Hard times

It is serious economising time in the Bobs household! Well, aside from the £7 The Husband spent on Krispy Kremes for me today. I am trying to be a super-savvy shopper, heading out with all the right ideas - a shopping list for the week and a meal planner which I absolutely thouroughly intend to stick to, heading to Aldi for as much as I can and rifling through Home Bargains and the pound shops for those essentials. Until I see that Sainsbury's have Pringles for a pound a tube and Asda have some lovely green jeans and denim shorts in. As The Daughter would say after she's dropped pasta sauce on the carpet, "Oopsie". I didn't realise just how hard this economy drive thing was going to be to be honest; temptation lies all around, especially for someone like me. I blame my bi-polar entirely for my impulsivity, which has led to unnecessary purchases ahoy - ranging from make up I'll never wear to *ahem* cars. "Oopsie" again. The last time that happened I ended up trading in a 5 month old perfectly decent car for The Shag; a beautiful leather bubble of a car but also a bottomless moneypit. And it is in this moneypit that I realise, while I'm driving to Aldi then Asda then Home Bargains - all in the name of saving money - I've gone through about thirty quids worth of petrol. I am quickly running out of the necessary income and disposable organs (it's amazing what you can sell on ebay these days!) it takes to keep the damn thing on the road. But at least it has a massive boot for all that shopping I do...every cloud and all that!

 It was in another of my favourite thrift shops, Poundstretcher, that I came across another way to slash my shopping bill. We get through reams of loo roll and kitchen roll in our house, literally bloody florets of the stuff. And what do we use it for? Noses and bums and wiping stuff up. So why do I spend a small fortune on Plenty just because Nicholas cage tells me too?! Erm..what do you mean it's not Nicholas Cage in the Plenty adverts?? So why don't I spend mere pence on cheap grey paper products instead? Well, I'll tell you why. Because cheap toilet rolls have sheets where the layers don't match up, so you pull off half a roll trying to get the perforated seams together to make one entire sheet. And they're so thin that you risk your finger going straight through when you...well, the less said about that the better! So I'm sending The Husband out for Andrex tomorrow, and we're all rationed to one sheet per toilet trip. All unnecessary direct debits have been cancelled, the latest of which is the pet insurance which, for the inhabitants of my Cat Hotel, was costing a bomb. I figure that as least three of the cat beasts only go as far as the back garden, what harm could possibly befall them? It'll be sods law that, while having a crap in my borders, Bob will get hit by a rogue bit of meteorite shrapnel and require delicate surgery that we'll have to sell the kids to pay for. So maybe this money saving thing isn't all it's cracked up to be. And that is precisely what I'll tell myself as I'm mooching round Topshops new summer range tomorrow ;)