PRIORITIES

It’s freezing but narry a snowflake in sight, thank God, and I’m shawled-up waiting for the cold to hit my nose before I put the heating on. Life isn’t hard – I just don’t want to waste good money on heat when I can spend it on books and tarot cards. We all have choices to make and different priorities.

Number 2 son gave me the £300 he owed me the other week and I immediately buzzed into town in an attempt to buy myself some electrical/techno gadget so it wouldn’t fall into the housekeeping budget (or, God forbid, go towards paying a bill). No siree – that’s not what free money is for.

I bought myself a little baby laptop, a 10 inch pink gorgeous thing that actually fits perfectly into a bag I’d crocheted earlier. So that’s £200 done and the shops were closing so I went home and treated myself to a Chicken Korma. It was two days later that I got the chance to go out again and, following a TV advert, I tootled along to Asda and bought: a Kodak 12 million pixel camera for 49 quid, a digital photo frame, a toaster and a jug blender. So that’s me sorted for life.

Is it really? I say that about every camera or phone or laptop I buy and yet a couple of years later there I am at it again! I feel good, that in continually forking out to Musician all year I’d saved that money so it also feels as if I’ve acquired all this stuff for nothing. I really should have bought a new washing machine seeing at the corpse in my kitchen will never do any kind of job again, but you can’t waste free money on things like washing machines. Well, I can’t. I’ll save some money in a jar, and in the meantime hand-wash and dry it on the radiators when the heating is on – and I don’t create a lot of laundry.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for my Ebay and Amazon buys to batter their way through the Christmas post. What are they? Why, books and tarot cards of course.