Things you can get for a fiver

Aloha, interwebbers! It’s still the weekend, isn’t that great? And I get so much more weekend these days, what with being woken at the crack of still dark by the kittens, who are eager to get back out to the killing fields. Well, Charlie is. Belle is mostly happy bringing leaves into the house, although they are in fact messier to clean up than mice. Leave don’t get eaten, you see. Who knew?

So, things you can get for a fiver. I noticed the other day that a five pound note doesn’t stretch very far these days; or, it’s just me being profligate as usual. What does comes in at five squid or thereabouts?

• 3. 6 litres of petrol, @ today’s price of 1.35.9 of your pounds sterling per litre. Yes, oh American readers, I said litres. Read it and weep with us.
• 12 sachets of Whiskas kitten food, about 4 days’ worth, which is why I switched to fancy James Wellbeloved dry food. I was spending more on cat food than on me food.
• A box of 4 John Lewis value tumblers. So, yeah, you could buy them, but they are horrid.
• 10 first class stamps for letters; 4 stamps to the US.
• 500g of Essential Waitrose English Cheddar. ‘Essential’ is Waitrose’s cheapo brand, rather than a definition of foodstuffs that are really essential. I love that they have ‘Essential Trifle’: the very name is a contradiction in terms and I like to pretend it’s deliberately ironic.
• A zumba class – sadly, the entrance fee does not also include the coordination required to get the best out of the class. I never knew that the words ‘This is just a basic salsa step’ could be so lowering.
• 3 2 cappucini from the new cafe near the office. I forget it’s name, in my head it’s ‘The Yellow Cafe’, although I’m not even sure if it is yellow or if that’s the colour of the awning of the bar before it. But it’s done now, the neural pathway has been constructed. We have figured out that because of where our office is situated in the building, it’s actually quicker to leave the premises and go to The Yellow Cafe than it is to go to the in house cafe. Also, the coffee doesn’t suck.
• 50 Lapsang Souchong teabags, with just about enough change for a bag of chips.
• One glass of Berry’s House Red at the Old Parsonage. But, this will come with free nibbles, and free Old Parsonageness (rubbish service, but great fire).
• One pair of knickers from M&S, various styles.

Congratulations, guys! We just spent 50 quid.

Brave Ms Musings bravely runs away

In common with the rest of my office, I reacted to the reality of being back at work with something akin to horror. You could tell panic had set in by the fact that most of us spent that first lunch hour of the new working year frantically calculating, researching, discussing and booking holidays. Never was there more earnest discussion of the fact that the end of May Bank Holiday has been moved to June (I forget why), which gives the glittering prize of a week off in June for the price of a mere three days.

Mostly, I try not to think too much about the never-ending mindlessness of working life, because I find it an overwhelming thought likely to induce hysteria. I still haven’t solved the problem of how to plug in a bit of life in which I’m required to think at the level at which I want to be pushed to think. Oxford’s Continuing Education courses don’t seem as though they’ll cut it, and anyway are at bizarre times that don’t fit even with my weird working hours. And I’m still 18 months away from not being regarded as a foreign student and therefore slightly more able to afford that PhD with the OU. By which time, presumably, university fees will have sky rocketed… La, la, la, I can’t hear you…

A few spring days in Italy seemed a good idea. Flights, even with real airlines, are cheap; but accommodation is not, then you throw in car hire and it all adds up. I’m still thinking about that one, trying to make a sober and sensible decision. Until it gets to the point where I have a particularly trying day, hit Expedia in a frenzied moment of ‘Fuck it’, and find myself off for a week in the hills outside Lucca. Oh god, I can practically taste it. Think car tax and MOT, think car tax and MOT.

However, since that ‘help, I’m trapped’ feeling was really beginning to build, I’m off to Derbyshire for the weekend, heading up straight after work on Friday night to wake up Saturday morning to Peak District glory. With any luck, open moors and skies and winds will work their magic and blow my restlessness away.

 

Inconspicuous consumption

It all started when a new shop, Objects of Use, opened in Oxford. As I’ve mentioned before, Oxford is crap for shopping and particularly crap for anything useful. There used to be Gills the ironmongers tucked away down a street that was so narrow I used to overlook it even when I was specifically going there, but Gills closed down around the time I moved back. It is much missed. So now if you want anything practical for the kitchen or bathroom, the options are Boswell’s basement or online.

Objects of Use is no replacement. It’s a small shop, with a very small array of carefully selected items that are indeed useful, but have also obviously been chosen for other qualities as well. There are no brand names here, because that’s not the point. So the water glasses are the sort of tumblers that are used for serving wine in cheap restaurants in Italy; the pans are plain cast iron; the vegetable brushes are wooden; and they stock traditional lunch pails of the sort that weigh a ton when empty and are circular, and therefore simultaneously pleasing to look at and hopeless for all practical purposes. You get the aesthetic? Everything is so basic, so understated and subtle, that the shop is clearly offering the opportunity to purchase goods whose whispered statement is ‘This is not a statement.’

It is the anti-Cath Kidston, which is great because I detest that spotted ubiquity. But I think it’s part of the same continuum that embraces taking the ordinary and over-designing it so that it can be sold to people who already have everything they actually need but don’t yet have it with flowers on. The epitome of this, to my mind, are those tins that say ‘String’ and are perfectly shaped to hold a ball of twine and nothing else.  What particular combination of time, money and OCD do you need to have to buy a tin specifically for string?

But now that everyone is broke and the economy is stuck somewhere behind the U-bend, spending lots of money on pointless, over-designed stuff might look a bit tacky. Everything in Objects of Use goes to the other extreme. I call it the ‘New Austerity’ (you read it here first, folks!), wherein you spend just as much money as you would if you’d bought something that looked expensive, only instead you’ve got something that looks slightly rustic and, ideally, vaguely French. Or, at least indeterminately continental. I’m wrapping in the current obsession with shabby chic here too: take a knackered table, paint it badly in shades of Farrow & Ball, call it French style, and bang an extra three hundred quid on the price.

However basic the item’s appearance, however dodgy the paint job, it’s just conspicuous consumption in disguise.