Wallymath Strikes Back

I've been credit crunched, and I'm not afraid to admit it. I'm not flat broke, unemployed, eating rats or living in a tent, but my life has definitely been adversely affected. I shan't bore you with the tiresome details, but Julie and I can't move out of our small rented flat until my flat in Twickenham sells. But, as Andrew & I aren't going to undersell that and buyers are thin on the ground, Julie and I are stuck.

It's a strange turnaround in life, from the heady days of loose-credit and multi-pub. Through the weekend haze and midweek blues I wasn't especially happy in life. That's all different now. I can't spend recklessly now, in fact I can't really spend at all. But life is definitely better. Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into a soppy love-story, as I suspect no one wants to read that. It'd be a bit uncomfortable for all concerned.

Nope. Instead, it's about time this blog got a list. So here is the alec.fitzsimmons.com endorsed list of Credit Crunch Good Stuff:

• Cooking: As I don't really go out anymore, 90% of my socialising is chez la maison. With people coming round Julie and I make a bit more effort and we've each added a couple of tasty dishes to our repertoire's. The new techniques and flavours picked up on the effort-meals have carried over into day-to-day cooking and so life definitely tastes better. Everything comes with a credit crunch topping.
• Leftovers: Following on from that, we've also become ultra-efficient. Very little food gets binned, instead getting turned over into some wierd concoction worth experiementing with.
• MPG: Efficiency also stretches to the road. Now I'm driving 62 miles a day, I can make big savings driving at 60mph. The display I work to on my dashboard is Miles Per Gallon. I've found (and this isn't much of a surprise) that 70mph isn't too bad, but go to 80mph and watch that MPG plummet. So I cruise along at or below the speed limit. It takes about 2 mins more on a 50 minute journey, but I'm never going to get a speeding ticket.
• Running: Speaking of speed, running is the perfect Credit Crunch activity. Once you've got a pair of trainers there's no cost. Just go out and enjoy the countryside.
• Health = Out running in the fresh air + eating fresh home-cooked food - boozing all weekend. Simple equation, really. Of course, I was pretty healthy 18 months ago when I did Ironman, but since then the Crunch has helped hold the health if not the fitness.
• The best spreadsheet in the world: Well, maybe not, but I suddenly found I needed to know how much money I had in my bank account every day of the month, how much I was spending and where I was spending it. So over the course of a couple of weeks last summer I devised the most fiendishly clever spreadsheet. 3 straight-forward sheets form a simple interface, but mask the complicated conditional array formulaes that magically give me an amazingly accurate picture of cash flow on any particular future date I choose. Without this tool I would have had to move back to Twickenham. That's not an exaggeration; it's been that important.
• Blogging: Staying in gives me the time to blog. alec.fitzsimmons.com was never updated after I met Julie, but now I've got time in life I can write. You can be the judge of whether or not I should have bothered.

Actually, a few people are reading this blog. My big sister Susan always sends me an email with some pertinent point, such as why trying to board the Gosport Ferry might be a bad idea. Big Ride Dave surprised me with a generous review of my last post. And Greeks has reacted splendidly to my following of his blog. At last some of my entries have comments!

And that's where I shall close tonight, dear reader. If you're enjoying this then make a comment. If you're not enjoying it then lie. After all, it won't cost anything!