Money photo

 

It’s all very well getting carried away with excitement at, finally, the prospect of a new kitchen and a house of which I need no longer be ashamed. We have been wrangling for years with our insurance company over a subsidence claim, and spent years before that overcoming the huge trauma of the  upstairs refurbishment done badly wrong by a previous team of tea swilling bodging builders and a managing architect who signed off things that he should not have. No idea why he did this. Why, after all would one actually trust people to do properly what they say they can do beautifully? He can’t in any way have been as fed up as us of a project that lasted over eight months instead of the planned four. We spent several tens of thousands of pounds rectifying the mess they made and some things are unsolvable. Unsurprisingly, those builders went bankrupt at the end of their project with us.

Having recovered sufficiently to comtemplate doing more work on our house, we are up to our eyes in glass doors and awning fabrics and too-expensive slate flooring and practical cupboards and boiling water taps and ovens and the usual exciting stuff. But paying for it: ah yes. That thought is sobering indeed.

This is how it is: the OH earns the money and I spend it. How funny that joke has always been! And now we’re taking on another huge mortgage at the same time as we have teenagers carrying on with their education.

The way the OH is paid is being changed radically this year. I’d best not go into the details but it means we shall be somewhat worse off.  I’m sure those people who spend incredible amounts of their energy deriding those who work in financial services will derive some comforting Schadenfreude from this. As I point out to anyone who will listen and several enveloped in the comfort of their own prejudices that they know better: my introverted, OH spends his day saying no to people who earn multiples of his salary and who don’t take kindly to “No.” His job exerts a terrible toll on him. But, you know, go ahead and hurl abuse at him anyway.

I, in particular, will be a lot worse off and this is upsetting me. It’s not, after all as if, as some seem to think, I lounge about all day doing my nails and feeding my family on junk food. Now, I understand that it’s all in a good cause: we’ll have a lovely living space but austerity is hard to accept. As we all know.

This post is glum. I am glum. Arguments about money are never good for a relationship but nor is brushing resentment under the carpet, for them to accumulate and trip people over at the most inopportune moment. And that is the end of tonight’s post.

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