Money Saving Madam: A Memoir

This year is flying by.

I suppose time flies when you’re having… well, fun, I suppose, or some peculiar version of it.

I have decided to celebrate the rename (did you notice the rename) by listing the positive developments that have taken place since I began my blog back in January – and it is all about the positive.

I have written on my blog at least once a week since January.

Lots of lovely people read it each month.

People have laughed, picked up tips and been encouraged. I have been encouraged too.

As per my plan (I knew planning had a place) I have indeed become a published and paid writer.

(I am not going to focus on the fact that this has not allowed me to quit my job and become a brunette version of Carrie Bradshaw.)

I re-embraced the fringe I last sported as a 5 year old, and it is working out well.

I have given up my Zara habit. This is in part due to the money saving, and in part due to developing an unnatural hatred of the manager of Zara. Both have contributed to the paying off of my credit card and steps in the direction of becoming a fully fledged grown up.

I now own a coffee table and have ‘coffee-table’ books on it that make me look intelligent and sophisticated. Some of them have been read.

I bought home-wear from John Lewis for the first time, and realised why people only order home-wear from John Lewis as part of their wedding list - when other people are paying.

I have shunned the fear of change and renamed the blog. Money Saving Madam was great, but she’s stopped writing solely about money saving, and as such, was dabbling in a spot of false advertising.

I hope you’ll stay with me/ embrace the change/ forgive me/ read on.

I really was rubbish at saving money anyway.

A public service announcement about getting sacked

My brother got fired last week. Don’t worry he consented to me publishing it here on the tinterweb - I did ask.

He hated his job. It really was a dreadful job at a dreadful place. I won’t say where, just in case they want to sue me for libel. They would probably try, what with them being so dreadful. And as you know, I’ve got no money to pay the lawyers bill.

He often talked of resigning, but he had no other job to go to – and surely a small salary where the price is misery is better than no job or money at all?

I’m not so sure.

I have a few friends whose jobs are genuinely grinding them down.

Things are not going well. They wake up in the night worried sick. The thought of work is making them physically ill.

Sound familiar?

Ok, well how about you imagine that you were fired last week. You have no choice but to accept it – so you may as well see it a good thing.

You hated your situation and this has forced change to happen.

What a wonderful opportunity.

Breathe a sigh of relief – they literally LET YOU GO.

Genuinely – perhaps getting fired is the best thing that can happen to you?

Perhaps it means that you are at odds with the company. I told my brother to rejoice. Clearly he is not moronic enough to be employed by morons.

Now I know that people have bills to pay and kids to feed and we are in a recession - so please do not think that I am in any way making light of losing your job. But I am talking here about those jobs that are causing people genuine misery, depression, or self doubt.

I reckon that if you were fired you’d find a way. If I was fired from my job tomorrow I can think of ways (all legal) that I could make the money to pay this month’s rent.

Luckily I do not hate my job. But if I did, if I really hated it...

If people constantly reject your ideas and what you have to offer – then you should leave. And if they fire you – then thank them.

They've inadvertently done you a favour.

Ps. if anyone has any jobs in the West Midlands region where misery, depression and self loathing are not key criteria of the role, please message my brother.

Always a bridesmaid



It could, of course, have been worse.

Having been a (blushing) bridesmaid twice in the past 18 months, I am starting to feel a little panicky about the old adage.

So it was with great interest, and a slight sense of the autobiographical, that I headed to the cinema to see Bridesmaids.

I needn’t have worried. I was holding onto the seat in front, convulsing with laughter as tears streamed down my face. And, even at my young age, was considering the merits of tena ladies.

If you haven’t been to see it, then stop reading this and go immediately. It is very funny. And definitely do not judge a film by its poster. There is not a pink dress or cowboy hat in sight.

And, for anyone that has ever worried about what hideous dress their bride-to-be friend might put them in, loathed a fellow bridesmaid, or fretted over a hen-doo, it may be a little close to the bone.

I’m going to tell you a story. It is January 2010. One of my two University best friends has just gotten herself hitched. I was a bridesmaid at this wonderful wedding alongside my other university pal.

The bride and groom looked as if they were straight off the pages of a wedding magazine. The historical village church was touched with frost on an icy January morn. Save the toastmaster, who was dressed a little like a lion-tamer, it really was the most perfect and romantic occasion.

And then, just like that, I was home. Alone. In a freezing cold Scotland, with post wedding blues, January blues and blue digits.

I was in a depression worthy of Bridget Jones. My best friend was married; I was pushing 30, and definitely going to die alone surrounded by cats. This was especially distressing given that I really hate cats.

And so, on a bleak January evening, as I ate my pasta and pesto dinner (did I mention I was also having the broke-as-hell-blues?) my phone rang. It was University best friend number 2. I joked to my flatmate, ‘If she’s calling to tell me she’s engaged, I’m probably going to have to kill myself.’

Luckily for everyone I am prone to exaggeration.

And so I empathised somewhat with Annie, as Lil, her old and dear friend announced her engagement. Panic. ‘I’m feeling a bit hot’, said Annie as Lil flashed her rock. Annie must whoop and hug with delight, but in her heart, she is horrified by Lillian's disloyalty at leaving her behind in the dismal pit of spinsterhood.

NB: (as they may be reading) being bridesmaid for my best friends was a delight and an honour. I still maintain that there is something intrinsically strange about dressing adults in the same clothes, but it was moving, special and an utter pleasure.

But, as anyone who has ever been a bridesmaid will know, that there is something about someone else's impending marriage that makes your existence seem second best.

In this brilliant film, even the married bridesmaids – those who have attained the great prize – instantly become disenchanted with their lives. A gentle bridesmaid, newly married, confesses her discontent with never having sex. A bridesmaid mother confesses her horror at sharing the house with three teenage sons "There's semen everywhere. One blanket actually cracked", and at her husband's insatiable conjugal needs, "I just want to watch the Daily Show once without him entering me".

I spat my malteasers clean out.

There is vomiting, there is drunkenness, there are jokes about sex, (all of which featured in my own bridesmaid experiences) but at its heart this is a lovely little film about friendship, and what it means to be female.

This film is not clichéd or lazy. It is witty and honest, providing a refreshingly true portrayal of what it is to be a modern woman; not one of the dreadful vacuous chick flick stereotypes that we have come to know and hate in so many films of recent years, but one of the lass who is suffering frostbite in Scotland whilst her best friends are getting hitched left right and centre.

Luckily for us, reality has made its way into this Hollywood movie.

Unfortunately the reality is that many of us are just one engagement away from a breakdown.

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My crush and me

Last night I was a woman possessed. There’s really no other word for it. I was in exceptionally close proximity to my beloved Mark Owen, and it was emotional. I’m not sure the word crush comes close, it’s love. And yes, I know he’s a cheating love rat - but readers, I forgive him all.

You see I liked him the first time round. When I was young and had dozens of Take That stickers from Smash Hits magazine all over my folders. And posters from Big plastering my walls. And when they split all those years ago I was bereft, and there was not a middle-aged woman being admitted to A&E in sight.

I do feel that I’m in good company with my slightly obsessive crush. The lovely Kate Winslet has admitted that her current co-star was in fact her teenage crush. Guy Pearce was the "heart-throb” she obsessed over as she was growing up in the Berkshire countryside when he was an actor on Neighbours, the hit Australian soap series.

Such was her obsession with the 43 year-old British-born actor, that Kate would even pretend to be ill so she could skip school to watch the soap. Clearly she didn’t realise it was also on at 5.30pm?

But you see for her, things have really worked out. She’s now a stunning Oscar winning actress being paid millions to get naked with her crush.

I am stuck screaming, along with all the other lunatics. Mark is just a few feet away, but is protected from us by a band of burly security types. He says he loves us, but is ready to have us forcibly removed at any moment.

We reach and long to get a touch. It’s embarrassing, it’s tragic.

But... perhaps all is not lost.

Maybe I’ll be a famous author yet. Then perchance we might meet at a showbiz party. He’ll buy me a drink. We’ll laugh at how I wore an ‘I heart Mark’ t-shirt and know all of the words to Babe.

Rachel Owen, it’s got a certain ring to it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to perfect the dance moves to Pray. I’m sure that’ll win him over.

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Needed: Cardboard boxes and valium

I am spending the weekend packing boxes, because folks, I’m moving flat. I am leaving the posh Georgian West End of Edinburgh for the slightly more ‘colourful’ Leith. (Location of Trainspotting for the ill informed.) The flat is lovely – in the up and coming part I’ll have you know.

And if perchance I do need drugs, they'll be easy to come by.

It is a cliché that moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do, second only to divorce. I have no direct experience of divorce, but indirect experience is bad enough, and I would certainly not choose to go through it. I do, however, choose to move house from time to time. I admit that there is stress along the way.

So far in this house move episode, I have smashed a picture, sliced my finger on the broken glass and caused a cardboard cut nice and deep on the crease where my thumb is attached to my hand. I now have only one opposable thumb.

As Celine Dion once sang, ‘It’s all coming back to me now.’ When, 2 years ago I moved into this flat, I made a solemn vow that I would be leaving it in a box. But no, seems it’s me loading up the boxes once again.

2 years ago I moved from Durham to Edinburgh. When the removal man vomited in the afternoon, I wondered if there shouldn’t be a Government Health Warning on moving house. Throughout that long, exhausting day I’m convinced my blood pressure hit danger levels on a number of occasions.

Although it could have been worse, a friend recently moved house and the day didn’t start terribly well when the removal lorry arrived at her home and reversed clean into her car. Whoops.

When I moved, an Edinburgh parking warden (read evil Nazi ticket distributor) stalked around the van desperate for me to leave it even momentarily unattended.

Whilst I was guarding the van from our fluorescently -cladded friends, the removal men were busy tearing the leather of my flatmate's one thousand pound sofa, scratching my dressers and vomiting in the stairwell.

I knew I shouldn’t have booked through gumtree.

This move hasn’t started well with my string of injuries, but I’m optimistic for an easier move this time over.

Although I am thinking of setting up a removal firm that provides a counselling service to help repair the shattered nerves of homeowners. We’ll also leave a welcome pack containing spare keys, plasters, bandages, scotch and valium.

Interested? I’ll be taking bookings... as soon as I get through my own move of course.

Poor kids

I told you last week how I loved a documentary. I’d been watching Made in Chelsea and it had upset me.

On Tuesday night I watched another documentary. This one actually upset me.

Poor Kids, on BBC 1 was a gut wrenching documentary about children living below the poverty line in the UK. I felt ashamed that I had ever moaned about having to suffer a camping holiday or cancel my glossy mag subscription.

The kids featured, 11-year-old Sam and his 16-year-old sister Kayleigh in Leicester, eight-year-old Courtney in Bradford, 10-year-old Paige in Glasgow – speak for themselves, but also for the 3.5 million other children living in poverty in Britain. And boy did they speak well. Honest, eloquent, strong, and mature beyond their years.

So much of it was unbearable: Sam being called a big girl's blouse for wearing his older sister's hand-me-down shirt to school, Courtney's resignation that she will always be poor, or saying her family doesn't go on holiday because they can't get on a plane because they're afraid of heights.

This is so different to the world I inhabited as a child – which by no extent was what  you might call 'privileged', but was filled with things like summer holidays to Wales, tap lessons, Brownies and birthday parties.

There was a moment in the film where Sam, on his 12^th birthday was being given a cake and sung happy birthday by his small family, and the electricity went off in the house.

Whatever people want to say about their parents, if there really are children who don’t have a meal in the summer holidays because they are not getting their free school lunch, we really have a problem.

How can these children have a realistic expectation that they will ever amount to anything when they are surrounded by news of job cuts and an estate full of the unemployed?

I don’t know the answers but I know that so much of it is a disgrace – the mould in Paige's flat that means she can’t sleep on her top bunk, the fact that Courtney's mum can't afford the bus fare to take her swimming, or that Sam sometimes ‘saves up’ his hunger for when his dad can provide a meal.

These kids are bright. At the end of the programme Courtney comments "I don't want to grow up."  Heartbreakingly it's due to her fear of what's to come, not so she can stay forever young in a magical Neverland.

These children could go onto great things given the right chances. So the right chances must be given.

If you didn’t see the programme, you can watch it on catch up here

A little joy goes a long way

This afternoon summer arrived in Edinburgh. At 5pm I was promptly out the office door and off to the pub. I sat in the afternoon sunshine, having a beer with friends and it was a Thursday afternoon treat.

Perhaps this delight is heightened by living in Scotland. For those who do not live in Scotland I should explain. In Scotland sunshine is a rare and wonderful thing. Scotland is good in theory. People often describe it as ‘bracing,’ which I’ve come to realise just means freezing. A friend of mine recently described Scotland as a cold purgatory.

Charming.

Well this afternoon, the sun was out in force. Out came my freckles, and goddamn, I even went a little red.

As I walked home, a little tiddly after a few beers, I realised that I really was incredibly happy.

And so, today, rather than having a wee rant, I thought I’d share a few of my favourite things – even though I could tell you the horror that is the fact that yesterday Gail Platt (of Coronation Street fame) was wearing my new White Stuff shirt. Gail blooming Platt.

Anyway, as I was saying.

Things that make me happy

The sun on my face

Bacon sandwiches

Playing on the swings

Fresh bedding

A lie in

Laughing until you can’t remember what was even funny

Christmas carols

My mum’s roast beef dinner

Earl grey tea from a pot

Dinner with friends

A power shower

A cold beer on a warm day

An afternoon snooze

Homemade apple pie                                                       

Breakfast in bed

The sea

Getting drenched in the rain

Cracker jokes

Old books