so today went by faster than i wanted it to, and by 3 or so i hadn’t managed to do any more jobseeking or exploring.

the trouble is that i am really trying to take the whole “spend no money unless absolutely necessary” thing seriously, so i am trying not to transport myself around the city on any whims because the tube is quite expensive, and even if i walk (or particularly if i walk, since the exercise makes me hungry) it can be dangerous to find myself stuck far away and starving, because i am then tempted to indulge in overly priced treats.

this leads to me feeling somewhat incapacitated, and it takes a while to leave the house, even though i understand that i need to leave in order to defeat the problem, because out is where the jobs lie.

the food problem has really been highest on the list, because i know that i need to buy food, but i have been uncertain how to stretch my pounds most wisely. there are loads of interesting markets in my new neighborhood, but culinary adventure is not my priority at the moment (after i get a job it will jump up, worry not), and i tired myself with the lentils and rice route in edinburgh.

so last night, feeling hungry even After indulging in a (not Too overly priced) sandwich in covent garden in the midst of my wanderings, and not feeling inclined to go in search of the apparently nearby but as of yet unglimpsed tesco, i wandered into one of the larger bangladeshi markets and, after staring at things for a good 20 minutes, bought two boil-in-the-bag box dinners and a packet of pre-made naan. it cost £4 total, and i had one of the dinners and one of the pieces of naan when i got home, as well as one of the remaining beers from tania’s and my trip to the black isle brewery, which is now one of my favorite brewers in the world.

no kidding.

anyway, i know my hunger doubtless clouded my judgement, but the food was fabulous. i have enjoyed boil-in-the-bag indian box dinners before, of the tastybite variety, but these are a brand called gits, and based on my sample of one, they are better.

and that’s saying quite a bit.

it’s not really a fair sample because the variety that i had – paneer tikka masala – is not a variety that i have ever had in tastybite form, if they even make it. i was actually quite excited to find it because paneer is something i like, and tikka masala is something i like, but it is not my experience that they commonly go together.

anyway, tonight or tomorrow i’m having the palak paneer, so then i can report more fully on how gits stacks up.
or boils up.
whatever.

first, though, the rest of my story.

well fed as i was last night, today i was still confronted by the awareness that i needed to go grocery shopping, and also by the realization that i could not put off buying a new cell phone charger any longer, because i had given out my number to a few potential employers yesterday, and i was just going to have to bite the bullet and admit that i have lost the charger even though i distinctly remember packing it and even though they cost as much as the phone did in the first place, which annoys me. it does not help that i am certain that there are 5 of them within any given 100 meters that are gathering dust under someone’s bed or creating a fire danger in the back of their closet. but whatever. i’m over it.

finally i got myself out the door and headed in the direction in which i believed tesco would be found. i figured i would also encounter somewhere to buy a phone charger, but i wasn’t actually thinking about it as much because i was getting hungry, so the need to buy groceries was no longer just a theoretical exercise.

as i remembered dominic’s instructions, the tesco was to be found by heading up to bethnal green road, then turning right, then walking until you got there. this seemed easy enough, but i walked a pretty good ways and didn’t see it, so i wondered if he might have meant left instead, and i walked back. after circling around a bit, and getting ever hungrier, i was a little frustrated, so i decided to just go in one of the smaller stores again, but one of the more anglicized ones this time, since what i had decided i wanted was biscuits and cheese and pasta and milk.

i found a friendly looking store with a “costcutter” sign, which made me feel like i could kid myself into thinking i wasn’t getting ripped off that much by going into a little store. i made my selections, felt rather good about the number of meals for which i was now prepared, and checked out. just over £10. good work. i went to hand the guy my card and he said “oh, sorry! we are a new store. we do not yet have credit card capabilities.”

now, many people have chided me for not carrying enough cash, and i must say that, for a short time today immediately after this point in the story, i wondered if i might have arrived at the point in my life where my habits end up changing long term. my new neighborhood seems somewhat short on cash machines, and the majority of the ones it Does have are the stupid fee-charging ones inside kwiki-marts. so perhaps i will learn my lesson. it remains to be seen. in the end, this adventure did not offer a clear interpretation to that end.

(that’s my way of saying you should keep reading ;)

so i left my groceries with the clerk and promised to be right back. he said there was a cashpoint (that’s british for ATM) two doors down, and there was, but it was broken. the next one was less broken, in that it still interacted with me, but it refused to give me any money, and by that time i was to here with the little kwiki-mart machines so i decided that i would look a bit harder for a bank, even though it was raining, and getting dark, and i was now officially hungry.

as a sidenote, a cool thing about britain is that almost all official bank ATMs do not charge a fee.

as another sidenote, there are almost no banks in my neighborhood, which led me to ruminate a bit on the consequences of poorer people living outside the main channels of commerce, which makes it more likely that they will be the ones to pay stupid fees to kwiki-mart ATMs as a kind of penalty. the machines are often right next to the lottery tickets, so it’s like a one-stop poor tax bonanza!

but i digress.

i found a free cashpoint at a post office, but it was out of money, which did not help my feeling that i was the victim of a rude conspiracy. i glimpsed what i thought might be a bank sign (i don’t really have all the logos installed in my brain yet), but it turned out to be a sign for a cell phone/car audio shop. i decided to interpret this, in the way that i like to interpret things, as a sign that maybe this whole diversion was just an excuse to get me to remember to buy my cell phone charger, because if i had succeeded in getting my groceries i would have just gone home and forgotten about it and been annoyed later.

so i walked into the shop, asked for the charger, and they had it! it was a genericky looking one, but i wasn’t feeling picky, so i pulled out my purse. as if on cue, the guy says: “cash only!” and i only sighed for a second, because i already knew i had to find cash, right? so the adventure was just going to continue.

on the way out, i asked how much it was, and he said £5.

this news lightened my mood considerably.

£5! that’s like 1/4 what the official ones are! that’s not even annoying! that’s like FMV for “you left it somewhere, stupid, so you have to pay Something!”

suddenly the hassle of having to walk out of my way in the rain and scrutinize every building i passed seemed negligible, and indeed, it all felt a part of some great plan.

for less than what i had previously prepared myself to spend on the charger, i was going to get the charger And enough groceries for the next few days. it was like getting the groceries for free, as a gift from the universe so that i would remember that, if i just don’t pretend to know where things are headed, unexpected surprises will always present themselves in the most wonderfully poetic of places.

and sure enough, no sooner had i walked from the phone place to continue the search for the cashpoint than, half a block down the road, i found a barclay’s machine, free, and willing to dispense me £20.

so i am now the happy owner of a busily charging nokia mobile phone, and the cheese and salami and crackers and twix finger that i had for tea were heavenly, thank you.

now, if i can only find a way to write a blog entry that isn’t really three blog entries in disguise, and that discusses something other than food, i’ll be off and running.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 3:04 pm and is filed under food, things i do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.