Online amnesty on ‘borrowed’ items

Dec 26 2008 by Paul Loraine, The Journal

IT is a nagging sense of guilt that everyone has experienced. You borrow something from a friend or find something that doesn’t belong to you and somehow, over time, it becomes your own possession.

Now a new website, set up by a Bafta winning North East producer, is allowing people to offload these items and upload their guilt in an ‘object amnesty’. Emer McCourt, the writer and producer behind the hit clubbing film Human Traffic, set up backtoyou.org both as a credit-crunch friendly means of giving a gift and as an avenue of confession for the guilty object hoarder.

In the creator’s own words, the site looks to “free everyone of those little voices with this guilt-free, weight-off- your-mind place for all those borrowed jumpers, found jumpers and never given Christmas gifts”.

She added: “There is the Christmas angle to it in that people can give people a virtual gift – what they already owned.

“But there’s also a public confession happening.

“It’s bringing a different meaning to it – it’s a kind of artistic experience. During the credit crunch it’s an opportunity to recycle a gift but also to give something fresh at the same time. You can give without it costing anything.

“It potentially has more meaning than a normal gift.”

Emer said she hoped the idea would catch on to the extent that schools, older people and working people alike would all offer up objects in the amnesty.

As well as giving people a financially viable alternative to an expensive gift at Christmas, she believes the website is a wonderful way of teasing out the stories behind objects. “Each of these objects sitting on shelves at home has a story and this is a way of finding out about those stories,” she said.

“I had a statue made for my sister which I ended up keeping but it has always belonged to her, so I put it up on the site.”

Among the items to have appeared on the site so far include a lucky horseshoe from a wedding that belonged to a bride, a £10 note never paid back and a church cushion someone borrowed to copy the design and never returned.

To add an object on to the site, you have to take a picture or make a sketch of the object and write a short piece about how you came to babysit it.

Then, to post the object on to the site, visit backtoyou.org.uk and follow the instructions.