'I am always trying to find ways of reusing things. For example, we've had to take curtains down in my bathroom and I was seeing how we could make cushions out of them,' says the Prince of Wales.
Whether the heating should be turned up or down is a source of tension in many households, and Highgrove is no exception, the Prince of Wales has disclosed.
He hinted at battles with the Duchess of Cornwall over his preference for wearing extra clothes rather than turning up the thermostat as he made a virtue of penny-pinching in an interview with the TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp.
"I don't mind keeping the heating down as long as I can have a hot bath," the Prince said. "Most people think it is too cold. I never hear the end of it. But I am one of those people who has a strange circulation. I think I have inherited it from Queen Victoria who also liked sitting in a draught." The Prince is a passionate advocate of recycling and discloses the lengths to which he goes to practise what he preaches.
"I hate throwing things away," he said. "I am always trying to find ways of reusing things. There are bits of this, bits of that everywhere. For example, we've had to take curtains down in my bathroom and I was seeing how we could make cushions out of them.
"[If] you throw things away and they languish somewhere, then you regret the fact that someone is making a vast amount of money out of all the things you've chucked out. It is one of the things that has driven me mad all my life. I've often stopped people throwing things away; all those wonderful Victorian lavatories, for example.
"I put my bathwater on the garden in the summer - it all helps." The Prince makes no apologies for his refusal to keep up with fashion trends, preferring his rigid adherence to double-breasted suits and favourite old overcoats.
"I'm like a stopped clock," he said. "I am only 'with it' once every 25 years, because it all comes around again."
The heir to the throne even believes Kindles and e-books will be a passing fad and that "real" books will never go out of fashion. "We have Wi-Fi and all sorts of modern things at Highgrove - I'm not saying you've got to go back to medieval days," he said.
"People tend to go berserk over the latest things but before long the novelty wears off. How sad if you were to chuck away all the books, only to find that eventually it comes around again, because I'm sure people will rediscover the joy of a real book."
The Prince joked that his hobbies of painting and hedge-laying kept him "sane … ish!" He told Allsopp, an ambassador for the Prince's Foundation for Building Community, that his sons pull his leg about his constant speeches on environmental issues. "They say 'Oh, he's on again', you know. But you never quite know with your children, do you? Because although they may pull your leg all the time, sometimes you find out later they have talked to other people about it."
The full interview appears in the June issue of Good Housekeeping, on sale on Thursday.
Prince Harry last week jokingly entered the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge into next year's London Marathon, but his brother does have one in mind. Prince William is keen to run the Lewa Marathon in Kenya on June 30 to raise money for the conservation charity Tusk Trust. After watching a screening of the documentary African Cats last week, the Duke appealed for more to be done to protect threatened wildlife. African Cats - made in Kenya - will also help raise funds for the trust, of which William is patron. It was at Lewa that he proposed to Kate Middleton.
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