Skip to main content

Day 4: the experiment continues

Having some scanning issues so you'll have to take my word for it but today was pretty wild on the splashing the cash front. Sadly all sensible expenditure which is never a huge heap of fun - my heart may yearn for Bond Street but necessity takes me to the supermarket... sigh...
  • £73.33 at Sainsbury's for groceries and petrol for the car (big yawn)
  • £1.50 for two Diet Cokes at Pret-a-Manger (yes, I am a creature of habit)
  • £4.30 for lunch at Pret-a-Manger (ditto)
  • £5.81 for a pack of Marlboro Lights from the newsagents
A grand total of £84.94! That's pretty good for 24 hours.

The funny thing is that I thought this experiment would make me realise how much money I waste on a daily basis. But it hasn't. It's just made me realise that my life is incredibly dull. This is my daily routine - drop the kids at school, go to work, only leave the office during the day for meetings, sneaky fag breaks or food raids at Pret (which I eat at my desk), come home, put the kids to bed, eat dinner with Alpha, finish off any work with a scary deadline, blog, go to bed.... repeat. ARRGGGHHHH.

Thank God I'm about to shake things up a bit by leaving my office job. Surely taking the freelance leap will catapault me into a life of glamour and excitement? Hmmm. Maybe. Not.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Apologies for being incommunicado this week and hope none of you out there are too distraught not to be receiving the usual almost-daily MotV missives. The reason for the silence is that I'm up to my neck, metaphorically-speaking, in research papers for my first grad course assessment. This experience has made me realise how rigorously un-academic I am in my thinking. It has also illuminated how reliant I am on red wine in order to get through endless evenings typing furiously on my laptop, not to mention the fueling of increasingly colorful curses that I feel obliged to aim at the University's online library system which consistently refuses to spit out any of the journals I'm desperate for (I refuse to believe this is 100% due to my technical incompetence...) Oh well, if this is the price one has to pay in order to realize a long-cherished dream then it's not all that bad... No one ever said a mid-life career change would be easy. Wish me luck!

Environment

Being an expat, a favorite topic of conversation is 'where I/you want to go next?' or 'When do you plan to go home?' It's a good question. I'm not sure I want to stay in Dubai for ever, but I'm also not sure about how long I want to be here for or where else I would like to live. For almost the first time ever, I have no fixed plans apart from keeping my eyes and mind open to interesting opportunities. And as to going 'home', I have no idea where that is. Constantly moving around as a child left me with the feeling that 'home' is wherever I am right now, so in effect 'home' could be anywhere. The longest I've ever lived in one fixed place was 18 years in London, on and off, but that doesn't feel like 'home' either - I love going back to see family and friends, and it's a great place to shop, but that's about it. I have a great love for California, which is where my extended family is from (and where most of the