Saving

I made some mayonnaise this morning before I went to work.

I like my own mayonnaise better than the sort you get in the shops. Whenever I buy olives or jars of dried tomatoes I save the oil in a jar at the back of the fridge, and then every few weeks I chuck it in the liquidiser with the biggest egg I can find and lots of garlic and lemon and mustard and vinegar. This makes a lovely creamy mayonnaise, and the olive and tomato flavours in the oil give it a sort of Mediterranean resonance of leftover sunshine. We put it on everything.

I save the fat when we cook sausages as well. It is white and rich and salty and rubbed into flour with thyme and parsley and more mustard to make pastry it is smooth and satisfying. I didn’t do that today because my husband isn’t making enough money to keep me at home making sausage rolls and cheese and onion pies so I have got to go out in the endless quest for cash, which I must say is a lot less like hard work, so the jar of fat at the back of the fridge will have to wait for wealthier times.

These might be some distance away at the moment, partly because I have no trouble at all saving sausage fat but am absolutely rubbish at saving money. I have had to make a huge effort to do this, and have got to be absolutely determined with myself.

One of the very splendid things about driving a taxi for a living is that whatever I earn I bring home with me that very night, none of this hanging about for a month waiting for some notional number to appear on a bank statement to solve all my problems. When we come home at the end of today we will each have a cash box to be emptied on the tablecloth and divided up.

Most of it goes into a handy sized box with a hinged lid that was once used for packaging some upmarket socks, and that we now keep for school fees and bill payments and hand reluctantly over the counter in the bank every now and again: but I have got a secret box in which I am saving up for Christmas. It is a pretty box with glitter and pictures of baubles on it, and every day I try and put something out of the taxi takings into it, the first one on New Year’s Day out of the huge bonus of double time the night before.

Every Christmas we have the most glorious, extravagant party, we stay in Manchester and go to the pantomime and the Christmas markets, and drink champagne, and Mark wears his hat and his Savile Row overcoat bought in wealthier times, and I wear my pearls and high heels, and we dance and drink, and eat and laugh and are reckless. I save up for it a little bit at a time all year round, so it gets a tiny bit closer every day, and it spreads the warm feeling and the excitement out over the whole year, which I like very much. The whole family comes and joins in with us, and I like that even more, because it is my very best time of year, and it is made a little bit more possible every single day, when I pop a little bit more money in the box.

Mark has a tall earthenware pot with a lid, he made it himself in his youth in pottery classes at school, and he is saving up in that for a new clutch and flywheel for my car. This does not increase the excitement of getting the car fixed, but this pot has its own feeling of suspense, because the challenge is that it has got to contain enough money before the dreaded and fast approaching day when the clutch gives up, and so this pot has a special thrill all of its own.

Two pound coins are saved for times when our souls yearn for something nice, like a takeaway or some lilies from the nice florist across the road, they go in a pretty hand painted tub that we bought in the spice bazaar in Istanbul which looks as though it might be full of genie. Money for milk and coffee and cheese and dog food gets chucked in an old brass dish that might once have been elegant but which seems to have done service as somebody’s ashtray, and we have just decided that we need to put some money away for some more building works, this time in the garden, so tonight we will think about what we can do with that, and we can feel the satisfying sense of something that matters to us coming a little bit closer to our reach.

It is so much easier to do it this way. I am absolutely rubbish at the sort of money that comes in a plastic card from the bank. No matter how much money I think I have put into one when I come to check my computer at the end of the week there is never anything there, as if it has all evaporated away. This is real, and solid, and safe, as satisfying in its own way as the jar of mayonnaise or the flaky pastry, because we have done it, and we know that we have.

Money might not buy happiness, but it will buy a new clutch and a couple of champagne cocktails at Christmas, and I think that’s more than good enough.

LATER NOTE: Mark says I need to make it clear to potential burglars and the Inland Revenue that I have completely made this up. I do not have any money anywhere at all.