Spring budget

I have been shopping.

I can’t believe how expensive everything is.

Everything is really expensive.

I mean, really, really expensive.

I haven’t bought very much for ages and ages, because of it being winter. In the summer, when there are millions of tourists ambling about, drinking too much and having a bad leg so they can’t walk up the hill, we collect bags and bags of excess cash and then spend it on shopping. We start the winter with a huge box full of useful things like shampoo and washing up liquid and other generally handy stuff. We have a freezer stuffed to bursting point with sausages and prawns and other exciting luxuries, and I can manage to squish half a dozen sacks of flour underneath my desk.

We use this stuff in the darkling days of winter when there is almost nobody here with bad legs and when nobody can afford to drink too much because they are still paying off their credit card after Christmas.

It is almost all gone.

I opened the box yesterday to find a candle, a tin of deodorant, and some cotton buds.

Today I went shopping.

I went to Aldi, which is supposed to be cheap, but I can tell you that it jolly well isn’t, so after that I went to Asda which is also supposed to be cheap, and I can tell you that that jolly well wasn’t either.

I bought a bottle of shampoo, a bottle of hair conditioner and two tubes of toothpaste and it cost me eighteen pounds.

I was affronted.

Not only was nowhere pleasingly economic, but both Asda and Aldi had lots of empty shelves. It was like being in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism, except more expensive. I trudged round staring at price labels in disbelief and wondering what has happened to all the tomatoes. I bought some dried ones, because I put them in mayonnaise, but they were eighty pence a jar more expensive than the last time I bought them, and I have told Mark that we need to start planting our own in the next couple of weeks.

I chuntered to myself in the taxi all the way home.

Mark said that we would probably be perfectly all right, and of course it is Easter very soon. All the same, I am not at all impressed, and I shall be writing to Rishi Sunak to tell him so, it is all very well having a beautiful billionaire wife and two perfect children and pretending he has never heard of Matt Hancock, but loo rolls in Asda are now a tenner a dozen. He will never persuade people to save the National Health Service by eating more fibre at that rate, he just hasn’t thought this one through.

In other news I have started cleaning my taxi out but gave up when it got too cold and dark. I will have another go tomorrow, presumably in between making gruel for our dinners.

I am not exactly sure what gruel is, I had always assumed it was some kind of porridge, but presumably if it was you would just call it porridge instead of needing another word for it. I don’t suppose it would go with the prawn toast anyway.

I am going to go to bed. Mark has rushed round letting all of the water out of the camper van and bringing firewood home because the weather is about to take a nasty turn. It is jolly cold at the moment, and is going to get even colder and then it is going to snow.

I know it is ridiculous but I am quite excited about this. It is always splendid when it snows, for no reason that I can think of whatsoever.

I am thoroughly looking forward to it.