Though there are of course clear
compensations from being Marion Rees’s son.
This means that retail therapy is always in the blood and a ready way to
make all manner of things well. I have
never found a little light shopping to be anything other than an advantageous
way of behaving when things are not going exactly the way you want them
to. Living in Spain there is also the
added attraction for WASPs of ‘delayed gratification’ when buying something via
Amazon.
I have had the moral worries about trading
with a company which quite obviously is dealing well over the other side of
legality about the amount of tax that it does not pay to, for example, Great
Britain by having its so-called parent company incorporated in Luxembourg
removed surgically. And I bet that your
attention span was not up to linking the last two words of that sentence to its
beginning!
Quite apart from my new electric chair (of
which more later) I have also invested in a more practical wallet from the
little shoe repairer tucked into a corner in the underground car part of the
shopping centre – and the new watch is still not that old. All of this (at least the last two) has been
purchased with something approaching impunity because some of the ‘hidden
money’ has resurfaced.
My financial ill-management is so poor that
my life has been one long struggle to hide money form myself so that I can be
surprised in the future with funds which appear as if by magic – my having
forgotten that I had hidden them. One
such sum was ‘loaned’ to The Generalitat some time ago and, while I knew it was
there, somewhere, I had no idea of when the money was going to be
returned. It was not, you understand, a
fortune, but it was a ‘spendable amount’.
Having suddenly returned to my bank account, with no information sent to
me, just a casual entry in my bankbook when it was last updated.
Now, of course, it is burning a hole, and I
have ordered yet more CDs and double walled tea mugs and ink. I still have not recovered from discovering
that the cost of a bottle of ink seems to have rocketed from pence to
pounds. So much for my YouTube inspired
plan to refill my disposable fountain pens.
Well, almost, I am determined to give it a chance and have therefore
ordered ink in a spirit of defiance from Amazon which allows you to ‘add on’
certain low cost items to another order.
This of course encouraged me to buy other things to make it all
worthwhile. It is at times like this
that I remember the only accountant who I retained many years ago who give me
the following advice, “Mr Rees do not spend money to save money.” Good advice which I always remember after the
event and not before. At least I
remember it.
And the chair, or The Chair, the
replacement for the one which was falling apart and the material of which it
was made, flaking away. I made the most
of the opening of a new furniture and home store and bought a new electric
reclining chair for what I think is a very reasonable amount. It cost an extra €30 to get it from the store
to the home, but I am still pleased and I find that I am using the reclining
function more than I did the last one because this one is electrically
adjustable and doesn’t have to be one thing or the other. If that makes sense. I have also purchased a faux-fur throw to
keep me warm in the cooling evenings.
When fully furred up with my feet extended and elevated I look like some
sort of Dowager Empress holding court.
And rightly so.
As we wend our way to Christmas I am
exploring the various goodies that Lidl have produced under their Deluxe label
and am thoroughly enjoying the discoveries.
I now have (among other goodies) a small container of blossoms to
scatter on salads and other decoration demanding foods. This, I feel, is a good thing.
As indeed is the range of teas that Lidl is
now selling – all of which I am buying.
Their Oolong tea bags are the best that I have tasted and the more
exotic the blend the more eager I am to try it.
I am now ‘tea-ed up’ till the New Year and beyond. And if my new mugs with filters arrive soon
then I can be even more radical in my blends and taste experiences! Everyone should have a hobby or two and one
of mine is now tea and its bizarre and, in many cases, unsatisfactorily blended
outcomes.
Were I a real aficionado then I would be
keeping tasting notes like those that I discovered in Nicholas’s bedroom when I
was staying with his mum. Nicholas I
might add was not there, or even in the same country now I come to think about
it. But in looking at his books I came
across his detailed notes of his wine tasting: each wine tasted with the
details of the meals which accompanied them with dates and times. That is the sort of dedication that I admire
but seldom emulate.
I have been to wine tastings and even
written my own notes – Toni has offered me folding money to record the
sessions, though I have of course refused to protect the guilty! But they were far too esoteric and fundamentally
funny to continue for long – much though I enjoyed them. But taking the whole thing so seriously is
delightful to find in someone else’s effort, but exhausting to consider for too
long from a personal point of view.
Tomorrow the start of a new chapter in the
Big Red Book which will lead us towards more work for our next assignment. I have to admit that I am becoming less and
less confident as the course progresses and it will be interesting to see what
mark I get for the next piece of work.
My ideas are in place, but I think that wholesale editing will be
necessary using rules and advice which have been vouchsafed to use during the
progress of the course. It will be a
very interesting exercise, but I fear an exhausting one.
I am making my way steadily through the CDs
from one of the new collections and at the moment I am discovering that I do
not know Britten’s War Requiem as well as I thought I did, though it is an
absolute delight to get to know it better.
There are some pieces of music which survive, no matter how fractured
your listening experience is – which is another way of justifying having
exceptional music on my car CD which I listen to on my way to and from the
leisure centre and getting the bread. No
trip is more than a quarter of an hour tops, so most music is spread over an
extended period of time. It gives one a
different perspective; not better possibly, but different.
My pillow!
That’s another purchase. My
eternal quest for a decent pillow (leaving aside the one I found in El Corte
Ingles for something like €250 which I did not buy) seems to have reached some
sort of reasonable conclusion. I have
been looking for some time, ever since I threw away my old feather pillow
having decided that it was only suitable for scientific research rather than
slumber. And then discovered just how
much feather pillows were! I did buy a
fairly cheap one from Lidl but it was woefully thin and inadequate. All of the artificial ones have been
unsatisfactory and, even though I have got used to them they were not what I wanted. The answer seems to have come from the same
place where I got the chair – and came at ‘reduced’ price too. So far so good, and at less than €15 an
absolute bargain. But I do now have
various sorts of partially used pillows waiting for visitors. At least now we can give them something like
the same choice of pillows that they have in five star hotels. Ish.
To bed!
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