway, I can’t be bothered to try to remember 30 years of skip ratting now. Just be assured I’ve amassed enough to furnish entire houses over the years from these glorious big treasure boxes.

The more moralistic among you, may have thought at some point while reading this: But wait! Some kind passer-by put the item of clothing on the fence for its owner to find again!

“They will return within the hour! Their faces will light up with joy as they are reunited with their stinky Danish top, their leopard-face jacket, their smashed up truck.”

In the beginning I actually had a three day rule. If it is still there the next time I pass, I told myself, fair game. But all that happened was that the item, which was always still there, had gone from reasonable condition to soggy slug infested mess. I know how people are. The smallest effort seems too great for so many. Much easier to buy new than try to find old – or make use of old. They don’t return within the hour, they resign it to being lost and forget all about it. Believe me.

Anyway, I still think that me zooming past on my trusty gutter-hunting steed behind all these foolish and forgetful people, scooping up their items deftly into my bike basket and finding a use for them, is such a great help to society in general that it outweighs the tiny possibility that I found something just minutes after it was lost and removed it just minutes before its original owner returned to find it.

Its not an easy job after all. Very few things can be used straight away – you need to put in the work. The Danish designer top was in good condition but smelt shocking. The owner had obviously started his day by dousing himself in pricy pungent aftershave with a deodorant chaser in a clashing scent before heading off to the races, re applying the deodorant and chucking pints of ale down his front while smoking 200 Benson and Hedges as the excitement of the racing reached fever pitch. It took two washes for the fag and ale smell to go and five washes on it still wafts faint waves of Eau de chemical perfume in its wake.

And gutter hunting can be physically hard (ref: hollybushes and wobbling bicycles) and really quite stressful. Once you have found an item in a place it doesn’t belong, you cannot hang around checking its condition before deciding whether to acquire it. It’s a swift exchange. You stop the bike, grab the item, thrust it in your bike basket and pedal off, fast, stopping further up the road, a good few minutes later to find out what you actually have. I don’t really want to be seen pulling dripping old t shirts out of trees.

I am extreme and fearless but I am not entirely without shame.

P.S If you do not quite believe Old Mum can really have found so much Useful Stuff in such a short amount of time recently, I am going to take photos of them. There. See Mean Old Mum category for Regular Gutter hunting updates and Gallery!