Little Seymour Number One is confused.
It’s not the Year Ten Maths and its quadratic equations that are doing it. Nor the Chemistry homework she was recently set. On this occasion, it is something far less obvious and it has got me baffled, too…
There are some kids at her school who seem to be under the misapprehension that she is a poor little rich kid. If there is indeed such a thing. They drop hints that she can afford things they can’t, and they jeer her because of where she gets off the school bus.
This, my friends, makes me want to laugh and cry all at the same time.
Firstly, er… HAVE THEY SEEN WHAT WE LIVE IN? As we all know by now, IT’S AN EFFING SHED.
We bought The Funny Little Bungalow when it was cheap, mouldy and leaking. We knew the damp wouldn’t be a problem when the roof was going to come off anyway, and we understood that dated doesn’t matter if you’re planning to rip the guts out of a gaff.
Maybe one day, Little Seymour Number One and all the others will live in an actual house, but surely the bus wends its way past infinitely posher ones..? Upmarket we aint. And us, rich? It’s a laughable notion.
We love a hand-me-down and a jumble sale. Reduced food? No problem. Coupons? Yes please. Free furniture? We’ll take that off your hands. We would never claim poverty, but for us, it’s all about what we can re-use and where we can save. There is no other way this “project” is going to work.
So the next time those bus wankers have a little dig when Number One alights the bus, I have told her to stand up and proudly declare that her pants are second-hand, her shoes are leaking and under her blazer, her school jumper only reaches her elbows (she hasn’t had a new one since Year Seven). Then they’ll realise that appearances can be deceptive. You never know what is going on under the surface, or behind the facade of a set of ostentatious gates and a pretty brick wall.
On a side-note, though, I think I need to be a little more careful with the budgeting strategy that is the buying of reduced-price food. Little Seymour Number Two didn’t eat her sandwiches today. When I asked her why, she informed me that there were great globs of green mould on them. Oops. My bad.
(But I’d have still eaten them. After all, there was cheese inside. Mould is mould.)
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