One Woman Goes To ....

To spend.... or not .

Writers of fiction are supposed to stick to one genre. It's why Joanna Trollope wrote Historical Fiction as Caroline Harvey and her contemporary fiction as herself. Readers have expectations and it doesn't do to mess with them.

This thinking can't apply to non-fiction. Otherwise the fact that I have just finished reading 'The Thrift Book - Live well and spend less' could not have been written by the same person who wrote 'The Shops - How, why and where to shop'. But it is. India Knight is the author of both.

My technical knowledge isn't great enough to know if 'being served bankruptcy papers' is the same as going/being bankrupt but it was this along with some more philosophical shifts that prompted India Knight's shift from Shopping 'my number one hobby' to sewing your own clothes 'amazingly economical and fun and provides the most enormous sense of satisfaction.'

She is very clear that this is not a book for the cheese parers. Which is just as well as her approach to thrift would probably have them as well as the tin foil recyclers take time out from paring and smoothing to snort with derision.

Most money saving or thrift sites especially the US ones go into incredible detail on how many $ or cents doing something will save or cost you. The nearest India gets to the impact of thrifting is to refer to the 'amazing amount of money it's saving me a month'.

The cost of fuel and sticking bubble wrap inside your windows is not what this book is about. The focus is on the fun and pleasure of doing things yourself. Whether it be cooking,sewing,knitting, growing your own and if you really get the bug - chicken and bee keeping.

Will I follow any of her ideas? A few possibly.

I aspire to her most 'expensive' money saving idea. The purchase of a caravan. Her's at Camber Sands. Mine on the Isle of Wight. Ironic as I don't think I bought anything after reading 'The Shops'.

However both books are very enjoyable. Thrift maybe the subject but India Knight is always very generous with words. This is her description in 'Thrift' of becoming conscious of waste -

'Little by little I became greener. We're talking eau de nil or chartreuse on a good day, rather than darkest forest green'.

For the parers undoubtedly green would have sufficed. Anything more an unnecessary extravagance.

I like that her word count is definitely still spendthrift.

The End doesn't always come last.

I have added another bad habit to an already long list. And with this one I am on my own as the only other person I know who has 'fessed up to this isn't real.

In 'When Harry met Sally' (still in my Top Ten) Harry (Billy Crystal) explains how he always reads the end of a book first. In case he dies and so never gets to know how things turn out.

That's my bad habit too.

Except that my reasons don't even have such dark and potent undertones. Mine are that I am lazy and can't WAIT TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS.

I start a book. Get a feel for the characters and what direction things are heading and then decide that I don't feel like taking the scenic page by page route to THE END. So instead skip to the final 4 or 5 pages where the unravelling,revealing and righting takes place and then having read that if I feel the need to know how it all happened I flick back through the book and find the key plot points.

It used to be that I got 3/4 of the way through before fast forwarding but now it's getting earlier and earlier.

And perhaps worse, reading Elizabeth Jane Howard 'Love All' ( Her 'Cazalet Chronicles' are some of my favorite books ever ) I started to feel that although I was enjoying the journey I was doubtful about how I would like the destination. A quick flick to the end confirmed my suspicions. No deep sigh of all being well with the world was going to accompany the wistful turning of the last page. So that was that, book abandoned.

I thought I was an End junkie. But it seems I'm worse than that. I'm a Happy End junkie. Pathetic.

All I can say in my favour is that I have never owned a pair of 'Days of the Week' underpants.

Did she really just say that...

I am listening to an unabridged version of Clarissa Dickson Wright tell her life story in 'Spilling the Beans'. Awful and fascinating. She certainly doesn't believe in crying over spilt milk. For most of my listening time the main thought that repeats in my head is how she survived, let alone managed to sit in a studio and recount it all.

There are a few bits where I have had to hit rewind to make sure that I heard correctly. And yes I did. For example her father was a surgeon and Clarissa relates how over the course of his career he operated on a young Saddam Hussein, saving his life when he had a severely torsioned gut and later performed colostomy surgery for the Queen Mother. This is a book full of such 'fancy that' moments.

Very engrossing. If you have a long car journey or just a large pile of ironing to be got through and need an entertaining and anecdote rich companion I would take Clarissa with you.