Full Time Care

I noticed something again yesterday which has had me fuming for a while now: supermarket prices. Most folks barely notice the price changes that occur all the time, since they do one big shop on a regular basis. When you’re spending hundreds, the pennies are less remarkable. Personally, I shop every day or every other day (because I can’t carry much) on a limited budget, so I see things in a different light.

The change that annoyed me was at Waitrose, which then made me think of one I’ve seen at Somerfield. For the uninitiated, Waitrose is an ‘upper class’ supermarket. In other words, they think they should only stock high quality items - and charge ludicrously high prices for them. Somerfield is at the other end of things: cheap and cheerful. As always, certain things cost less in one place than another, so I tend to shop in three or four stores, picking up the best bargains in each.

Yesterday, I needed some green beans. My partner loves them with garlic. I normally pick up six tins (I’d rather buy fresh, but the prices are insane) at 33p each. That’s a couple of pounds total. Yesterday, Waitrose had done their regular price check and - presumably because people have been buying a lot of beans - the price had gone up to 52p a tin. Now, I understand supply and demand, but a 19p (57%) price rise from one week to the next is just taking the piss.

That, in turn, reminded me of the cheap noodles at Somerfield. You know, those little packs of instants that are in their basics range? We buy those to put with other stuff and, at a normal price range of 9-11p each, they’re dirt cheap. The weird thing is that they change price every week as well. I’ve seen them at 7p and I’ve seen them at 19p. From lowest to highest, that’s a 170% increase! How crazy is that? Same with basic baked beans: minimum 17p a tin, now at 34p (last time I bothered to look).

Now, I know we’re talking about pennies here, so price changes seem bigger. But consider this: I would buy half a dozen tins of beans and half a dozen packs of noodles. At their lowest prices, that’s £2.40 total. At their highest, it’s £4.26 - almost twice as much. Apply the same principle to a big (or even small-and-very-regular) shop and you’ve got a pretty damned scary situation.

Even worse is that there’s no reason or warning: the prices just change, and nobody says a darned thing. It always seems to happen on the popular items, too - those I’m buying half a dozen of because they’re cheap and fit in my extremely limited budget. Money-grubbing scumbag grocery shops. Bah.

…an even darker lining. That’s how she’s thinking today. After a week or more of stressing whether her parents are going to come and visit unannounced, my lady has hit rock bottom. Depression, to add to the anxiety and alcohol.

She’s spent the entire day - and I mean the entire day - being utterly pessimistic about absolutely everything. For example, she had an application form for a volunteer position that’s interesting. I commented that there was a question about receiving government benefits: they ask if you’re getting any so that they can avoid affecting how much money you get. To me, that’s a nice thing. To her, it was massively negative that volunteering could affect the benefits.

The whole day has been like that. In about twelve hours of hanging out together, she’s said one positive thing - that she liked the drawing she did this evening. Absolutely every other comment has been negative.

So I’m going to go and eat something sweet to cheer me up, watch a bit of a film and go to sleep, in the hopes of not having crappy pessimistic dreams.

She’s been drinking again. I suppose it’s a reaction to letting the chance of a job go today, but my lady spent the better part of the evening getting drunk, even though it’s only two days since she last did that. A small part of me is disappointed, of course, but mostly I’m just glad she’s finally asleep.

You see, she recently dug out some old IAM CDs - a French rap group. There are some very amusing tracks on them, as they were a pretty humorous bunch of guys, but being ‘asked’ (i.e. told) to listen to the same funny song five times in two hours is not something I enjoy. Even worse is getting her into bed at last and then having to spend another fifteen minutes listen to her singing loudly, making up her own words. Yes, she’s funny. Just not late at night and at high volume when we have neighbours who have kids.

It makes me want to pound her head to a pulp so that she’ll shut up. Coming from a pacifist who has and would never harm another person, you can imagine the level of annoyance.

Oh my goodness. Last night was supposed to be a bit of a party for my partner and me, but it turned into one of the worst New Year celebrations I’ve had in… well, for as long as I can remember!

It started out quite well, with my partner having a tipple and enjoying listening to music while I was, for my part, bathing in the luxury of having a working connection again. Things were rolling along nicely as I sat myself down to prepare our dinner, peeling potatoes, getting the chicken in the oven and so on. Then the trouble started.

You see, she didn’t stop drinking and started obsessing over things that make her anxious. I had dinner ready by about 10:00pm, but she’d decided that she absolutely had to finish a letter she was writing to her analyst. So I ate alone, while she ranted and raved in the next room over her inability to express what she wanted to say. Quite normal when you’ve downed two bottles of wine, my dear. Of course, in this state, it was absolutely impossible to convince her to stop writing and join me to see in the new year.

She then started worrying about my birthday present and whether I will like it. As with most drunken conversations, this dragged on and on, went round in circles and started to really wind me up after a while, but she wouldn’t let it go. For two hours. At the same time, she restarted her letter twice, failing dismally to produce anything cohesive.

So, by 2:00am, I had eaten alone, listened to her whine and worry about my present and sat waiting for her to finish her letter… for FOUR HOURS. By this time I was livid. It was her idea to celebrate the new year, after all, dammit. She couldn’t even put together two sentences by that time, either - she made absolutely no sense at all, she was so drunk. In the end, she ate the salad I’d made for her, ignored the main meal, then virtually collapsed from fatigue and alcohol consumption, having emptied almost three bottles on her own. What an absolute waste of time and effort on my part. Thank you so much. I hate alcohol.

Today, she has a massive hangover and feels terribly guilty about the whole thing. So what? It’s not like it’s actually going to encourage her to change anything. She’ll make promises, she’ll say she’ll stop, she’ll say this year will be different… and in three days’ time, I’ll be sitting listening to her incomprehensible drunken crap again.

Happy new year.