Last updated 16:05, Saturday, 05 April 2008

“I CAN’T wait for pay day!”

PURPLE DAYS: The famous purple house at Rigg Beck, Newlands, near Keswick, derelict for many years, pictured shortly before it burnt to the ground recently. In its heyday the house was home to many actors and actresses performing at Keswick’s ‘blue box’ theatre, predecessor of the Theatre by the Lake.

That cry from a young colleague the other day was not entirely new.

You hear it every month from several of the young reporters - and sometimes from the not-so-young.

But we did challenge him this time because we all knew that this particular colleague had a bit of a windfall during the month and should have been quite well off.

It was with some shock that we learned that the old idea of looking after the pennies has been completely lost and that pennies are now currency to be wasted.

Our colleague explained that his money woes were not due to an excess of cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women. No, his problems were caused by the supermarkets.

“You go to buy something small and then you’ve got all this change and you feel you have to spend it,” he explained.

“Change” it would appear, constitutes anything that is not made of paper.

Mind you, my husband, who is decades older than this colleague, probably has the same attitude.

I keep a tin for pennies and two pence pieces. I empty out my purse on a regular basis and the “shrapnel” goes into the tin - only to be taken out by my husband when he goes to buy the daily paper.

He has some sort of fanaticism about having the right change when he goes for the papers, or the milk or for a packet of cat food.

He may have notes bulging out of his pockets but he always has to go to my tin, my purse or my coat pocket to look for the change.

That is, he looks there after he has upturned every cushion in the house on the off-chance that he has lost money down the back of the couch or the chairs.

When I complain - and I do complain - he says that people like me are destroying the country’s economy.

“Imagine if everybody held on to their pennies and five pence pieces,” he says. “There would soon be none in circulation!”

Maybe he has the right idea; perhaps if I was fanatical about spending pennies we would be wealthier than we are.

My greatest problem is a thing called “one click” on the computer. If you’ve got an account at a certain book and CD store you can look up what you want and buy it with one click.

You don’t even have to type in credit or debit card details or anything.

It’s not like spending money at all - until you get the bills at the end of the month and then you have to use the pennies in your tin to buy food because you’ve spent all the real money.

A friend gave me a set of three detective stories for Christmas, all featuring a middle-aged woman who retires from a PR business and buys a cottage in the Cotswolds.

She becomes a Miss Marple-type, solving the many murders that seem to take place whenever she is around.

Agatha Raisin is a complete anti-hero. She buys cakes and passes them off at the Ladies’ Society as her own. She even buys an instant garden to win a gardening competition. She is competitive, bullying and desperate to find a man. You spend most of the time really disliking her.

The books, unfortunately, have become compulsive and I now know what it is like to have an addiction.

I have promised I will only buy myself three a month but suddenly it’s become three a fortnight and if the series doesn’t end soon I am going to be out on the street with not a “one click” to my name.

I shake my head sorrowfully at my young colleague and, with the wisdom of years, I advise him on how to be more careful with his money.

I shake my head in annoyance at my husband and tell him he’s obsessive and to leave my tin alone.

Then, in my secret shame, when nobody else is around, I go to the computer - my worst enemy and my best friend.

And I know that in a couple of days my next lot of books will arrive.

Perhaps if my young colleague has learned from my lectures, he will be able to lend me some money till pay day!