Miss Moneypenny

Here I am, disemboweling todays newspaper, looking for a read that will wash down easy with coffee avoiding all the election drama. Out goes all the inserts: Real Estate, Classified, Business, Books, any actual news. The process is akin to whittling an entire tree down to a toothpick. Suddenly, Lou interrupts. ‘Hey! Your’e getting rid of a good bit!’

For a second I panic, thinking she means I’ve thrown out the Pictures of Grinning Celebrities with food in their Mouths section. When she reaches for Money, I relax. She’s welcome to that dumb old section. I can never earn enough money, so what’s the point in reading about people who do? I could earn one pound or a million but still manage to live just beyond spitting distance of my means. Whatever the income, I maintain the same ratio of debt to dough. The ‘having enough money feeling’ is infrequent and elusive. For me it lasts the hour it takes to leave work and spend the entire lot at whatever I’m into at the moment … renovating the house obviously means it’s ‘home stuff’ much to Lou's aggravation (she looks after the books and trys to keep me focused).

I have always been rash with cash. My spendthrift tendency was established early, thanks to Monopoly. I loved passing Go and getting all the pretend money. But the older you get, the more responsible you’re supposed to be. What for? I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the closer I get to being dead. While I still possess a modicum of youthful bounce, I’d like to bounce in style – usually more style than I can afford. For instance if it’s food, get that cheap stuff out of my face. I want fresh and organic baby: individually bathed grapes, lovingly caressed strawberries, hand-shelled almonds from a little Greek lady’s backyard. Holidays? Well, going native is the last thing I want to do. I expect to stay in a pasha’s palace, not a no-star nightmare. I figure that if I treat myself as a queen, everybody else might get the same idea…

But while I’m carrying on like La Dolce Vita: The One-Woman Show, my bank manager is doing his version of The Terminator. Hard experience has taught me that he doesn’t necessarily feel obliged to underwrite my overspending. But sweating it out from pay cheque to pay cheque is a tradition of mine that goes back to the 7 pounds weekly ( a pound a day) pocket money I had when I was 10. By day two, I was usually cashing in the last of my chips on a suger-coma load of sweets. Danger came when I’d spy the latest Jackie or Honey magazine next to the racks of ‘lovehearts’ and ‘chewy coca-cola bottles’. My devotion to hip-twitching, pants-itching David Cassidy necessitated the regular purchase of these teenysheets in order to monitor his lusciousness. My father was regularly put in the undignified position of having to subsidise my soppy crushes.

Nowadays, my kids, clothes and travelling have replaced David and Loveheart sweeties on the instant gratification tip, but the urge to splurge remains the same. My actual earnings are workhouse relations to my ritch-bitch spending habits. In fact the less I earn, the more flagrant I am with my sprees. It’s classic overcompensation: ‘You think I’m not rich enough to afford a new pair of jeans from Earl? How dare you! You’re right, but how dare you anyway. I’ll take seven.’ At least I don’t spend my dosh on ‘showoffy’ things like seven bedroom mansions and flash cars ( oh, and dying my hair blonde every Tuesday). Give me a plane ticket to paradise instead …

In an effort to equalise incomings with outgoings, I have officially named Lou my financial advisor.I suppose I might as well go through the motions of being responsible, even if it’s just to impress her. My enthusiasm for responsibility waned when Miss Moneypenny made it clear that the first step was to give her all my accumulated wealth. I made it clear that I didn’t have any. Every time she hears ‘fashionbiz’, she thinks ‘doughbiz’. And in my case, it’s ‘no biz’.

Miss Moneypenny, ever the optimist, keeps trying to get me to come in for meetings at her place to talk about my long-range money plans, Well, my plan is to get it, then spend it. It’s hardly worth the petrol money to go and tell her that. She’s fine about understanding the comfort purchase of a new lipstick, but she’s not so good with the concept of 12 new ones. What can I say? I need a lot of comfort… especially at the moment. What I can’t seem to convince her with is that I don’t earn enough to spend and to save. Obviously, I do have priorities, but saving isn’t one of them.

What worries me is that I’ve lost the ability to tell when I might have enough to start saving – because no amount ever seems like enough. Like any other drug, one quickly develops a tolerence to money. Once in a higher bracket, the green glow of plenty fades fast with all the fancy new things to buy. Or the fancy new ways to buy not-so-fancy old things. In this pursuit, Elvis Presley really was the king. His habit of flying his private plane to Colorado for take-aways of fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches demonstrated a cash-triggered lack of perspective universal to humankind.

If Elvis couldn’t say no to out-of-state takeaways, what hope do I – a mere mortal – have in soberly administering my sporadic career-triggered windfalls? None. But I don’t care. If I waited around until I could afford it, I’d never have any fun…

THE RAT PACK

A P.S. to this blog is the announcement that we have finally gathered our building team...so apart from Mr Hunk (we still don't know his name as we break out in cold sweats and giggle like schoolgirls every time we ask him about the plumbing)we now have Sami (from Jordan), Dino (from Georgia - getting scary isn't it?) And a Polish builder called Frog (I think that's how it's spelt)so for totally obvious reasons we have christened him Frank! Sammy, Dino and Frank, we couldn't even have wished them out of a Genie's lamp...Have to go now, Lou wants a meeting about the price of our freestanding bath....aaaargh!