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Here’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).
It’s probably too late to pitch Channel 5, though, because “Extreme Cheapskates” – a US import – already exists. I watched a bit, while thinking about the Swabian butt theft, and some of these people are, to put it mildly, exceptionally dedicated to thrift. There’s a woman who flosses with her own hair (it must be freakishly strong, what does she use on it?) and keeps chewed gum in the freezer to reuse multiple days, another – apparently a millionaire! – who pees in jars to keep her water bills down, and a man who does the washing up and warms soup in his hot tub.
Other so-called cheapskate tricks, though, seem perfectly reasonable. Using roadkill for its fur sounds sensible (it’s dead anyway), as does reusing bathwater or keeping jeans in the freezer instead of washing them. Over time, I have started to find frugality more appealing myself, albeit inconsistently: I will place a leftover half potato on a saucer in the fridge with a reverence usually reserved for holy relics, but spend £4 on a basic cake I could make for pennies. But I certainly get more and more pleasure from minor domestic acts of meanness: I hoard and reuse plastic food bags and boxes eternally (microplastics be damned; I’m sure something else will kill me first) and redunk teabags, though purely for my own consumption and mostly camomile, which tastes of nothing in the first place, so no harm done. I even dunk myself in my husband’s bathwater occasionally.
Does that sound weird and gross? Maybe, maybe not – there’s a spectrum, from last days of Rome profligacy to making lasagne in the dishwasher (another Extreme Cheapskate trick), and we are mostly somewhere in the middle. The extremely frugal by choice, though, measuring out their lives in coffee spoons pinched from the work canteen, are mostly seen as comical, silly and slightly sad.
We have internalised an idea that lavishness is life-affirming – live a little, use the good bath oil, as Nora Ephron said (impossible: I’ll die with the good bath oil dusty and unopened, taking a grim last satisfaction at having saved it). But isn’t the opposite true? Aren’t the real sad weirdos the ones throwing yacht foam parties and sending Katy Perry into space? Appreciating every drop and crumb and being careful can be life-affirming, and life- (on Earth, in the wider sense) prolonging. We’re not facing the kind of horror we are seeing in Gaza, but this summer, UK farmers are sounding alarm bells at the prospect of poor harvests and the difficulties they are facing feeding livestock, and I have just read a bleak French news story about the effect of extreme heat on poultry farms (apparently 750,000 chickens died there as a result of 2023’s less dramatic heatwaves; worse is predicted this year). Nicking your neighbour’s water isn’t OK (and disturbingly end of days), and I’m not up for hair flossing – I don’t even have hair to floss with. But when natural resources are becoming scarcer, a “scarcity mindset” starts to make a lot of sense and the extremely frugal might have the last laugh.
