Car Wash

Yesterday I did the impossible. I took my car into be cleaned. 

Stop traffic.

Put it this way: I've owned my little vehicle for about 2 years. In this time I have cleaned it once. Suffice it to say that there was year-and-a-half-old bird faeces ingrained in the paint. In fact one of the droppings of turd was so enormous (its splatterings covering a good 25cm of my roof) I'm convinced a large albatross dropped his runny load on my baby. A thick layer of grime suffocated my mirrors. And don't get me started on the inside. Old freezocino takeaway cups squashed under the seats, rusk crumbs, socks (THAT'S where they all went!!), and only God knows what else. As the guy at Hannibal's handed back my keys I shrunk beneath his resentful grimace for putting his personal health as serious risk thanks to the unsanitary dump that was my car.

Now am driving the cleanest, sterile, shiniest, gleaming, newest-looking little Yaris in Cape Town. And for the first time in months I can actually use my wing mirrors! I think this calls for celebration. Champagne anyone?

Confessions of a shopaholic

When I lived in London I developed a mild but unmistakeable shopping addiction. (Who doesn't?) It's safe to say that Top Shop inherited no less than a quarter of my salary each month. At one stage they even offered me a position since I knew the store like the back of my hand. I was eventually unable to actually close my cupboard door and would spend a good hour each morning deciding what I was going to wear, and like most girls, I still wanted to borrow clothes from my flatmate. Having moved over to London with no more than a standard-sized suitcase, moving back proved far more difficult. After shipping off two colossal sasquatch-sized boxes, I still arrived at the airport with four suitcases only to be told I had to pay somewhere in the region of 250 pounds if I wanted my precious clothes to join me in SA. Tip for girls – just cry hysterically, it really works. Every time. 

Once back in amazing Cape Town I decided to put a sturdy end to my shopaholicism. It wasn't too difficult since I deem it totally impossible to find a decent piece of clothing in South Africa – something that isn't three seasons old and made from pathetic fabric hastily stitched together into something that is desolated after one wash (you know who you are... *YDE. Cough!*). And if you do happen to stumble across something nice, you need to take out a loan just to walk into the shop.

Anyway, so back to present day. I have since been two years clean, aside from the odd must-have essentials (ie leggings, a few summer dresses, some heels, one or two tops, underwear, cardigans... Oh you know, the basics). But this month, a month when I really needed to save considering I'm moving into my pimpin' bachelor pad in May, I suddenly liked FOUR things at once! Shit. I think I went into some sort of catatonic trance because before I knew it I was shying away guiltily from V&A clutching a myriad shopping bags, cursing my credit card and scaring away fellow pedestrians.

I love my new tops and have had many a good comment. But I don't love the current state of my credit card account and I must now suffer the consequences of my actions. So have had to come up with some ways to save cash each day so that I can pay off my debt before the month is up:

• Have one less bottle of Champagne on my evenings out

That should do it.