Thursday 20 January 2011

A modicum of perspective, please...

Austerity means different things to different folk: today's reading of the newspaper brought home exactly how much...

A banker's wife, newly let loose on the scribbling public after a creative writing course, has been detailing the cutbacks she has had to make in her lifestyle.  These involve cancelling the half-term break in the Maldives and instead - horror of horrors! having to rough it in their holiday home in the Alps.  Had they been able to go to the Maldives, everything would have been ruined, just ruined, because they would have had to forgo the helicopter transfer to the hotel.  Not only that, but her husband is having to have his hand-made shoes MENDED.  The worst, though, involves the children and is just one Laboutin-clad step away from stubbing them with lit cigarettes and locking them in the cupboard under the stairs with the spiders.  The children will have to...and I'm biting my fist in horror at the mere thought here...sit in an airline seat THAT DOESN'T TURN INTO A BED! I imagine Mumsnet have already rushed round to the mansion en mass, hell-bent on rescuing those poor unfortunate babes from what must be living hell.

Some years ago I shared a flat with a friend whose idea of retrenchment was to cut the cleaner's hours down by a day a week to a mere three days; this to clean a two bedroom flat only marginally larger than a changing cubicle at Top Shop, owned and lived in by a single, very tidy woman and her weekend lodger (me). 

And me? I make six sausages do for three meals (sausage, broccoli and tomato sauce for pasta, chicken, chickpea and sausage casserole and two for the freezer for something else), my best friend Mrs G makes a chicken stretch to 9 meals and I use Aldi's 'Creme de la Merde' face cream.  Oh. And I wear three jumpers indoors. My heart is bleeding for the Banker's Wife and her poor, deprived children.  Not...

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