New things

I've bought some new things; it has to be done at times, especially when retail therapy serves you better than any little blue pill or therapy session. So, what has Sniffy been throwing her money at?

Well, her love of espresso drew her to one of these:

But she didn't have over £300, so she got one of these for £40 instead:

This is a De Longhi EC11. It does two cups of espresso at a time, really nice espresso, which is all I could ask for. It even does steam to heat and froth milk for latte lightweights. Fantastico.


In Heals yesterday, we happened up their kitchen section, where we came across these:

Available in three sizes, the Typhoon Capsule storage jars are lovely and reasonably priced. Another advantage is the aesthetic pleasure of them not having writing on them that tells you what's supposed to go in the jar. You know the sort of thing; pastel-shaded tins with "coffee", "sugar", "flour", etc written on them. These things are not quite as bad as crockery that instructs you to drink "coffee" from a certain mug, or eat "pasta" from a particular dish, (I've even seen crockery emblazoned with "plate", "dish", "mug", etc) but they're in the same league - "things with writing on them" - or "stuff for when you get alzheimers", which is perhaps more appropriate.

Of course with the example above, you could get quite confused and try to eat your cornflakes out of a coffee mug, but you get the picture.

Anyway, back to the Typhoon storage jars. They're quite nice, but one of the ones we bought was a bit duff and the lid didn't quite fit properly. Then while struggling with it, I sliced my thumb on the sharp edge. So now, instead of being emblazoned with "flour", that particular jar is smeared with my blood.

The piece de resistance in terms of purchases is a new gadget - a diddy camera, to add to my collection of photographic equipment. I got one of these:

It's OK. The main feature I was after with this acquisition was dinkiness for less than £150. I'd have liked a Canon, but when I buy Canons, I always get quite high-spec ones and they're pretty expensive.

So, adding up the outgoings from recent shopping expeditions, including a Tesco visit on Thursday night and Sainsbury's on Friday, the total comes to:

Coffee machine - £40
Tesco shopping - £130
Storage jars - £30
Camera - £140
Book - £12
Total - £352

Which equals a Francis Francis X1 coffee maker.

So you see, you can often save yourself a lot of money by going for one big purchase to satisfy that part of your brain that benefits from getting new things, rather than forgoing that and buying lots of little things in its place.