When I was at work, in the days before I retired and got really busy, my day was filled with important decisions. Policy had to be set, timetables worked out and budgets fixed. I couldn’t just turn up at the canteen at 10 o’clock and decide if it was to be a sausage sandwich or bacon that would not be time effective, far better to know in advance what the policy is for this week.


How many meetings could I schedule for lunchtime to qualify for a free buffet and could I get and ‘A’ buffet or did it have to be a cheapo ‘D’ one. The quality depended on who was invited, outside people carried more weight so therefore qualifying for a better buffet, of course if they had to cry off at the last minute I couldn’t be blamed and the buffet was ready anyway so we may as well have it......


I have already said about the major issues I had with living away from home in hotels all week and having to make decisions on evening meals and drinks etc so I won’t go into them again but enough to say that my days were full of obviously high powered decisions. But now after retirement all those decisions have gone away and small things like the morning post become something to look forward to. And that is usually junk mail or catalogues for Christine, not much difference there, it’s all junk mail except for a Thursday when, mid morning comes the local free paper and we both make a dash to get it first. Not that either of us ever look at the paper. We simply want the flyer from Netto.


Why would we get excited about a flyer for Netto’s? Well as I have said before on our return from Barcelona last time we decided to change our shopping habits and look for bargains and quality rather than simply throw our money away on ‘gone off’ food from Tescos, so one of our major decisions now is where to buy the wine from. In the Netto flyer is the next week’s offers which always includes wine, and because lots of other people must be doing the same, if we aren’t there early it’s all gone. But this rush for bargains has a down side and does not always prove to be cost effective.


Being pensioners we naturally have to watch the budget and the bottles of Pino Grigio at £2.99 look a bargain so we start with them and it’s ok, good everyday wine. But then we notice after a couple of weeks that they do 3litre cartons for around £10 so quickly out comes the calculator and I establish that these are even better value so we switch to them. Our normal routine is that we open a bottle at tea time have a couple of glasses each and if there is any left put it back in the fridge for tomorrow. Now that’s OK for bottles but what happens when you have a carton ‘on tap’? I'll tell you what, you get a top up every time you go in the fridge that’s what. And with me opening the fridge every time I pass these cartons soon disappear. The first one lasted from Saturday to Tuesday.


So Christine comes up with a way of making the wine last longer. An easy way would be to stop drinking it but that’s not her plan, she changes the glasses to smaller wine glasses. Now spot the fault in this plan. Correct! We drink twice as many glasses and the cartons still only last four day’s, I suppose on the plus side we get fitter because we have to walk to the fridge more often to top up our glasses.


We could try the ‘no drink during the week’ rule but that’s not easy as we always need a bottle or two in the fridge in case any of our friends pop round, none of them do tea or coffee only booze.


So we have now switched back to the bottles but instigated a rule that we never start before the school bus goes by, that’s on their way home from school not going in a morning, although maybe..........! No. Of course on non school days the rule doesn’t apply.