Making do

We were out at friends last night, and when we came home, rather stupidly stayed up another half hour or so. I find it difficult to just walk in the house and go straight to bed. Some winding down has to take place. M switched on his computer and played a game of Scrabble. I started looking in cupboards for a replacement mouse, as his isn’t working well. When I unearthed one, he attached it, and then found it didn’t work at all. By the time we’d reinstated the old one, it was 12.30, and I didn’t get my requisite night’s sleep.

I cannot say what I did today, because my brain stayed in a haze most of the day. I think I might have cleared a mm’s worth of paper from the 3 or 4 inches on my desk. Tonight I made a ‘store-cupboard meal’ - it was going to be tuna with pasta; at some point, I discovered I was out of cheese for the sauce and topping. I was short of milk too, and I had to make up a sauce using half vegetable water, to save some milk for tomorrow’s breakfast. However, I used extra butter in the sauce to compensate for no cheese, and I threw some mushrooms in too. It came out quite well in the end.

The financial world has gone mad, because they’ve finally started to worry about people having debts they can’t repay. Every time I get an unsolicited letter offering me a loan to buy a yacht or a new car, I wonder when they’re going to stop tempting people into this situation. Years ago, when M & I were short of money – approximately the first fourteen/fifteen years of our married life – we didn’t have credit cards. We had one huge debt – the mortgage on our house – compounded by another loan to support our business. But we didn’t borrow anything else. I would have been scared stiff at the prospect of having a card and building up debts with no rein on them. It was only once we were financially OK that we allowed ourselves that luxury. Perhaps, now the big boys are being affected by the debts of the have-nots, some common sense will prevail.