Monday Morning

It’s funny how much you can get done in a morning, isn’t it? I mean, nothing much really gets done in afternoons. It’s like all your blood sugar melts away then and siesta is the perfect solution. Sometimes your whole life can change in an evening of course. Particularly if it’s an evening that starts with a bolt of lightning across a crowded bar and that evening becomes a weekend becomes a real life flesh and blood living breathing touching feeling other. But it still seems to be mornings where the basics get sorted.

So this morning I sit down with Excel and pull together the various movie budgets and other liabilities I have. I work out what I owe and what I need. Then I look through the mortgage literature I picked up last week and phone the one with the best rate. About an hour later I have taken the steps to remortgaging my property and using the equity to consolidate my existing debts. The result is that I will be able to afford to pay for 35mm prints of both my short films. And not only that, I will be nearly £300 a month better off. Ha! And not only that, hahahahaha!

Full of what can only be described as smugness, I take the car to the garage and top off the air once more in that slowly leaking tyre. No, still not had it fixed. Yes, it does bother me the longer I leave it. This week, I say to myself. After pay day, I say to myself. Stop talking to yourself, I want to add but I don’t.

Meanwhile, my favorite boots are nearly worn through and Camel aren’t making them any more so getting them fixed is a priority too. You can’t beat soft comfortable leather boots if you’re going to have a happy life. Happy feet equal happy life. Honest. Just look at how many people go to reflexologists. So I take the boots into town and find it will cost a mere £30 and they’re sorted. I go to the cheap shop and buy soap and toilet rolls (it’s a guy thing, we panic when we’re down to the last four) and then to the expensive store and use £10-worth of refund vouchers from the petrol station to buy delicious lunch.

By this point I’ve spent less than five pounds and achieved quite a lot. How smug am I now? I join the queue in the bank with the good intention of opening a type of savings account where I can bypass being taxed but the queue is a still life posing for a non-existent artist so I take the leaflets and go. This is naturally where the tight rein on spending slacks off. I need to buy my sister a birthday card. She’s hinted “fifty” and I’ve said “twenty” but neither of us said what we were talking about although of course we both knew. I settle for thirty plus the cost of the card.

Incidentally, two pounds for a piece of cardboard and the queue is halfway down the shop? You could toast bread on the heat from the overworked cash register! It makes you wonder why the sales assistants have a grey pallour rather than wonderful tans. Maybe if they changed the readouts from green LCD’s to sun lamps? Is this a licence to print money or what? And all the cards in there are soooo bland. They may as well be blank. Note to self: make more own cards after this.

Of course, the birthday schtick means I’ve undone quite a bit of the morning’s good Living Below Your Means stuff so I rent three DVD’s from the library and one from Blockbuster for good measure. On the way back I bump into the beautiful Shauna. Sigh. Tall, curvaceous yet slim, long blonde hair blue eyes angelic smile (and nice tits, yes, since you were wondering). I am irresistably drawn into her gravity well and we gaze adoringly at each other for minute after long minute. Passers-by melt into the background as we stand there with those delinquent half-smiles half-questions on our faces…

Reality break over. Okay, so we chat for a bit and laugh a bit and it’s good to see her and of course this doesn’t end in any kind of date situation (because I’ve asked before and she has a boyfriend who “wouldn’t really approve”) and I’m reminded that I haven’t been to salsa for ages and nor have I been to jive and, wow! There are some great looking women around. It’s good to be alive and I love them all!

Then it’s back home to watch the first of the movies and gorge myself silly on free food. And another few drops of irresistable force have fallen on to the immovable object, that hard rock of reality, drip drip drips wearing a hole relentlessly into the future where the tide will burst through and I’ll be ready to catch the surf.