Mere Muggles

“Well, my gran brought me up and she’s a witch … but the family thought I was all-Muggle for ages. My Great Uncle Algie kept trying to catch me off my guard and force some magic out of me – he pushed me off the end of Blackpool pier once, I nearly drowned – but nothing happened until I was eight. Great Uncle Algie came round for dinner, and he was hanging me out of an upstairs window by the ankles when my Great Auntie Enid offered him a meringue and he accidentally let go. But I bounced – all the way down the garden and into the road. They were all really pleased, Gran was crying, she was so happy. And you should have seen their faces when I got in here – they thought I might not be magic enough to come, you see. Great Uncle Algie was so pleased he bought me my toad.”

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)

 

Harry is finally visually represented with the correct eye colour, courtesy of the talented Mouri at newgrounds.com.

Well, maybe it was another stroke of J. K. Rowling’s genius; maybe it was pure coincidence. Either way, articulation of the fact finds its way onto my Facebook newsfeed at reasonably regular intervals, and usually raises a smile. Here’s the deal: canonically, Voldemort exercised control of the Ministry of Magic during the academic year 1997-98;¹ under his regime, Muggle-born witches and wizards were not recognised as genuine members of the wizarding world, so that records of their being so were altered or purged; Muggle-born witches and wizards resident in the United Kingdom typically don’t discover their true magical identity until they receive a letter inviting them to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry at the age of eleven; and therefore, for those of us who were less than eleven years old at the time in question – for the very same generation, in other words, that grew up reading Harry Potter and longing to be part of the wizarding world – there remains a chance that any one of us could be a Muggle-born witch or wizard whose existence was erased from Ministry of Magic records during Voldemort’s reign of terror. There remains a chance, for every one of us, that we really should have received that Hogwarts letter and set off from Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters on the first of September to receive our magical education. Take heart, millennial Potterheads; there’s hope for us yet: we may yet turn out to be more than mere Muggles.

Because nobody wants to be a Muggle, does she? Of course, Rowling’s fictional universe is far from the only one in which there exists a hidden community of special people endowed with extraordinary powers – the same is true, for instance, in the Percy Jackson series, the Mortal Instruments, the Children of the Red King,² and countless others – but it’s probably the best example merely by virtue of how well known it is. Some people are magical; others are mundane. Some people have the supernatural abilities; others just don’t. They’re just the ordinary, run-of-the-mill rank and file; they don’t get to cast the spells and fight the battles and do the cool things that make it into the stories; they’re just the unremarkable randomers there to bulk out the background while the special heroes get on with the stuff that really matters. They’re mere Muggles. And nobody, having had a glimpse of the wizarding world – having come to understand that the world we see hides an incredible supernatural reality – wants to be a Muggle. Being a Muggle means one cannot truly participate in the wizarding world; instead, one can only observe. And as fun as it might be to ooh and aah at the astonishing, it’s surely got to be more fun to actually be part of the astonishing oneself.

Happily for us, there are – if you’ll permit the analogy – no Muggles in the Church.

But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it says, When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men … And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ…

That’s from Paul’s letter to the Christian community at Ephesus.³ I owe credit for the concept of this post both to my supervisor, who recently took a few of us through the chapter in question, and to one of the aforementioned ‘few of us’, who subsequently described a tendency, upon looking at lists of gifts for ministry in the New Testament, to assume that some Christians had those, and the rest of us were – well, Muggles.

It’s a tendency I recognise. One scans through a list like that and thinks, oh crikey, I’m not sure I’m up to doing any of those jobs. I’m not denying that God bestows each of these supernatural abilities on some of the individuals he has chosen to be holy and blameless before him, but I can’t see that I really fit the bill for any of the roles in question. And you know what, I think if you were to ask most of my Christian friends, they’d say the same thing about themselves. I know about these great heroes of the faith who do the cool stuff and have their stories told, but that doesn’t sound much like most of the Christians I know, least of all myself. Aren’t there some of us who are just the ordinary, run-of-the-mill rank and file? Aren’t there some of us who just pootle along quietly in the background – turning up, and maybe helping out here and there, but nothing too dramatic – while the movers and shakers get on with the super-important ministry stuff? Isn’t there any room in the Church for Muggles?

Well, from the aforementioned Ephesians passage, no, there isn’t. Grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift – and from what follows, it’s clear that we’re talking about gifts for ministry here, not the gift of salvation (which has in any case already been dealt with in the previous chapters, and had a line drawn under it in the form of a brief doxology, forever and ever, amen). To each one of us. There is no wriggling out of that. If you belong to the body, grace has been given you to carry out ministry of some description.

None of us in the Church is a mere Muggle. None of us is lacking supernatural abilities. None of us is relegated to only observing the astonishing things God does instead of fully participating in them. In fact, let me rephrase that: none of us is permitted to only observe instead of to fully participate. If the reason our gifts for ministry were given – and they have, if the Bible is true, been given – is in order to equip our fellow-believers to exercise theirs; and to build one another up; and to bring about unity among us; and to increase our knowledge of the one we worship; and to grow one another into maturity of faith; and to cause each other to reflect more fully in our own person the perfection of our Lord … if the reason God gave us these gifts was in order that we might use them for these purposes, then not to do so frankly constitutes disobedience and neglect of duty, not to mention a disservice to our brothers and sisters.

Christian, you are not a mere Muggle – not because you’re one of the special heroes instead, but because God didn’t design his Church to be divided into two categories of people, the remarkable and the mundane. You are not a mere Muggle, and neither is any of your fellow-believers. You are not a mere Muggle, and you are not permitted to only observe the proceedings of ministry, only to benefit from them, rather than fully participating yourself. But more to the point, you are not a mere Muggle, because Christ gives grace to each one of us: he who calls us to exercise our gifts for ministry in service of his body, his people, is the same one who apportioned those gifts in the first place, precisely so that they might be used for such a purpose. These are gifts of grace; they don’t require any worthiness or innate capability on our part, any more than the gift of our salvation does. We are no more responsible for our own spiritual giftings than the witches and wizards of the Potterverse are for their own magical abilities.

Nobody wants to be a Muggle. And in the Church, nobody is. Now that raises a truer smile than any daft headcanon about a misplaced Hogwarts letter, right guys?

Footnotes

¹ Here’s a handy timeline of key events of the Potterverse for your consultation: https://www.hp-lexicon.org/timeline/character-timelines/harry-potter-timeline/. I’ll warn you now that it contains Cursed Child spoilers.

² Also known as the Charlie Bone series: http://www.jennynimmo.me.uk/CharlieBone.html. I’m surprised that no cinema studio appears to snapped up the rights to this one yet.

³ Do check out the whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+4&version=ESVUK.  

The Truth About Lying

Sheldon:         Remember how Leonard told you we couldn’t come to your performance because we were attending a symposium on molecular positronium?

Penny:             I remember ‘symposium’.

Sheldon:         Yes, well, he lied.

Penny:             Wait, what?

Sheldon:         He lied, and I’m feeling very uncomfortable about it.

Penny:             Well, imagine how I’m feeling.

Sheldon:         Hungry? Tired? I’m sorry, this really isn’t my strong suit.

The Big Bang Theory S1 E10, ‘The Loobenfeld Decay’ (2008)

 

Pinocchio. Because, you know, lying. Thanks to parrysuwanitch at freedigitalphotos.net.

So here’s a slightly crazy-sounding proposal for you all to run through your heresy filters: lying isn’t a sin.

What? Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it is. What about “you shall not bear false witness against your neighbour” (Exodus 20:16)? What about “you shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another” (Leviticus 19:11)? What about “no one who practises deceit shall dwell in my house; no one who utters lies shall continue before my eyes” (Psalm 101:7)? What about “lying lips are an abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 12:22)? What about “do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices” (Colossians 3:9)? And I hope you realise I’ve barely scratched the surface!

Ah. Well. Yes. Such evidence would, I grant you, appear to suggest that there’s an inherent sinfulness in deliberately stating something that isn’t true as if it were – for the purposes of this post, I’m dealing exclusively with lying defined as verbal assertion of something the speaker knows is untrue, and not other forms of deception or dissimulation – but, on the contrary, I think you’ll find that if we take all the scriptures together, including narrative passages…

You mean narrative passages like the one where Ananias and Sapphira are struck dead by God for lying to the apostles about the price they received for a field?¹

Actually, that wasn’t one I had in mind – but why don’t you keep going for a bit? How many occasions in the Bible where somebody speaks an untruth to somebody else can you think of, just off the top of your head?

All right, let’s go: Abraham lies to Pharaoh that Sarah isn’t his wife;² he tells the same lie to Abimelech;³ so does Isaac, about his own wife Rebekah;⁴ Jacob lies to Isaac that he’s Esau⁵ … um … Potiphar’s wife lies to him that Joseph assaulted her⁶ …

Keep going. There are a few in the books of Samuel.

Michal lies to Saul that David’s sick when, in fact, she’s let him out through the window and put a decoy in his bed;⁷ David lies to Achish king of Gath about where he’s been raiding;⁸ then during Absalom’s rebellion, Hushai the Archite lies to Absalom that he’s on his side rather than David’s, so that he can give him faulty counsel and keep David informed of his movements;⁹ and there’s a woman who hides the two messengers Hushai sends in a well and lies to Absalom’s men that they’re elsewhere…¹⁰

… and the two supporters in question consequently make it back to David, and can tell him to use the time that Hushai’s bad advice has bought him to cross the river and regroup. A combination of Hushai’s lying and the woman’s lying rather saves David’s skin there, don’t you think?

Well, sure – but just because God uses a lie someone tells in order to achieve his purposes, it doesn’t necessarily mean he endorses the telling of the lie.¹¹

Oh, of course not. Which is why I’m now going to give you two examples when God quite clearly does endorse the telling of the lie.

First, consider Shiphrah and Puah, the Israelite midwives ordered by Pharoah to carry out mass infanticide among their people: “But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, ‘Why have you done this, and let the male children live?’ The midwives said to Pharoah, ‘Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.’ So God dealt well with the midwives. And the people multiplied and grew very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.”¹² Note how we go directly from the midwives lying to Pharoah to cover up their illegal activity, to God blessing them for their actions.

That’s … uncomfortable.

It’s about to get even more uncomfortable. Consider now Rahab, who hid the spies Joshua sent to scout out the city of Jericho prior to Israel’s conquest of it: “Then the king of Jericho sent to Rahab, saying, ‘Bring out the men who have come to you, who entered your house, for they have come to search out all the land.’ But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. And she said, ‘True, the men came to me, but I did not know where they were from. And when the gate was about to be closed at dark, the men went out. I do not know where the men went. Pursue them quickly, for you will overtake them.’ But she had brought them up to the roof and hid them with the stalks of flax that she had laid in order on the roof.”¹³

Later, Joshua declares of Jericho: “And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall live, because she hid the messengers whom we sent.” And sure enough: “But Rahab the prostitute and her father’s household and all who belonged to her, Joshua saved alive. And she has lived in Israel to this day, because she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.”¹⁴

Concealing the spies is literally the one thing Rahab actively does in the narrative, and the fact that she lied in order to do it is presented, I think it’s fair to say, without ambiguity or embarrassment. This deed is then explicitly identified as the reason why she and her household are saved when every other living thing in Jericho is annihilated. On top of that, in the New Testament, Rahab’s concealment of the spies is referred to as a shining example of what faith in God looks like in action – not only once, but twice: “by faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies” (Hebrews 11:31); and “and in the same way was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way?” (James 2:25). How can we possibly both commend Rahab’s actions as an imitable demonstration of faith, and simultaneously characterise what she did as sinful? We’ve got to forsake one or the other – and since scripture unequivocally demands the former with reference to this specific scenario, the latter must be the one to go. It cannot be a sin in and of itself merely to deliberately state a falsehood as if it were true.

But what about “lying lips are an abomination to the LORD” and so forth?

I’ll deal with that next week, God willing. For the moment, I’ll leave you with this: where scripture condemns lying, it must be condemning something other than mere verbal assertion of something the speaker knows is untrue. As to what that is, why not have a ponder and a pray and a search of the scriptures over the next few days – and then see whether your conclusions match up with mine?

Footnotes

¹ That’s in Acts 5. I’m not doing hyperlinks to Bible passages this week because there would be an altogether unwieldy number of them.

² Genesis 12.

³ Genesis 20.

⁴ Genesis 26.

⁵ Genesis 27.

⁶ ♫ It’s all there in chapter thirty-nine of Genesis… ♫

⁷ 1 Samuel 19.

⁸ 1 Samuel 27.

⁹ 2 Samuel 16.

¹⁰ 2 Samuel 17.

¹¹ This is the approach that GotQuestions takes to this issue: https://www.gotquestions.org/white-lies.html. I don’t think they present the full picture.

¹² Exodus 1.

¹³ Joshua 2.

¹⁴ Joshua 6.

Ethical Shopping for Beginners

Donna:             A great big empire built on slavery.

The Doctor:     It’s not so different from your time.

Donna:             Oi, I haven’t got slaves.

The Doctor:     Who do you think made your clothes?¹

Doctor Who S4 E3, ‘Planet of the Ood’ (2008)

 

Behold my great and numerous purchases, she exhorts.

If you read my last ethical-shopping-themed post,² you might be forgiven for supposing me to be done with the preamble on that topic now. Not quite, I’m afraid. Three principles and three caveats strike me as necessary to outline before I proceed with the business of specific, practical recommendations; I’ll attempt to keep them brief.

For all I’ve been talking about ‘ethical shopping’ as if it’s obvious which concerns that entails, there are all sorts of competing factors that might lead a person to consider one purchase more ethically sound than another. These, I suggest, can be broadly categorised under the pleasingly (or possibly a tad cringingly) alliterative headlines of Product, People, and Planet.

Under Product, one considers questions like: do I actually need this? Could I borrow one for the duration I need it, or use something slightly different that I already own? Do I actually even want this, if I give myself a bit of cooling-off time after initially catching sight of it? Will I use it? Will I use it regularly? Will it fulfil the functions I want of it, or will I find myself buying a whole catalogue of other paraphernalia to supplement its capabilities? Is it good quality? Will it last me a long time? Is it repairable? Is it repairable in an actually meaningful way (because let’s be real here, I’m no handyman)? In short, is this something it’s actually worth my buying?

Under People, one considers questions like: were the people who made this paid fairly? Did they have good working conditions to make it in? What about the people who produced the raw materials it’s made from – be they farmed, mined, whatever? And as concerns the people to whom I’m actually handing over my cash, do I believe it’ll do more good in their hands than it would elsewhere? Whose pockets am I really lining here?

Under Planet, one considers questions like: is this made of sustainable materials? Is it second-hand, or recycled? What was the extent of the environmental damage caused by the relevant manufacturing processes? How far has it had to be transported? When I’m finished with it, will I be able to dispose of it in a sustainable way – recycling or composting, most likely? What about the packaging?

It should be pretty self-evident that often, such concerns are going to conflict with one another, hence my first caveat: there is no such thing as a perfect ethical purchase. I once perused a copy of The Rough Guide to Ethical Shopping in my secondary school library, and was struck by the author’s suggestion that if one were to try to live one’s life without having any negative impact on the world whatsoever, one would be forced to conclude that one really ought to reduce one’s carbon dioxide output to zero by ceasing to breathe.³ And indeed, there is a sense in which all of us as humans would be doing the world a favour were we to simply stop existing, but, oddly enough, that wasn’t God’s favoured solution to the problem of our sinfulness.⁴ In the way we spend our money as in all areas of our conduct, we’re never going to hit perfection this side of the consummation of the age, but we can still strive not to grow weary of doing good to all people.⁵ And in the way we spend our money as in all areas of our conduct, that’s often going to involve selecting a course of actions on the grounds not that it’s ideal, but rather that it’s overall less terrible than the other possibilities. Each of us has to make decisions about his or her own priorities. So I might choose, for example, to compromise on ecological issues of packaging and transport in order to get hold of a product made by a workers’ co-operative changing lives for the better on the other side of the world. Or I might choose to sacrifice almost all concerns about the relevant manufacturing process in order to acquire an item that’s actually going to function as I need it to for a good length of time, saving me from having to make numerous other dubious purchases to supplement it.

And sometimes, realistically, I am going to end up sacrificing pretty much all concerns about the ethics of my purchase, because at the end of the day I need a such-and-such and I can’t figure out a more ethically sound way to get hold of one, which brings me to my second caveat: I’m not some kind of guru at this. I don’t, as you are certainly aware if you know me at all, float around in an organic hemp kaftan eating fairly traded aduki beans, or whatever your image of the paradigmatic ethical shopper may be. As I said two weeks ago, if you’re only bothering to make a go of this ethical shopping thing in order to attain to some picture-perfect lifestyle, you’re doing it wrong.

 

Hemp’s better for ropes than kaftans anyway. It’s also, fun fact, linguistically cognate with ‘cannabis’.

In which vein, buying products you don’t actually need, simply because they fit the ethical profile that suits the lifestyle to which you’re aspiring, isn’t ethical at all. This, indeed, is my third caveat: often the most ethical decision is not to buy anything at all. I remember reading on the Fairphone website a declaration that the most ethical phone you can choose is one you already own (a surprising assertion from a company that exists to sell phones, and so all the more worth paying attention to). The world is already filled with an extravagant excess of consumer goods; using up more resources and creating more rubbish is something we should try to avoid as much as we can. Beg, borrow, steal – OK, don’t steal, but definitely borrow, make, or otherwise improvise before you buy. This principle clashes, of course, with the concern that we need to be buying things in order to support the people who make them, but all we’ve really done there is loop back round to my first caveat.

At any rate, my belief that often the best purchase to make is no purchase at all has generated what is perhaps an unfortunate side effect in view of the real point of this blog post, that I basically don’t buy stuff particularly often, so that the number of ethical retailers I’ve actually patronised myself, and am therefore able to recommend with any real conviction, is as yet rather small. I have therefore recruited the help of my older sister, who also takes an interest in these matters, with the hope that pooling our knowledge might yield a wider selection of recommendations and advice for my lovely readers to enjoy.

Here begins the not-at-all-exhaustive list of our suggestions for where to buy things that cause slightly fewer problems for the world than is usual:

Charity shops – obvious, really, but worth mentioning explicitly, since they score well on all three of my alliterative principles (providing one chooses one’s product carefully), and a further advantage is that there are almost certainly a good number of them in whichever shopping district you prefer to frequent. Nor are these just for clothes: there are plenty that sell furniture and household items too, not to mention books, entertainment, and so forth.

Other second-hand retailers – personally, I derive a good deal of enjoyment from browsing rails of lovely dresses in vintage shops,⁶ while my sister, in her own words, prefers staying in the house and browsing retail websites such as eBay (https://www.ebayinc.com/our-company). eBay sells both new and second-hand products, so you can factor in that concern alongside others like your seller’s location.

People who make stuff – for example, I own two gorgeous cushions, a cleverly-structured washbag, and a unique knitted hat, which were all made by the residents of a village near the city where I grew up, and purchased (for far less than I’d have paid in a gift shop) at the triennial⁷ flower festival held at the village abbey. It’s a case of keeping an eye out, really. Or if you’d rather stay on the sofa, Etsy (https://www.etsy.com/uk/mission?ref=hp&from=homepage.about_etsy) is a good shout, particularly since, in a marketplace so vast, there are bound to be sellers who cater to even your nichest interests; for example, my sister once purchased an attractive set of rings based on the video game Skyrim.

Independent shops – this includes your local butcher, baker, candlestick maker, farmers’ market, greengrocer, chemist, health food shop, tea room, ‘community grocery’ (as Exeter’s Read Food Store styles itself, http://www.realfoodexeter.co.uk/food-policy) – anywhere that’s independently owned and focusses on locally-obtained products is ticking a lot of boxes. Actually going into a shop and picking things up also gives you a lot of control over levels of packaging: why put a hand of bananas in one of those superfluous plastic bags, for instance, when they can go straight into your reusable shopping bag as they are quite happily?

As far as purchasing new products from specific larger companies goes, here are a few that stand out for us:

Clothes

Thought clothing (https://www.wearethought.com/our-thoughtful-way) – formerly branded under Braintree, these guys make the loveliest bamboo tights ever, as well as recommendable cardigans, dresses, jackets, socks, etc.

People Tree (http://www.peopletree.co.uk/about-us/mission) – another ethically-minded clothing brand; my sister can recommend their navy-blue shorts.

Lady Vintage (https://www.ladyvlondon.com/about-us) – make all their gorgeous vintage-inspired garments in London. (Anything made in the UK automatically scores well on People because we have laws guaranteeing working conditions, pay, and so forth.)

Technology

Fairphone (https://www.fairphone.com/en/our-goals) – not only do these guys make every effort to source their materials fairly, but their latest model represents something of a revolution in repairability thanks to its modular design. (And I can testify that it’s a good-quality phone as well.)

House of Marley (https://www.thehouseofmarley.co.uk/principles) – the most sustainably-produced headphones you’ll find anywhere, with amazing noise-cancelling too (as anyone who’s ever tried to communicate with me while I’ve got mine on will confirm). Stocked by HMV, which is useful.

Cosmetica⁸

Green People (https://www.greenpeople.co.uk/our-story) – cosmetic products with more organicky certifications than you can shake a stick at, an unusually solid score on Ethical Consumer,⁹ and ingredient lists which actually consist of comprehensible natural items, rather than just chemical nonsense.¹⁰

Lush (https://uk.lush.com/tag/our-policies) – hurrah, a brand you’ve heard of! Their latest ethically-minded policy is to do away, as far as possible, with plastic packaging, but that’s far from the only thing for which they can be commended, and of course another plus is that they have a branch in most reasonably-sized cities.

Lily Lolo (https://www.lilylolo.co.uk/pu+about-lily-lolo+story+1) – this is a mineral make-up brand (which my sister informs me is a Good Thing) who, again, do well on ingredients as well as ethics of production. One downside is that few actual shops currently stock their stuff; one of the few is Aromatika (https://www.aromatika.co.uk/pages/about-us), a local Devon company who are also responsible for my very favourite facial cleanser.

Food

Milk&More (https://www.milkandmore.co.uk/our-story) – you know how in the olden days somebody would deliver milk to your door in glass bottles that you would then return for reuse? Well, you can still get that, which is very useful in a household like the one we grew up in, where vital resources like milk and orange juice would disappear at quite an alarming rate. They also deliver other food items, so do check that out for yourself.

 

No more need for rubbish (in a very literal sense) plastic milk bottles.

This is a trickier category to make recommendations in when it comes to larger retailers; it really is more a case of working out what’s on offer in your local area.

Miscellaneous

Gusti Leder (https://www.gusti-leather.co.uk/the-world-of-gusti) – it’s blooming difficult to find an ethical leather goods company, because, in the minds of many ethcially-concerned consumers, making products out of animal skin is unethical from the off – but these guys fit the bill, and my new handbag is very nice indeed.

Ecoffee (https://ecoffeecup.eco/about-us) –stylish reusable coffee cups, made of bamboo. With the money you’ll save by getting own-cup discounts, it’ll pay for itself in due course (depending, of course, on how much coffee you drink). Bamboo is amazing as a sustainable material, and you can make almost anything from it, from crockery to socks.¹¹

Obviously these are just a few of our favourites to get you started, and there’ll be loads out there that we don’t know about. In any case, as I stressed above, options will differ from place to place, but tracking these kinds of retailers down is good fun in itself.

If you’ve been clicking links on the way down and have done a bit of product-browsing, you’ll likely have noticed that, price-wise, ethically-minded brands tend to be towards the higher end of what’s normal. On one level, this just makes sense: retailers that sell products cheaply often achieve their appealing prices by cutting corners on issues of Product, People, Planet, or indeed all three. It’s also true that ethics are still a fairly niche concern amongst consumers, and niche products do tend to be more expensive. Still, I’d say it’s worth spending a bit more than one would otherwise for the sake of sound ethics. If you’re following the principle of not buying stuff you don’t need, and getting hold of a fair bit of what you do buy second hand, you’ll have more money left over to spend on other things anyway – but the key thing is that if you’re parting with your cash in order to place it in hands where it’s going to do good, then of course it’s perfectly all right to be parting with bit more of that cash than you might otherwise spend. Budget sensibly, granted, but don’t consider it some kind of failure in the virtue of thrift to spend more on a particular product than you might ordinarily. As ever, it’s about working out your own priorities.

And with that, and the hope that you find some use in the above suggestions (both specific and less so), we wish you all happy shopping. Do drop any particularly stunning recommendations of your own in the comments box below.

Footnotes

¹ I hasten to add that the dialogue continues with Donna retorting, “Is that why you travel round with a human at your side? It’s not so you can show them the wonders of the universe, it’s so you can take cheap shots?” Because this was before Doctor Who started aggressively claiming ownership of the moral high ground at every possible opportunity. As ever, thanks to http://www.chakoteya.net/ for the transcript, and NowMyWingsFit for the recommendation.

² ‘Money is Power’, under ‘February’ in the box on the right.

³ I can’t reference properly because I don’t have a copy to hand, but I’m pretty sure this is the book in question: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/393418.The_Rough_Guide_To_Ethical_Shopping.

⁴ Unless you count the Flood, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=ESVUK, but of course that was less a solution in itself and more a trailer for the great solution to come…

⁵ I here allude to Galatians 6:9-10. Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians+6&version=ESVUK.

⁶ The best, though not the only good, one in Exeter is The Real McCoy, http://therealmccoy.co.uk/, where I once bought an actual ballgown for ten quid, no word of a lie.

⁷ At least, I think it’s triennial. I may be wrong.

⁸ This is a word I have made up, in imitation of a Latin or Greek neuter plural, to mean ‘cosmetic items’ in an all-and-sundry sense.

⁹ Ethical Consumer, http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/, awards scores out of twenty according to a variety of ethical criteria. It’s particularly good for checking which of the bigger and more mainstream brands are less awful than the others, but sometimes seems to require subscription for access to the juicy details.

¹⁰ If the matter of ingredients in cosmetics is of interest to you, I direct you towards another post that my sister and I collaborated on, ‘Good Chemistry’, under ‘2016’ then ‘November’ in the box on the right.

¹¹ Crockery includes a rather stylish apple-adorned range by dotcomgiftshop, of which I own a selection of pieces including this one: https://www.dotcomgiftshop.com/vintage-apple-bamboo-dinner-plate. As for socks, I own bamboo ones of various brands; if I want more, I usually just pop into Sancho’s Dress on Fore Street – another example of a local, independent shop committed to solid ethics – and browse their selection: https://www.sanchosdress.com/pages/about-us.