After some rather intense travel over the last few weeks, it has been a relief to settle down for a while and cook for ourselves again.
Combining what we’ve learned from two fantastic books, Feed Yourself for $35 a Week and The $21 Challenge, back at home in Australia, I think we’ve got grocery shopping down to a fine art – our weekly shop regularly coming in at around this mark. But I was nervous as to how we would fare here in the UK.
‘Time is money’ wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1748, in Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One:
Remember that TIME is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or thrown away Five Shillings besides.
To update this slightly, Franklin is saying that there is an opportunity cost involved in deciding not to work: if you take a week’s unpaid holiday, you need to consider not only the costs of the holiday, but how much money you could have earned during that time.
Over time, the idiom has come to be associated perhaps more commonly with other people wasting your time rather than you not making the most of it: ‘I can’t afford to spend a lot of time standing here talking. Time is money, you know!‘
But what is the relationship between time and money?
I have always found it strange that the gold watch (or clock) has long been considered a traditional retirement gift.
Surely once you are retired, you will have more time to enjoy, and less cause to watch the minutes tick by to home time, less need to set an alarm to wake you up?
Sitting on the bus from Cork to Dublin, I got to thinking about a recent discussion I had with fellow traveller and blogger Elizabeth the Island Enthusiast about the different ways of calculating how long you can travel for – whether for a quick jaunt, extended – or even permanent – travel.
Increasing house prices is one of the most frequently discussed – and worried about – topics.
One of the most fascinating items on display at the British Museum is a 13th century mortgage, carved into a stone brick.
Dated Sunday 11 June 1217, and written in Sanskrit mixed with the local dialect in Nagari script, the enormous brick records a mortgage against a loan. (I suspect that if you took out enough mortgages, you could build a house out of the mortgage bricks!)
What is money, and what does it mean to you? This was one of the first questions I explored on this blog, but my recent post on inflation and my visits yesterday (and again today!) to The British Museum made me consider the issue again.
Walking past a bakery in Bergen, Norway today, I was consumed by the sweet aroma of hot cinnamon.
In to Baker Brun we went, to buy a Skillingsbolle, described as ‘the all-time favourite Bergen treat’ with a name originating from its original price of one shilling. In fact, the word ‘shilling’ itself derives from the Old Norse scilling meaning ‘division’, and was a division of the old Norwegian Rigsdaler.
Continue reading “Why does a shilling bun cost more than a shilling?”
We’ve just spent the day wandering around beautiful temples in Bangkok, Thailand, and, after seeing numerous signs warning against pickpockets today, am glad to say that I’ve arrived back at the hotel with my wallet, which I’ve been carrying in a hard-to-reach part of my bag all day.
It’s always been a source of frustration to me that most women’s clothes, including even business trousers, don’t have pockets. Jeans are often the only clothes that reliably have pockets (even then, not all do), but most women’s wallets are too large to fit in a pocket anyway.
Continue reading “What do women’s pockets and men’s wallets have in common?”
We are currently staying in the delightfully quirky ‘Hotel Re’ in Singapore, which, like many hotels, has a large ‘function room’.
It has often amused me that, by definition, function rooms are frequently the only rooms in a building with out any designated function until one is inserted into them. ‘Dining room’, ‘bathroom’, ‘bedroom’, ‘office’ are all obviously purposeful.
Of course, in homes, there’s often the ‘spare’ room – used for storage, for an occasional study, as an additional bedroom for guests. But how necessary can a room called ‘spare’ really be?
As I sit here ready to leave Fiji, I am reflecting on some of the things I’ve learned over the past couple of months, and particularly, during our final volunteering placement with IVI, which we finished up yesterday. One of which is a new perspective on the question ‘Is it a need or a want?’
I knew that we were going to a remote island school, and having had some experience in an even smaller, even more remote village in Fiji before, thought I knew what to expect. But I didn’t. The school we were placed at had very different opportunities and challenges.
