I’ve no idea why it takes many sofa suppliers six weeks to deliver a sofa, but it does and as a result I’ve got nothing to sit on in my new gaff except an expanse of scruffy laminate. The idea of buying a sofa to sit on while I wait for a sofa to arrive seems needlessly extravagant, so I’ve turned to the global network dedicated to giving away stuff and getting stuff for free.
Next week marks Freecycle’s 10th anniversary, a glorious decade of matchmaking compulsive off-loaders with the vaguely needy; it even survived a fractious British schism in 2009, when disaffected Freecyclers broke away to form an almost-identical network, Freegle. Between them, Freegle and Freecycle now boast over 900 local groups in the UK with four million members. That’s a hell of a lot of unwanted stuff that magically transforms into wanted stuff.
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