I HAVE developed an awful compulsion to buy stuff. When I leave the house, going anywhere, my wife says: “No consuming.” By this, she doesn’t mean don’t eat or drink anything — just don’t come home with any more stuff, particularly soft fruit.
On the way back from swimming three times a week, I find it impossible not to stop at the fruit stall outside the Tube station. If raspberries are £ 1.50 for two punnets, I am unable to stop myself, even when there are five punnets of mouldy raspberries already in the fridge at home.
“They are a bargain,” I say. “Not if half turn out to be in–edible,” she replies. “Yes, but they were so cheap.” “That is a false economy,” she says. Same conversation every time.
I find myself going into Poundstretcher and looking at the prices, not for anything in particular, just wondering what I should buy. Obviously I have to buy something, having come in.
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A Lidl is opening soon not far from our home in north London. For months, I have pressed my nose against the window, and then gone round the back on my way to the pool to tell the workmen to hurry up. I love the one in nearby Camden, and always buy a hot brown loaf there, just out of the oven (well, that’s what I tell myself — they might well have just been stuck on a radiator). But at 75p, what a bargain. Have you seen the price of artisan bread at the farmers’ markets? Nothing less than £3.50. The word “artisan” has taken over from “organic”. In each case, all it means is “expensive”.
I didn’t used to be like this. In fact, I always said I hated shopping, and still do for boring things such as clothes and shoes. It is getting a bargain, that’s what excites me, buying stuff because it is cheap.
It is an impulse, but also an activity. I feel I have achieved something if I come home with five notepads for £1, even though I already have 50 of them.
I blame my mother, Marion, obviously, as that is what mothers are for. When I used to visit her in Carlisle long after I had left home, I would open her cocktail cabinet — which never saw a cocktail in its whole life — and find bags and bags of sugar.
In the end, she got Alzheimer’s, poor soul, but that wasn’t the cause of the compulsive sugar buying. It was the war. You couldn’t get sugar, and she had a sweet tooth. So she bought sugar whenever she could to be prepared for the next war.
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It is not that I spend a lot of money on my consumerism, rarely more than £1 or £2 on these impulse purchases. And I do eat all the raspberries.
In a way it is harmless, and it gives me so much pleasure, such as today. We have a gas fire downstairs that has to be lit with a match. We had run out, so what fun I had looking for matches, eventually finding some in the back of a local hardware store. It is one of those old-fashioned ones, so crowded and crammed that people set off down the narrow aisles and never return.
I found a packet of 10 boxes of matches. We don’t need 10, but blow me, when I saw the price was 50p I realised we did. Ten boxes for 50p! Incredible.
I came home and counted them. There are 40 matches in each box, which means I got 400 for 50p. Wow. We light that fire for only about 10 days in the winter when it is really cold. So that should last me, let me see, using both hands . . . 40 years.
Hmm, perhaps I have overstocked this time. I know. I’ll redo my will. Leave them to the children. They will be well pleased.