Other people's finances: a digression

Other people are unfathomable, even our nearest and dearest; and that goes double for their finances. The things we regard as extravagances, the things we regard as essential purchases, or as bargains not to be missed, no two people's lists ever quite match The friend who exclaimed wistfully that she'd love to be able to afford a meal out, or an excursion, but who buys new dresses for no particular reason could no doubt give you matching examples of my own perverse habits - I could give you a few myself...

durham_rambler has a mental scale of what things ought to cost. This isn't related to what we can afford, or whether it's available elsewhere for less, it's an absolute. It pains him to pay more than a certain sum for a hotel room or a bottle of wine or a shirt. Much of the time this is useful, because it helps us to make decisions. Every now and then, though, I want something which he regards as Too Expensive.

For example, we set off on holiday without a detailed map of the region where we were going to be staying, but confident that as we got closer to our destination, we'd find something. I've been caught out this way before, and at each motorway stop, I'd check through the maps on sale. I didn't see anything ideal, irresistible, the Veneto at the perfect scale; there were maps that covered a large part of northern Italy, but they were big and unwieldy without being all that detailed - and our destination was so near the edge of the map that a few miles further south would take us into uncharted territory. On the other hand, there was a road atlas of the whole of Italy at much the same scale and costing only a little more. I decided that this was what I wanted, but durham_rambler was outraged: it was almost 20 euros. We could buy a road atlas at a fraction of that price in the remainder bookshops at home - not, admittedly, a road atlas of Italy, but nonetheless this established a fair price, and 20 euros was well above it. He was so fiercely discouraging about this extravagant purchase that I was talked out of it - though fortunately only until the next rest stop, where I found another copy of the same atlas, slightly cheaper, and bought it.

There was something that made me want to post about this, but I'd forgotten what it was: the story as it stood came out as "Isn't durham_rambler silly, and wasn't I right?" and that wasn't at all what I wanted to say. There was something that had made me see his reasoning not as silly or mean but as rich and mysterious, and I couldn't remember what it was. Then I found this photograph:

( Ta - DAAH! )