Home Economics Edition

This, though, is free.

Happy August! It's a brand new month of penny-watching for me, keeper of the household accounts, with four blank pages of my paper Expense Tracker to fill in. We're now eight months in to my ten year project, which is to pay off the mortgage and lay a nest egg. The nest egg will hopefully hatch a golden goose to keep us safe and warm in our childless (weep, weep) old age.   

Naturally I ask myself why we didn't start this ten years ago. As a matter of fact, we began taking stabs at it in 2017, which is how we managed to save up a down payment. One interesting thing about money is that if you don't watch it, it completely disappears, but if you do watch it, some of it sticks around. 

I emphasise "some." Life in the UK is expensive, perhaps notoriously so. It is probably one of the best countries in the world for rich people. There are so many delightful things and pastimes here for the rich. If we were rich, we would buy an 18th century townhouse in Edinburgh's West End, go stalking after deer, and pop down to London for the opera. B.A. would frequent the great auction houses, and I would indulge my passion for clothing Made in Britain to a greater extent.  (She sighed.)

To return to reality, I read a lot of personal finance blogs of my fellow not-rich, and I love poring over their household expense accounts. It's fascinating, and the authors are usually pseudonymous, so they don't mind. However, I am no longer pseudonymous, so we will just look at our monthly food bills. 

The excitement! 

I have picked the food bills because they belong to one of the few areas of monthly expenses that we can actually control. The energy bills are somewhat unpredictable, as they are not based on our actual use as much as what the energy companies think they can get away with before we change providers. The phone/broadband bill is like that, too. We halved our phone bill by calling British Telecom and threatening to go elsewhere. 

Another reason to pick the food bills is because it is a major contrast to living expenses in the southern parts of Canada and the entire USA. That said, we do not usually go to the very cheapest supermarkets, which are Aldi, Lidl and Iceland, but to middle-of-the-road Tesco, and we take occasional forays into snazzy Waitrose and high-minded Real Foods.

The reason for this is not snobbery but opportunity: we simply live closer to Tesco. Also, the cut-rate supermarkets don't always have everything we need when we need it. And Waitrose has my favourite coffee, and sometimes even puts it on sale. 

Right. Now steel yourselves. January was a doozy. RCBT means Restaurants/Cafes/Bars/Takeaway.

Food-and-drink Expenditure in 2021

January 2021: Groceries--£455.47; RCBT--£112.65; Coffee subscription: £12.95

February 2021: Groceries--£299.70; RCBT--£45.15; Coffee sub.: £12.95

March 2021: Groceries--£308.75; RCBT--£25.30; Coffee sub.: £12.95

April 2021: Groceries--£361.71; RCBT--£69.03; Coffee sub. £12.95

May 2021: Groceries--£350.34; RCBT--£344.45; Coffee sub. £12.95

June 2021: Groceries--£389.75; RCBT--£67.60; Coffee sub.--CANCELLED

July 2021: Groceries--£321.52; RCBT--£150.80. 

Explanatory Notes

I didn't start writing down what we spent when and where until April, so I am not sure why we spent so much in January. That we weren't paying attention is my best guess. 

The dramatic dip in February and March is thanks to Lent. 

The jump in April is thanks to Easter feasting. 

The massive RCBT bill in May is thanks in part to a April/May holiday in North Berwick and in part to a May trip to Cambridgeshire to see friends. A takeaway fish supper for two in North Berwick costs £17.90, and a sit-in Thai supper for four in that particular English town costs £85.90. Both, incidentally, were exquisitely delicious. We had TWO fish suppers in North Berwick, as it happens, because--let's face it--the North Berwick Fry is itself a good reason to holiday in North Berwick. 

I cancelled my coffee subscription when I found the same coffee on sale at Waitrose and reluctantly admitted to myself that it has been some time since the harshest lockdown had been lifted. 

Speaking of lockdown, the RCBT bill also increased thanks to lockdown lifting. For the time being, we can go to pubs, bars, cafes, and restaurants almost as normal. Booking ahead is usually necessary and naturally we have to sign in with either a pen or our smartphones. To a certain extent, social life has returned indoors, and that means "paying the rent,"  as it were. 

(I'll never forget handing over thermos flasks at a pub to fill with beer and then drinking the beer with B.A. on a bench by the river. It was very cold, and I got very tipsy.)  

In July, B.A. and I celebrated Canada Day in a Canada-themed restaurant and that Saturday splurged in a cocktail bar. The next week, B.A. picked up the tab at the pub for himself and his mates, and we had breakfast rolls in a humble cafe. Mid-month, I met my pupils and their maths teacher for a pizza lunch, and B.A. met some friends from his former workplace for sodas. In between there were a snack attack at the "Mac Shack" (which sells macaroni-and-cheese), a Gregg's savoury pastry, and two scrumptious Sunday pastries. As you see, it doesn't take much to spend £150.80 on eating out in Scotland.  

Meanwhile, as B.A. will undoubted say as he reads this post, fresh food is expensive. Not so homemade apple cider and elderflower champagne, however, thank goodness!

UPDATE (August 3): They do say you should never compare, but I was excited to see the June food costs for the Fire Shrink, as he too lives in the UK: He's beating himself up for spending just north of £500.  

How to make your home larger for free

Currently when I am pedalling away on stationary bike, I watch videos about Tiny Houses. After every workout, I notice that my kitchen (where the bike lives) is much bigger than I thought. Then I go into the sitting-room and notice that it is bigger than I thought, too. Kitchen plus living room have a larger floor space than most Tiny Homes I've seen. And there's more! Across the hall, there's an enormous front bedroom, which is our dining-room/office/guest room, and a back bedroom with a closet bigger than any closet I've ever seen in a Tiny House. And tucked away by the front door, a wall apart from the kitchen, is a bathroom with an actual bath and a big cupboard for towels, sheets and demijohns of fermenting apple cider. 

Thus, after ever workout, I feel incredibly rich and simply luxuriate in all the space. I also think that if we wanted to, we could sell our flat and most of our possessions, build a Tiny House somewhere, and bank 90% of our profit. 

Therefore, if you are feeling sad and cramped about your modest house or flat, do have a look on YouTube at how the Tiny House class live. They're so cheery about it, too. 

Talent = Deliberate Practice + Love

"From Mulieris Dignitatem to Przygoda Słonia," said Benedict Ambrose as he walked into the sitting-room this morning. 

"It's all the all the same to me," I said, looking up from the bright green picture book that tells the story of The Elephant's Adventure.

This is not exactly true, for I have to look up a lot more words in the Polish translation (or original, let's face it) of Mulieris Dignatem than I do for Przygoda Słonia. But what is true is that reading Polish is reading Polish,  and picking up The Elephant's Adventure is a lot less daunting than the thought of another chapter of MD or St. Augustine's Wyznania.

Yesterday I met a Polish stranger in a sunny park for a "language exchange," and she told me (in Polish) that her dream was one day to speak English as fluently as she speaks Polish. I felt then that I had met a kindred spirit because of course I would love to speak both Italian and Polish (and a whole list of other languages) as fluently as I speak English. 

Since both my new acquaintance (perhaps a future friend!) and I are well over 14, fluency is going to be a lifelong project, and it is unlikely that we will ever speak our foreign-to-us languages without strong accents. However, this doesn't really matter as anglophones find accented English charming (or, if not charming, normal), and Poles find accented Polish miraculous. (I don't know what Italians think because, bizarre as this sounds, I don't have any born-in-Italy Italian friends, and have had the same Italian tutor for years.) 

What will get my znajoma and I to our linguistic goals is deliberate practice and love of our chosen languages. I doubt we have talent for languages because I less and less believe in talent and more and more believe in the power of deliberate, obsessive practise at something that a practitioner loves, especially if this practise is done before the age of 20. 

I now realise that my easy ability to put down words in a sonorous order is thanks to keeping a diary as a child. Being read to, and obsessively reading books, and listening to my parents discuss books also has something to do with it, but I am sure I put in my 10,000 hours of writing by the time I was 20. My brother Nulli undoubtedly had put in 10,000 hours of piano practise by the time he was 20.  I wrote and he played because I loved writing and he loved playing. 

I'm not sure how deliberate our practise was, though.   I am sure at least half of his must have been painstaking challenge, and I probably looked up words in the dictionary. My brother had good teachers, and I had good models: P.G. Wodehouse comes to mind. 

The more I think about it, the more gleefully I dance on Divine Talent's grave and read books like Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice by Matthew Syed. Realising that you can excel at something that you really love as long as you put the right kind of practice in is very exciting. The trick is that you really have to love doing it because otherwise you would need superhuman discipline. 

Update: Very cool eco devotees here and especially here. They seem very rooted in reality.

The Condition of Servitude

The problem with growing up with books written before 1950 is that most of them were written by authors with the privileged leisure to write books. I generalise, but as far as I could make out, the gentlemen had gentlemanly job titles (if any) like Professor and the ladies either lived by their pen, or on the family fortune, or on their husband's income. If asked how L. Frank Baum or Lucy Maud Montgomery had fed, housed and clothed themselves, I would have assumed they received an income from the sale of their books. Perhaps they did, but what I did not know about was that there was a vast ocean of authors who never achieved anything like Baum's or Montgomery's publishing success. 

My inner script, therefore, said that--since I got A+ in Creative Writing--I was sure to make a living as an author. By the time I was 19, however, I had divined that this was easier to dream than to do, so I vaguely set my sights on an academic career. Sadly, I still laboured under the mistaken belief that if something is hard, you lack talent, and should find something to study that you are talented at, i.e. find easy. How disappointed I was to discover that Ancient Greek is really hard. I thought this meant I had no talent in it.  Needless to say, I swam in a lot of self-hatred and anxiety until I switched my major to English Literature. The A's and even A+'s came back---because of My One Talent, I thought.  

I enjoy mining my mistakes to help other people, especially young women, not make them. To recap, the first mistake I explode in this post is that any but a minority of book authors make a living at writing books. The second is that your brain is made of concrete that has hardened in a certain shape and that you are incapable of learning things you find difficult so well that they become easy tak jak język polski. 

Unfortunately, both mistakes carry a heretical theological idea, which is "God must love those more/differently talented people more than me, or He would have set the concrete of my brain differently/sent me the requisite successful ideas/stamina for a bestseller." 

But I seem to have gone off-course, for what I really wanted to talk about was Jacob Lund Fisker's idea that most of us are born in wage-slavery, and it is our job to dig ourselves out. I have actually bought the book version of "Early Retirement Extreme," not because I want to retire extremely early (too late!) but because I don't want B.A. and I to have an impoverished old age. 

The time to begin preventing your impoverished old age is really when you are a teenager and earn your first paycheque. I read recently that if you manage to save $15,000 by 25 and then invest it in a tax-sheltered vehicle at 10%, you will discover when you are 65 that it has turned into $1,000,000. Of course, one problem--when you are a teenager or even 25--is that you cannot imagine being 65. Another problem is earning as much as $15,000 by age 25 although I bet if you added up all the money you have earned after taxes so far, you would faint dead away. I don't dare think about all the money I made and squandered as a teenager.

At any rate, were I speaking kindly to my teenage self today--a very good imaginary exercise, by the way, as it cheers up the teenager still residing within--I would tell myself to save 50% of everything I make for the rest of my life. One thinks of the charming child in The Pursuit of Love who hoarded all pocket money so that she could run away one day.  Perhaps the secret is giving children a goal. 

"Dear Nephews! Dear Nieces! If you save up 50% of all pocket money, all cash gifts, all summer jobs, you will be well on your way to wealth and can do anything you like when you are 40."

"Dear Auntie! We cannot even imagine being 40, so wouldn't it be better for us to buy wonderful clothes and delicious hamburgers when we out with our friends, and just trust to getting a good job that will let us do anything we like when we are 40? Also, dear Auntie, you are very old, so will you not just leave us your money?"

"Dear Nephews! Dear Nieces! First of all, I am planning to live to 102, when you yourselves will be rather long in tooth. Second, if you plan carefully, you can inveigle your parents into buying you wonderful clothes that will last the most crucial decade of saving up. (Wait until you have finished growing.) Third, you should take the lead in social plans and suggest a teenage supper club, in which you take turns entertaining at home (having banished your parents to the movies) or order the cheapest thing on the menu. Fourth, if you already know exactly what paid work you want to do and know infallibly how to get it, you are certainly an improvement on the 1970s model. Fifth, practising always saving 50% now will make it so much easier for you to do so when you are given your first paycheque for full-time work."

The most likely answer to this is loud guffaws and "Oh Auntie, you're so funny!" but perhaps it would plant seeds in their young, pliable, definitely-not-concrete minds.  

To go back to this "born a slave, must dig yourself out" analogy, one of the biggest shocks in Crean & Fimister's Integralism was the idea that being an employee is undignified. 

"Strictly speaking, whenever a person is employed by another for payment, he is in some sense that person's servant or slave," write the priest and the professor. 

 "[...] Even in the commonplace of paid employment, slavery is undesirable, for the paradigmatic form of ownership is where the labourer owns his own means of production. This is more attuned to the nature of man, whom 'God has left into the hands of his own counsel' [Sirach 15:14]," they continue.

"[...] It is in view of self-sufficiency and emancipation that the servant, that is, the man labouring for another in exchange for renumeration, labours. The condition of servitude is therefore of its very nature infantilising."

If we are to take this seriously (and your mileage may vary), it is therefore incumbent upon us to save up our money and invest it where it will work for us, sparing us the indignity of servitude. Naturally, human beings actually LIKE and NEED to work; the problem (if I understand it) is needing the paycheque. So a good compromise is to work at something you love to do and would do even if you were not paid for it. However, you must support yourself and your family, and the most lovesome work is not always the most remunerative work. The solution therefore is to slave and save until you have an "independent income." Sadly, the most effective time to do that is when you are young and compound interest works so dramatically in your favour.

A Weekend of Gardens

We had a beautiful weekend, with the sunny weather actually typical of east coast Scotland in the summer although everyone forgets this as soon as it rains.

On Saturday Benedict Ambrose and I took advantage of the combination of sun and my day off work to go to a National Trust for Scotland property featuring a huge, tiered garden with a pond, fields, and a curious horse hanging his head over a stone wall. Dogs are not permitted off the lead, and so dog-walkers don't seem to go there very often which is---I am sorry to say, for I like dogs--a blessing. It is thus a quiet place; an almost secret paradise. 

As the sun poured down, we switched from bench to bench to suit our comfort as we read our books. Around noon we moved to a large, sheltering gazebo. An hour later I volunteered to go to the nearest grocery store for lunch and came back with pork pies, a sandwich, water and crisps. B.A. continued reading David M. Levy's Scrolling Forward, and I continued Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid. The latter is about the invention and implications of reading.  This reminded me of language acquisition in general, and I texted Polish Pretend Son to find out what words my year-and-a-half-old godling uses. It's clearly as summery in Poland as here, for her small store includes the first syllables of "mosquito" and "housefly."

One of the joys of Scotland is that we don't have mosquitos and, thank heavens, midges don't usually thrive this far south. The Highlands must be alive with midgies, though,  and this is why I never go there from May to October. They bite hard.

We stayed in this beautiful garden until 5 PM or so, went to the grocery store together, and came home. B.A. set up chairs under our apple tree, which abounds in small "cider babies," as B.A. calls them, with copies of the Spectator. Our next-door-downstairs neighbour came padding into our garden barefoot with a half-bottle of white wine he though we might like, and talked tipsily of apple cider making and illegal stills he has known. 

On Sunday after Mass--and our TLM still thrives, thank heavens--B.A. and I went to a birthday party held in one of Edinburgh's many private gardens. These gated gardens appear in the middle of Georgian or Victorian streets or squares and are the collective property of the residents who subscribe to their upkeep. If we ever live in the West End or the New Town, we will certainly pay the subscription and become happy key holders ourselves. (Perhaps I could keep my veggie trug on the roof.)

The gated garden in which we sat and ate Coronation Chicken sandwiches and raspberry Bakewell tart and drank sparking wine is at least a city-block long and lined with shrubs and trees. It has weathered grey curved wooden benches here and there. It is large enough to have several (music free) parties without them impinging on others. We watched with amusement as a party of small children whacked away at a piñata, and two small children turned and stared as B.A. and another birthday guest broke into a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song. 

This time the benches moved with us as we sought partial shade from the overly generous sun. B.A. and I sat and chatted (and B.A. occasionally sang) in this park from about 2 PM until 9:30 PM. Thus, it was very much an open air day and a very good use of the (east coast) Scottish summer weather 

One of our conversation threads wove around the recent Motu Proprio and the allegations launched at people who love the Traditional Latin Mass. Our host, who stands at the church door on Sundays with a clipboard in obedience to the archdiocesan COVID-19 procedures, revealed that not just cradle Catholics and convert Catholics but potential future Catholics come to our Mass. Because of B.A.'s illness and other difficulties of the past four years (e.g. COVID-19), I haven't been much of a parish social butterfly, but I dimly recalled hearing reports that some of the students who appear at Mass aren't Catholics or even yet Christians. Some of them have been baptised, and others haven't yet been received. I believer these converts and inquirers first come because enthusiastic Catholic university students bring them.   

As we trundled down Princes Street on the bus, I noticed crowds of people outside fancy bistros and bars. It seemed busy for a Sunday night--or perhaps it only seemed that way after a year and a half of lockdowns. 

Catholic Clothing, again

If I lived in an climate-controlled iron box with an internet connection, I would know it was summer from this article in Catholic World Report. I skimmed the article on Catholic clothing (I confess) and then went to the comments to see the usual complaints from women about the focus on female modesty, the usual rejoinder about hot pants, and the sneers at the very well-dressed men, who are accused here of trying to "out-dapper" one another. 

I particularly enjoyed the remark about people looking as if it were 1962, because I have a pet theory that 1963 was the Annus horribilis on which the good ship Western Civilisation foundered. But of course no woman dresses exactly as her grandmother or mother did in 1962 for women's underclothing in 1962 was atrociously uncomfortable. Also, the only trad Catholic woman I know eccentric enough to wear gloves to Mass is me, and only very rarely: to Polish Pretend Son's wedding, for example, and when extra-paranoid about the Vile Germ. 

As it is summer, I usually wear to Mass the blue maxi dress I bought for wear to the Vatican Press Office with sturdy blue shoes (alas) or blue sandals. I object to the idea one cannot wear sandals to Mass, for monks and nuns certainly do. Also, my feet are aging faster than the rest of me, and apparently I can't wear ballet flats. Indeed, even my dowdy comfort shoes did not pass muster with my physiotherapist, who bent them in her hands to show how inadequate they are. 

Naturally I wear a blue denim maxi-skirt of indestructible traddery almost every day now. I'm happy to say I have three: one suitable for wearing in town, one only for the house, and one for gardening and painting. With this I pair a clean T-shirt and, in necessary, a cardigan. 

I felt confirmed in my uniform--which involves, as you see, weekday clothes and a Sunday dress---by reading about the late Latinist Fr. Reggie Foster, OCD. Fr. Foster was known for wearing a strange habit of his own design: a light blue jacket, a turtleneck and denim overalls. He looked like a janitor and was treated like a janitor by those who didn't recognise him and look down on janitors. Although I prefer priests to look like priests, I am still moved by his humility. 

Personally, I'm a bit worried of being treated as though I were insane. As far as I know, this hasn't happened yet. In my usual weekday outfit, while climbing up Fleshmarket Close, I looked warily at a man in a bizarre costume that was half-football fan, half-Viking. He was loud, with a friend, coming down Close and nobody else was around. 

"God bless your day, Sister," he shouted.

Maybe I should go back to wearing lipstick. But if we all stopped wearing lipstick, think of how much money and plastic we would save!

Lovely Young People

I was cheered, yesterday evening, by a little video showing lovely young people from Europe and beyond asking Pope Francis and the bishops not to suppress the Traditional Latin Mass. As Pope Francis doesn't understand English wonderfully well (as I noted on a BBC documentary), I told Benedict Ambrose it was a pity they didn't speak Spanish instead. 

"English is the universal language of the world," harrumphed B.A. or words that he will tell me later today he actually said.  

If some enterprising filmmaker really wants to wring hearts, they should do a similar project with young married people and their tiny children. Every time I see a new big young family at Mass, I am utterly delighted.