Swap! In The Name Of Love

In the wee hours of each and every Sunday night, at precisely the moment when the Weekend morphs into a Working Day and everyone's dreams are suddenly wrought with a sense of tedious desperation, something special happens in Machynlleth. A computer server kicks up a gear or two, whirrs to itself happily for a moment before blasting out hundreds of identical emails, each one marked for a different recipient, most of whom live locally. This is no spam server. This is the communication that people in Machynlleth jump out of bed early for on Monday mornings. For this mass email is Mach Swapshop.

It is in essence a little like Freecycle but rather than giving things away for nothing, people are encouraged to swap stuff. So if you're offering a desk but really need a chair, you can say so and someone else whose chair needs are over-supplied but are somewhat lacking in the desk department, would respond forthwith and the trade would occur at some mutually benefical time and place. Often of course the match is not quite so serendipitous, so people more usually settle for a bottle of wine, a bar of chocolate, some ready cash, or if they're feeling really generous, nothing at all.

I have a huge radish

Swapshop also lets people do the reverse and put Wanteds ads in, again with the swap philosophy in mind. Upcoming events also get a section so anyone can advertise something they're involved with. In the last Swapshop email I count twenty events advertised, including such diverse activities as a pub quiz night (which I'm planning on attending), a children's book club, a one-woman play about Edith Nesbit, a planetarium show, arts and craft classes, the weekly public lecture Mach Speak (the forum I spoke at a few weeks ago), a children's halloween party and a taster session of Emotional Freedom Technique, Matrix Re-printing, Reiki and Indian Head Massage, to name but a few.

This week's Swapshop email was number 651 so assuming it's been going weekly all that time, I make that over twelve years of Swapshopping! It's definitely well used. There are probably between 30 and 50 things being offered each week. I've made good use of it myself so far, mostly to obtain things - a free-standing clothes rail, a water barrel for my polytunnel, net bags to hang melons from, a jack-to-audio cassette adaptor so I can listen to music in my caravan, lots of plastic pots for seedlings, wooden pallets for stacking firewood, and lots and lots of horse manure. But I've also used it to give away the decrepit old trailer-tent that was on my land when I bought it, to a couple who have since become friends (they're on my pub quiz team tonight.)

I'm concerned these 80 cabbages aren't going to be ready to harvest before I leave in two weeks

Not only is Swapshop all the above but there is often a pithy and uncredited mots de la semaine at the top of each email. I'll leave you with the latest one:

“Imagine if trees gave free wi-fi, we would plant them like crazy. It's a pity they only give us the oxygen we breathe”