Yesterday Rachel and I were talking about how our attitudes to money have changed over the years. For Rachel, perhaps only subtle changes. For myself, I really have changed. Here I liken ourselves to honey bees and an excitable puppy. Guess which is me!
We were sitting, of all places, in the garden shed yesterday afternoon. It was quite warm and cosy there while we drank our tea and reflected on how we were in our early adult lives, long before we knew each other.
That was when we remarked on the contrast between our attitudes and how they have converged over the years.
The honey bee
Rachel is the honey bee. She knows her job and gets on with it. Amongst the various duties, she helps store nectar and honey in the hive for the greater good of the hive.
She’s industrious and salts away the proceeds of her hard work. Even though she has no specific purpose for all of her earnings, she tucks it away safely and it works for her with a good return.
She lives carefully, within her means and is prudent.
The excitable puppy
This was me, back in the early 1980s. I suppose I had little money but always just enough to get by. I had little by way of savings and what I did have (left over from childhood) was converted into far more exciting things – a bicycle, a camera, a tent, records and some loudspeakers, an air ticket, and a….. you get the drift.
I was curious, my head was full of wanderlust, I loved life and wanted to explore and discover things. I didn’t want to be shackled. If I wanted to buy something, or go somewhere, I would just have to figure out how I was going to pay for it.
I had some crappy jobs when I left college. When I was preparing to set off to Africa with my bicycle in the early 1980s, for a few months I worked in a hospital laundry and saved money like crazy, just like the honey bee. The good side of the job being it seemed well paid back then, it was near to where I lived and it was the first job I applied for. Also I could take my clothes there to get them washed and dried every Friday. Those ladies who did my laundry were so kind!
The bad side were the times when I was assigned to work on a conveyor belt, to sort through the laundry as it came from the hospitals. There were soiled sheets and pyjamas, along with surgeon’s gowns with blood all over them. They all needed sorting.
That crappy job taught me a lot, even though I was there for a short while. It taught me what a menial job was like and how people looked after they had been in a place like that for many years. I felt I was working hard to earn my money and it seemed quite good at the time.
Back then my accommodation was equally crappy but in a funny kind of way, it did me good. I lived in a large Victorian house in Gloucester. Tall ceilings, a large, dark and wide staircase led to my two rented rooms on the first floor. I shared a cold and primitive bathroom with the other occupants of the house. My living room, complete with a kitchen area, was huge. It had an equally huge bay window which was nice in the warm autumn sun but freezing in the winter.
Talking of freezing, my bedroom was at the back of the house and there was no heating. Often condensation would freeze on the window and if it was really cold, when I woke in the morning the bed clothes would have frost from my breath while I slept under a mound of blankets and an old eiderdown.
So there you are, I had a dream of travelling and then figured out how to pay for it, one step at a time. Rachel on the other hand would systematically save her money, knowing it would be needed one day in the future.
She is the honeybee, even now. As for me being the excitable puppy, well hopefully I have grown up a little. Yes I have, but there’s still that curiosity and wanderlust inside me which needs to occasionally come out!