Optimism
Last night in a moment of optimism, I rang my helpful automated phonebank. Their friendly voice confirmed my suspicion that, unfortunately, the power of miracles has yet to affect my bank balance. I am only just solvent, a situation which feels as if it has dogged most of my life. I work hard, sometimes too hard, yet here I am aged almost fifty and I have £20.06 to my name, including the cash in my purse. And a frozen pension locked away somewhere that will, when I am finally old enough to claim it, pay for half a bagel a month from my local lo-cost supermarket. At least that techno voice didn’t sound disapproving, as it does when it says, after a weighty pause, “Your account is twenty-six pounds and fifty-one pence OVERDRAWN ….(for which we will charge you a pound a day until you are in credit, so we don’t really mind)”.
As a family, we have resources we can call on, but my personal income never stays long enough in my account to get comfortable: either I am feeling generous – I will always be better off than the bods who sit on blankets in the street – or the costs of food, kiddies birthday parties and school shoes eat into my budget, urgently demanding my immediate attention. Quite how I ended up buying Seline a pair of crocs AND a fluorescently bright pair of “trainers Mummy, not gym shoes…” remains a mystery. She will only wear one pair, and right now, my money’s on the lace-ups. Budgeting never gets a look-in. What it would feel like to have cash in the bank and leave it there? Amazing.
Also last night, a large spider dropped onto the bathroom floor. Spiders do that sort of thing. Having navigated the bath pipes or abseiled from the ceiling where they have been hanging for several weeks, they take a leap of faith and seem to spring out of no-where in my line of sight. I love spiders – those of the small British varieties – which I like to think of as bringers of prosperity and largesse. This one I saw and immediately the thought popped into my head, “A large money spider, isn’t that great?” The wriggling creature seemed to move sideways at breakneck speed in its anxiety to get away from me. It tried to crawl under the linoleum without success, so I “helped it” but putting a cup over it which I moved haphazardly up to the window, from where I hoped to launch it to freedom. Unfortunately, it didn’t trust me, and half way to the window, it simply disappeared. Was it that unidentifiable object with spindly appendages that gurgled down the plughole after I had brushed my teeth? Was that a cosmic comment on the state of my finances? I sincerely hope not.
