I was given £24 out of the blue the other day, two £2 coins and a £20 note. I had given two concert tickets to Nick as I couldn’t go. As i said, these tickets have already been budgeted. They are part of a stack that I buy at the beginning of the year. But Nick came back and insisted I take £24 for the two £12 tickets. Probably his wife had said, you’re paying that money back. He’s a dangerous man to be in debt to, even if it is on;y for a London Philharmonic Orchestra redition of Bartok’s Viola concerto and Mahler’s 1st Symphony. So I got the money back. Now, I have no trouble with coins. Coins disappear in general costs. But a £20 note. That’s a different matter. As it is money from out of the blue I feel I ought to assign it a specific function. It is still sitting at the back of my little travel card pouch where I put my cards (debit and Tesco being the main ones). This issue troubles me somewhat as it feeds into the greater free money I am about to receive. When my dad died a few months ago he had savings of about £50,000 which is about to be split between four children. So, in theory, any day now I will be getting about £12,000 of more free money. What I had thought was that I would put £10,000 towards paying off my mortgage and then have £2000 of free money for a specific function, something I wouldn’t normally buy. But nothing springs to mind. The truth is that I integrate special buys into normal expenses. This is one of the things I am most proud of. That I find money from normal funds for special expenses. I integrate the special into the normal. There is no difference between special and normal. I do not need to go into special; normal is enough for me. I am repeating this because I feel it is a signoficant position. It is part of my larger agenda, that there is no difference between leisure and work, normal and special. But the fact remains that I will have notes burning a hole in my pocket and I will be unable to find a place for them in my spending plan. I read a line the other day. Men always like boys’ toys. It’s just that when they grow up, their toys get more expensive. I could not be more indifferent to this. I bought myself a treat on line a few minutes ago. It was volume 4 of Thomas Bernhard’s collected plays. It cost £4.23. You work for years refining your appetite and what you find is you’ve refined it out of all existence.

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