As the credit crunch sinks its teeth into our tubby nation, a fascinating change of mood is occurring. Conspicuous consumption is over. Instead of swooning over handbags so gilded they have padlocks, my friends are suddenly discussing how you don’t need more than a pea’s worth of supermarket toothpaste for shining teeth. Whole blogs are dedicated to home dentistry with pliers and whether it’s more frugal to run the toothpaste across the brush instead of along it as in the profligate advertisements. There are even suggestions for make-your-own toothpastes composed of bicarbonate of soda, peppermint essence and road grit.

Ooh, it makes me come over all crafty and Blue Peter-ish. I have always had these tendencies. As a student I was famous for my collection of yoghurt pots and my embarrassing home-made Lycra garments, but now I can cut plastic butter tubs into strips to make plant markers and no one will laugh. Much. This spring, ahead of the trend, I collected dozens of bog-roll tubes, filled them with compost, and grew seedlings in them. The pots disintegrated gently in the soil of the allotment, which started rather a fashion in Cricklewood veg circles.

And now the “I’m green and frugal, nyahh” thing means I can start wearing what my husband describes as “smelly dead men’s clothes” again. He means “well-chosen vintage fashion items” such as my cinch-waisted jacket. When its silk lining disintegrated, it was brilliantly replaced by Magda, a Polish seamstress who has emigrated to Finchley Road and still knows ancient ways of fixing things, forgotten in the consumer Alzheimer’s of Primark.

I see the Finchley Road pawnshop is looking increasingly cluttered, too. This is a great place that pays you to store your ugly furniture, ornaments and vulgar rings, objects you never wanted anyway. Indeed, before the Winter of Discontent II sets in mid-summer, there will be much enthusiasm for freecycling, swapping, hand-me-downs, wacky ways to save on food and fuel bills, and showing off when dinner parties are created for under a tenner. (That’s the food, stupid. The wine is quite another matter.)

Of course, some frugal fashions are easier to embrace than others. We hardly sweat at all now, since our main physical activity is logging on to Facebook, so why do some people shower twice a day? As for hair washing, we know that kills natural oils and costs the earth, and that there are folk who have shampooed eight times in three years and still have friends. Avoidance of dirt and germs is giving our lily-livered children a tendency to asthma and allergies. Our personal hygiene needs are now bonkers, our bodies doused with expensive unnatural odours. Bring back the truly Great Unwashed with normal cream-coloured teeth instead of snow-white.

Is cleanliness next to Godliness? Absolutely not. There are no Brazilian waxes in the Bible. Indeed, a Victorian hygiene manual I’ve been reading notes that St Jerome praises the dirty habits of the saintly, and “especially commends an Egyptian hermit who only combed his hair on Easter Sunday, and never washed his clothes at all, but let them fall to pieces by rottenness”. As for St Thomas Becket’s undergarments when he was martyred? “They were enough to make you shudder.”

Bring back mild grubbiness and bracing, cold showers. In Germany, apparently, the derogatory word “Warmduscher”, or “warm showerer”, is used to describe what we in Glasgow call “a big Jessie” – someone rather flabby and unmasculine. Talking of Germany, a book featuring an “unhygienic, free-spirited fictional heroine” has caused a sensation there. Charlotte Roche is a 30-year-old television star who has written Wetlands, a novel which boldly goes where no woman has gone before in chick lit. The down-and-dirty details begin with piles and move on to avocado pits and their immoral uses. It’s a cri de coeur say the newspapers, a feminist rallying cry that tells us not merely to stop shaving legs and armpits, but to take a strong line against the oppression of waxing, douching and having paste jewels glued on to disablingly long nails.

Why spend £100 on a few ounces of perfume and advertising in a silly bottle when you can make your own? Sadly, Roche does not advise us to bottle lavender and roses, but instead to use our own, home-made juices, rich with pheromones. Dab a little behind your ears and men will pursue you like a pack of over-excited terriers, she says, except in German. Even in a credit crunch, that’s just a step too far.

kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk

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