Christmas Present. Christmas Past. A lesson in how to be really crap.

Every year I say the same, but this year is going to be different. While I do believe that John Lewis is probably the best place ever, even my love of epic proportions does not stretch to the Oxford Street Branch on the 23^rd of December – a visit that has happened the last two years running. Each will remain in my mind for all the wrong reasons for all eternity. Panic, queues, sweat, frenzied buying spending pointless pounds on throw away crap. So, I resolve: Not again. Oh no. not this year.

There will be a different approach this year. I pinky promise.

I’ve already done about 50% of Little Companion’s Xmas AND Birthday (in Jan). I know – check me. I sat at my desk, logged into Amazon and got worryingly excited about a whole lot of Quentin Blake books  that I’d never seen before. I bought about 5 of them. I threw in a David Walliams illustrated book called ‘Gangsta Granny’ – it’s got to be a classic, right? Some audio books to keep Little Companion entertained in the car, and more importantly to save my sanity because if I have to listen to the ‘Very Hungry Catapillar’ one more time I think I’ll build myself my very own little house called a cocoon and crawl inside for a hell of a lot longer than two weeks, I can tell you. So I have made head way and I am feeling happy about it.

But... "Too easy!" I hear you cry. Yes... Sadly, that’s what I was thinking too.

This year I will be Thoughtful. I will make effort. There will be some form of personal touch and definitely no Boots gift sets at all.

So I sit down to think about what I should do. I’m quite creative, but the crux of the problem is that I’m seriously lazy sometimes. I think of all these amazing things to do, I get the stuff, I make the things, but here is my guilty secret. The process of finding the address, writing it on the package, getting stamps and putting the packages in the post kills me EVERY time. Literally every time. I hate it. I hate that it is at least a 3 tiered process, I hate that every time I don’t have one of my friend’s addresses I have to ask for it, again, and they know they've given it to me before, so are probably mildly irritated by me asking them for it again, and now they know that i'm going to send them something. All this because the last time I asked for it, I forgot to write it in my address book. The process is one of those things in life that manages to help me spiral in to a pit of self-loathing that Britney Spears circa 2008 would have been proud of.

It is mildly better now I sit by the franking machine at work, but not hugely as I can’t take the piss. But again, I am resolved that this year will be different. I have already located my address book. Every friend that I ask (again) for their address (SORRY!) - its going straight in. Fact. I am going to brave the Post Office if it gives me a hernia.

So I move on to thinking again. What am I going to do. Make cards? Make Xmas tree decorations? Baking! Biscuits! Short Bread! Oh god.. you can take the girl out of Scotland… I’ll be giving everyone tartan scotty dogs in a minute. Shoot me now.

Let’s be realistic, it’s probably going to be more likely that I’ll go to lidl bash up their Lebkuchen & put them in a slightly battered “homemade” box, get Little Companion to put far too much glitter on them, and go with that. As my previous posts re: trying to live cheaply proves, I’m all for bending rules, cheating and lying – within reason of course.

Had dinner with a friend recently, actually at Naked Chef Husband’s restaurant, she told she’d made elder flower cordial & sloe gin. Genuinely wanted to punch her – but didn’t because she’s so bloody lovely and perfect.  

So aside from fake homemade biscuits, I do have an idea. It’s such a cop out I know, but I have it covered – relatively easy, stress free, and I can add a personal touch to it: All relatives will receive Photos. Wedding photos to be precise, from 2009. They’ve been dropping not so subtle, well actually quite frankly sarcastic comments about ‘needing’ them for about 18 months now. And rightly so. So I know that they will definitely like them. My life just one guilty lurch after another where I’m constantly reminded of what I haven’t done, what I need to do… All I need to do now is remember to take a memory stick home, load the pics up onto it, fire up Photoshop work a bit of wizardry on them and get it to a Boots somewhere near me. Then post them out, with a handmade card. Done. Easy peasy.

I’ll let you know once I’ve achieved all of the above. I hope you’re still reading in 2017, and I’ll let you know how John Lewis is looking circa December 24^th 2011.

how hard can it be? (part 2)

The answer to the above question is: nigh on impossible. I failed either miserably or triumphantly, I can’t quite make up my mind.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I figured that I would save on travel costs by cycling to work. My annual travel card costs £3.52 per day. If I didn’t cycle then I would have precisely £2.36 to spend for the entire week. By cycling not only would I be saving money on travel costs, but I would also be getting fit and negating any need to go to my proverbially diamond encrusted yoga classes. One major spanner: due to the season and the length of time it would take me to get to work on a bike I would most definitely need bike lights, and I had no idea where they were.

Sunday night I was being lazy and horizontal, glued to both my telly and twitter manically tweeting about (hashtag) Xfactor. Therefore, I did not do the necessary preparation to get on my bike on Monday morning as originally planned. Monday evening I returned from work and had a look around. No bike lights anywhere. I gingerly stepped into unchartered territory: the shed. This is a foreign place and I have no idea where anything in there lives. It felt a bit like snooping around in someone else’s house. It was no use. I’d just have to wait until Naked Chef Husband came home.

After putting little companion to bed I put on the ‘Life In Balance’ channel and did one of their work outs. It was free and I was feeling smug. I felt I knew that this week would be, if a little quiet, easy. Naked chef husband came home and I enquired about the bike lights. He scratched his head and denied knowledge of their location – he had looked for them though, he assured me... I was beginning to panic now, as the challenge of living off £20 for one week had, in a split second, moved on to trying to live off £2.36 for a week. This was a slightly more daunting prospect, but still in my weirdly positive mind that is clearly no stranger to denial, very much doable.

Tuesday came and went  – I had a number of chats with my friends at work about my frugal week. And it became clear that they really didn’t understand why I was doing it.

“Seriously, why?” They asked me.

“Well,” I said,” It’s a challenge, isn’t it?”

“But why?!” they asked again.

I didn’t really have an answer… I was beginning to ask myself the same thing.

Wednesday morning at work the stationary company that I use delivered our stationary order with a free massive tin of Quality Street. I instantly contemplated taking it home and using it as a Christmas present for someone. I found myself fantasising about walking into Sainsbury’s doing a supermarket sweep style dash and walking out without paying. Living cheaply was fast turning me into a wannabe criminal. In the end I shared the Quality Street with my colleagues, but only after having a sharp word with myself in the ladies and putting about 1/3^rd of the tin in my handbag.

About three people asked, “where have all the purple ones gone?!”

 I shrugged. HA! “No idea.”

Little did they know I had morphed, practically overnight, into a common thief.

During the day I remembered on Saturday I would be taking Little Companion to one of his friend's 3^rd birthday party. Thankfully Naked Chef Husband was off work so I asked him nicely to go to the shop and purchase necessary present and card.

One of the colleagues that I’d told about the challenge offered to take me out to lunch on Thursday, so I gratefully accepted and swap the tinned goods lunches for a Byron Burger and French fries. It was triumphant and I don’t know if it was because I’d been having such crappy lunches up to that point, but it tasted like one of the best burgers I’d ever had.

Thursday evening was the turning point in the week in terms of my spending. Sadly, as with most lapses in my will power, there was a lot of alcohol involved. As a company we were taken out by the one of our contractors. It was a free evening and I was still feeling confident that I could get through the rest of this week spending no more than £2.36. Somewhere between the 6^th cocktail and the karaoke I decided it was a great idea to go on with the others to an awful West End club which shall remain nameless, as the majority of my friendship group would disown me if they knew where I went.

 There were Jager Bombs, there was a bottle vodka at our table – I didn’t bother with the mixer. There was dancing to Rhianna. Well, I say dancing I really mean staggering with my hair over my face. Suddenly it was 3am and I had to get home. There were four of us left and we shared a cab. Somehow this journey took 1.5 hours, and so I got home at 4.30am. I paid around £15 for the cab, but If I’m honest, I can’t really remember the exact amount. Shambolic.

On Friday morning after two hours of sleep I woke up, still heavily pickled in desperate need of carbs and Starbucks. I had both – I think I spent about £7 in starbucks. One saving grace is that I have a starbucks card, which was fully loaded when the week started, so no actual cash was spent and I saved about £1 by using it. At lunch time I had a little lie down in the hidden meeting room at the back of our office whilst being fed Domino’s Pizza by my lovely and helpful colleague. There was a two for one offer on the Domino’s that day, so it only cost me £5 but that brought me to approximately £24.64 over spent. Unsurprisingly on Friday night I was in bed by 9.30pm. Cheap, if nothing else.

Saturday literally could not arrive soon enough. I figured that the challenge finished at around 7pm on Saturday. This is mainly because I had planned ages ago to go out on Saturday night, so in my head, all I had to do was live, for ‘free’ until 7pm on the 26^th November. It wasn’t in the rules, but I’d decided that that was how it was going to be, so that how it was.

On Saturday morning Little Companion and I bummed around the house, playing Jesse and Bullseye (Little Companion on my back saying “Giddy up Bullseye!” whilst kicking me in the kidneys). In the afternoon I took Little Companion to the birthday party with the “free” present. He was, unsurprisingly, the most ‘boisterous’ child there.

A list of questionable behaviours:

·         running away about 5 times

·         getting every cherry tomato on the ‘healthy snack plate’ and squashing them one by one so that he could watch the pips squirt out of them, then leaving them as he doesn’t like tomatoes

·         throwing a tantrum

·         pushing another child over looking up at me and grinning wildly

·         planting a wet kiss on his best male friend’s mouth (cute, but a little inappropriate)

·         Thumped the birthday mascot tiger on the head

But, all of this paled into insignificance because the whole thing was free! I felt distracted from Little Companion because I was compelled to shove as much free food down my neck – I didn’t really give a damn that I was essentially food blocking a bunch of bewildered 3 year olds. Thankfully the other parents were impressed with my food stealing ways and happily joined in. This diminished my guilt somewhat.

And then came 7pm. I’d made it, HOORAY and my falling off only really happened because I went out and got very very pissed, and no one really counts anything when they’re sozzled, right? So what did I do to celebrate? I went out for a feed, drink and a dance with my friends.

This week was a lesson in the following:

1.       Letting your morals go a little.

2.       Asking nicely for things.

3.       Being more open to a bit of help - why not let people take you out for lunch?

4.       Bending the rules.

5.       The fact that boozing it up will ALWAYS result in a failure of will power. Always.

Much to my relief, I read my fellow frugal living friends Rachel's and Helen's blogs, and they both had fairly similar experiences. All that being said, I think we did quite well really, and I am very happy to say that I won’t be having another tuna sandwich or tinned soup for a very long time.

how hard can it be? (part 1)

I recently suggested to two friends, one of whom lives in Edinburgh and the other in Prague, after reading this article by Stuart Jeffies that we should take a leaf out of his book and try frugal living for one week. Both ladies are talented bloggers, and so we decided we’d do it and write about it. Natch. We started on Sunday 20^th November.

As preparation for the week ahead I started to look at what I do with £20 on a regular basis. £20 covers 1 Bikram Yoga session with 1 bottle of water and a towel. It covers 2.5 hours of babysitting. It covers 4/5ths of my work lunch spend for the week. It covers 2 weeks’ worth of Starbucks coffee. It covers approx 1.25 bottles of wine in a bar. Before I quit smoking, £20 would cover about 5 days’ worth of death sticks. All in all, it doesn’t cover very much.

I recently had an in depth psychometric profile done at work. At one point in the feedback session it took an unexpected and alarming turn towards my personal life and he hazarded a very well educated guess about my spending habits. My spending habits, by the way, are something that I definitely don’t like to think about at all – I get stabs of fear/guilt when I try to catalogue what I have bought over the course of a month and do the classic: buy it, shove it into the back of the wardrobe, and pretend it never happened with worrying regularity.

The assessor said,

“I hate to think how much money you spend – most probably like water. You love nice things. The money in itself isn’t important, just the end goal of having lots and lots of beautiful things – clothes probably.”

(WOW.)

I laughed nervously. He was spot on. I love nice things – clothes, art, technology, books, restaurants, nights out with friends… the list goes on.

I have what I believe is a natural talent when, in a shop or looking at a beautiful spread of products in a magazine, of homing in on the most expensive possible item & fantasising about how exactly I NEED it, how it would be PERFECT in my house/wardrobe/life. This is only about a million times worse when browsing online, as the purchase, in my (completely incorrect and slightly mad) eyes is only theoretical. No actual money has gone (hate to say this, but yes it has). And don’t get me started on eBay: Internet + value + competition = obsession + poverty. This is the curse of good and insatiable taste, I say. But having said all that, back to the matter at hand: how hard can it really be? It is only one week after all.

The Rules:

£20 has to last one week to cover everything other than rent and bills. Anything that you can forage from your freezer/fridge/cupboards is free and other than that, you have to use your £20. That includes travel from Tooting to Holborn for five of the seven days but it’s OK, I have a master plan – cycle to work for three of the days.

My next post will catalogue Sunday – Saturday worth of no spending…. Unsurprisingly, it is harder than it looks from the start line, mainly because I couldn’t find my effing bike lights.

Stay tuned!