Victoria Summerley: City life

I saw something the other morning I haven't seen for years and years. It was a rag-and-bone man, complete with flat-bed cart and shaggy brown pony. They were turning into a side street in Earlsfield, in our corner of south-west London. Unfortunately I was in the car, and on urgent Mum's Minicab business, so I couldn't stop. But it made me wonder whether the rag-and-bone trade might enjoy something of a resurgence in today's would-be-green society.

When I was little, and living in south London, the rag-and-bone man was a regular visitor to our street. He seemed rather a sinister figure: the poor fellow was incredibly thin, as was his horse. I thought the words rag and bone were a literal description of him, rather than his trade – he appeared to be nothing more than an emaciated outline held together by a patchwork of shabby garments. The old East End term for this sort of trader – a "totter" – seemed equally appropriate.

His skewbald horse looked as if it was about to expire at any moment and my twin sister and I, who had wept over nearly every word of Black Beauty, had awful visions of this decrepit equine dropping dead between the shafts, like poor old Ginger in Anna Sewell's novel.

There were many things about the rag-and-bone man that puzzled us. The first was his cry, which sounded like: "Loooong bed!" We thought this possibly referred to the cart, which when empty looked rather hearse-like. This in turn fostered our suspicion that the bones and rags he was supposed to collect came from dead bodies.

Why we thought this, goodness knows, but I suppose that children more familiar with sentimental Victorian stories than with the business of making stock or soup are more likely to think in terms of stolen skeletons than of humdrum ham-bones. Given that the term "totter" is thought to come from "tot", an old slang word for bone that in turn may be derived from the German "tot", meaning dead, perhaps we weren't so far off the mark.

I think that, even as children, we worried about how he made enough money to live on. We knew, from watching the Sixties TV comedy Steptoe and Son, that his trade was not a lucrative one because in those days people didn't throw things out the way they do now. Indeed, my mother and grandmother, who had lived through years of rationing, were enthusiastic recyclers decades before it became fashionable.

Our clothes, books and often toys were bought from jumble sales; any leftovers from the dinner table were transformed into soup or rissoles; and our pet rabbits and tortoise lived on cabbage and lettuce leaves that had fallen off the back of a barrow (in a genuinely accidental sort of way) in the local fruit and veg market.

There would be much richer pickings for modern-day Steptoes, and they would make a nice change from the charity bag scam, in which commercial companies deliver flyers that look very much like charity versions, asking for donations of old clothes "to help people in the Third World". At least one of these comes through our door every week and it's very difficult to tell at a casual glance which is genuine and which isn't.

According to Which?, the charity collection business is worth millions of pounds and it has been targeted by bogus operators. The more sophisticated of these have a small-print disclaimer somewhere on the bag or leaflet, but other gangs simply steal the real charity bags before the bona-fide collectors arrive. If you just want to get rid of unwanted stuff, you might not care where it goes or who takes it, but it's not so good if you want your ex-belongings to serve a more beneficent purpose.

At least with a rag-and-bone man, it would be a more honest and possibly profitable transaction, even if the price he paid for your junk was only a couple of quid. And how nice it would be to have horses back on the streets (so long as they were properly looked after, of course). Instead of carbon emissions, we'd have compost.

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I joined Facebook, the online social network, the other day, solely in the interests of research, of course. I can't quite remember what I was supposed to be researching because once I logged on I became engrossed in tracking down old Fleet Street friends and catching up on all the gossip, and playing Scrabulous, the electronic Facebook version of Scrabble.

Since media stories about Facebook have tended to concentrate on whether or not Prince Harry or Prince William really was a member, I had tended to despise what I thought was yet another time-wasting cultural phenomenon involving people in whom I had zero interest. But it is good fun – a bit like a virtual party – and as far as I'm concerned, it has at least two things to recommend it.

First, among the groups you can join is one called The Independent (The Best Newspaper in Britain). Second, my kids got so bored waiting either for a) the Scrabulous application to work, or b) their virtual opponents to play their turn that they got out the Scrabble board and spent Sunday evening playing real games with real people instead of slumping in front of the television or computer. Now that really is a social breakthrough.

v.summerley@independent.co.uk