Globetrotting With Me and Dame Zelda

Noting that we have been to Agadir, Marrakech, Tenerife, Lanzarote, Madrid, Alicante, Lisbon, the Algarve, Nice, Paris, Biarritz, Sardinia, Madeira, two of the three Ballearics, Berlin, Dubrovnik, Athens, Lake Como, Cyprus, Rhodes, Zakynthos, Crete, Sicily, and both Bodrum and Marmaris in Turkey, among many others, some people think that Dame Zelda and I must be sitting pretty financially. 

Such people are mistaken, and need to understand two things. First, the UK’s two no-frills, low-cost airlines, EasyJet and Ryanair, are often willing to fly you to a picturesque foreign destination for little more than the price of a train ticket from London to Birmingham, say. Ryanair doesn’t have on-board lavatories, or actual seats, and its CEO has gone on record as regarding the, uh, carrier’s passengers as stupid and contemptible, but: the money saved! Great bagfuls of it! 

Moreover, when we’re not on holiday, Dame Zelda and I live very modestly. Our house is approximately the size of a large walk-in closet in one of my semi-native Los Angeles’s ritzier necks-o’-the-woods. As we sit side by side on the sofa in the living room, Dame Zelda can easily reach over and touch our front window, while I, to her right, am unable to open our comically undersized refrigerator only because there’s a wall in the way. 

Many frugal people are known to clip discount supermarket coupons. We actually eat them, having found that they can be substituted very palatably for toast in such popular English dishes as beans-on-toast. I’m not suggesting they’re flavourful, but there can be no denying that they are extremely low in the wrong kind of fat, and high in fibre. 

You might imagine, given our having visited Agadir, Marrakech, Tenerife, Lanzarote, Madrid, Alicante, Lisbon, the Algarve, Nice, Paris, Madeira, two of the three Ballearics, Berlin, Dubrovnik, Athens, Lake Como, Cyprus, Rhodes, Zakynthos, Crete, Sicily, and both Bodrum and Marmaris in Turkey, that we get around London in limousines, but the fact is that we either take public transport (free, because neither of us is a spring chicken) or walk. Mostly we stay home and watch television programmes about people of approximately our own vintage being shown holiday homes in Spain. "Good-sized room," the male of the species will commonly note, laconically. "Can you picture yourself out here with a glass of wine?" the show's chirpy presenter will commonly wonder with great eagerness. 

It can get chilly in England. My first winter here, when we lived in Teddington in the same block of flats as Rick Parfitt, I was flabbergasted when Dame Zelda, despairing of being able to cram them into our comically petite refrigerator, put a couple of four-paks of lager out on the balcony to chill. I’d never witnessed such hi-jinx in California. 

We save pounds a-plenty by using our central heating only when the outside temperature plunges below 0 degrees Celsius. The rest of the time, we wear multiple layers of clothing. As I write this, I am wearing two pairs of jeans (a “slim” pair over a “stretch skinny” pair), two T-shirts, a jumper (or, in America, sweater), two hooded sweatshirts, my big hooded winter coat, with the hood up, a Thinsulate® balaclava, and two pairs of gloves in which it isn’t easy to type, but behold the lengths I go to to try to amuse you. We have found that our frosty breath creates a nice atmosphere for watching Nordic crime dramas when we tire of the property programmes. 

We used to get all our clothing at thrift shops, but have realised that nearly everything is cheaper at Primark, and you can return things at season’s end if you leave the tags on. It amuses Dame Zelda to refer to Primark as Primani. 

We will be spending three days in Malta in November, and have just booked a mid-January week in the Azores, which the Telegraph describes as Europe’s answer to Hawaii, though I suspect we will be unable there to buy the matching muu muu and aloha shirt Dame Zelda and I have coveted for years.