Friday 22nd January 2010
I really can’t go on doing it all for you. You’ll have to think of how to slash costs for yourselves after this. Here are the last of my top tips.
Bullet points again!
- Comb through your attics. What can you sell on E-bay? There must be something. I’m trying to dispose of a glass table-top. I’ve never been near E-bay before. I’ve got 4 ‘watchers’ but no bids
- Edit the home – throwing away is free. Maybe you can sell or re-gift
- Economise by booking your Italian villa for the summer at once. Will cost more later and bargains will be gone. Only 25 per cent to pay now. The rest will appear somehow
- Book your summer flights; they’ll never be so cheap again
- Have no fear of the no-frills airlines. I’ve been invited to Cap Ferrat for dinner in June. I’m going by Easy from Luton. No-one will see me there on a Friday lunchtime
- What else can you get away with when no-one’s looking? Wear old clothes at home to preserve your best. But remember to change if you go near the window or outside
- Don’t eat – unless you’ve got company, who will be thrilled by your slenderness
- If you must have something, try a cold boiled potato – with some Greek yoghurt, for a treat
- Wear a scarf all day as part of your outfit – doesn’t cost anything as long as you don’t have to buy the scarf
- Make lists – go through the home room by room, drawer by drawer, cupboard by cupboard. What needs to be done? Should you re-knife your residence, or re-dinner-plate? (That means, Get new) The hours spent on this will distract from any possible peckishness. And you will have glorious lists at the end of it
- Give a dinner. May sound odd but if you do not progress beyond chicken or, better still, vegetarian, you could end up in profit from all the bottles of wine brought by your guests
- Go to dinners – manoeuvre your host into doing chicken, then steal all the bones for a bouillon. Remove any other left-overs. They’ll never notice. Remember to take your Tupperware for ease of transport
- Best of all, Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything. No ski-ing holiday, no Winter Sun, no Easter break, Absolutely fail-safe. Not only no loss of cachet but possible rarity value accruing even
Do all this and, by April, you’ll be a Multi again.
By the way, I made that broccoli and Stilton soup out of the Multis’ Stilton rind. Much liked. Rind still going in its Emma Bridgewater tin.
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If you are looking for womens’s shoes in men’s sizes at reasonable prices try Brixton Market….nobody will ask questions…or indeed notice you. That tip is a rather old one, but in the spirit of Adrian’s Pearls I thought I would recycle it.
Are you accusing me of re-cycling? Morley’s of Brixton was always an excellent source but maybe nolonger. So hard to keep track of department stores of one’s youth – whether alive or dead. Arding and Hobbs (never understood why they didn’t drop the second ‘haytch’ having gone to the trouble of removing the first), from whence the marmalade orange stair carpet in my old flat came, quite gone. That was the flat where the avo bathroom was, condemned by Frankie-Doreen Gunn as ‘rather smelly’.
Giving up work was the best way of saving money, according to Darling Susan in “Highland Fling” – cheaper in the end because no need to take taxis, no need to wear formal day attire, no need to spend hours in City restaurants at lunch, etc.
Wait until January 2nd and buy foie gras in a French supermarket. They eat it in huge amounts over the Festive and then it gets absolutely slashed, and everyone VERY IMPRESSED by a dinner that begins with foie gras on crackers, whatever may follow. Seems to keep forever if you scrape the obviously greenish bits off. (Joke).
After that, you can get away with what Barbara Pym calls the Cheaper Cuts, boiled for weeks in economy lager, if you pretend it’s out of Fergus Henderson. Credibility sometimes fails if you claim your lime jelly at the end is Ottolenghi, however.
Awful false economy travelling with orange-coloured airlines however. You have to knock it back to a frightful extent to get over the horror and then when you land you turn out to have been returned to Luton. All very well if one lives in Luton which one of course Doesn’t.
Of course the very best tip of all is to Sell Your Money-Saving Tips to one of London’s top newspapers, ideally the Daily Mail at two pounds a word.
You know, I once went to Luton to look at a car for sale. I think I’ve mentioned before that buying a car leads to the most extraordinary adventures and encounters with persons (car salesmen) who in extremity of frockage and hair are perfect Poor Little Rich Gay but in almost all other respects absolutely not.
I meant to mention WORK. A difficult area. Thank you for your suggestion of selling to the Daily Mail. I hope readers will find it useful and we will see shortly a vast improvement in that publication. There must be other lucrative piecework that Poor Little Rich Gays could do that isn’t plumbing or being a leccie. I know! Follow the Robin Smallmeal example – carve out a career as a ‘model’ in ads for Eastern European processed products. Appear in road-side posters all over the Central of Europe. No-one will ever know. An avucular look and a high burnished chestnut rinse an advantage – although Smallmeal, in daily life at least, has gone back to grey, as we know.
What excellent advice! I had a similar experience when I worked. A minimum of 10 couture outfits at any one time at £19,000 each was a drain on the salary