London Calling…

Yes, my little sister is saving up to buy a house. An actual house. This is a girl who makes buildings out of gingerbread, owns approximately 500 hundred assorted pink cushions, and by first year in college was still unaware that a return flight did not mean you had to get there yourself so that they could bring you back.

My horror at this turn of events is superseded only by my immense curiousity over how she will manage this. Currently she is in her third (or perhaps final?) year of college, in a course that is something to do with minding babies. Since it takes 4 years to learn, I can only assume that it contains more information than “do not drop baby on head�, and so I imagine she will soon have some sort of qualification and be able to charge a million euro a year for looking after kids. At least, she will if she has her own crèche. If she does not, she will be stuck working for someone, and have to earn a wage instead of producing money by transmuting the remains of dirty nappies and snotty tissues, which from what she has mentioned of profit margins, is what all the other crèche-owners must be doing.

So I can understand why she wants a house. Just not the feasibility of her actually obtaining one. For you see, my sister has many sterling qualities, examples of which include an incredible ability to co-ordinate clothes, a shameless demand for unwarranted and unearned gifts, and a charm and popularity which have stood to her for years. However, self-deprivation in order to achieve a goal is one that has consistently eluded her. On her own of course, this house-buying would simply not be an option. She works part-time, and owns a little girlie car, the purchase of which sent me into a very similar apoplexy last year. All of her funds go into keeping the car alive.

One might say that this belies my earlier assertion against her ability to sacrifice personal luxury. Alas, no, this is not the case. Because it simply meant that instead of her spending all her money on frivolous crap, she spent it on the car, and her boyfriend bought her the frivolous crap. Which brings me neatly to what enabled her to think about buying the house at all, the boyfriend. Now he has a decent income, and a fulltime job. But he cannot save for a house while buying her everything glittery she sees in a shop window. And she cannot save for anything at all while owning the car, that shiny blue drain on finances.

But the fact remains that they are saving for a house. So I suppose the real question isn’t whether my sister is capable of self-sacrifice. It’s more like “Which fetched more, his liver? Or a kidney?�.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.