Post 33 – Expenses

Do you know how fucking hard it is to eat £35 worth of food every day? I receive £245 every week for ‘reasonable living costs’, ie the company I work for will pay for food, soft drinks, bus and taxi fares (though most of Geneva, at least all the places I want to visit are within easy walking distance of my flat) and anything else that leaves me out of pocket because I am living in Switzerland and not in Scotland. Tonight for example, I went to a steak house and had a starter, a 6oz T-Bone steak, 3 beers, and a big fancy ice cream, chocolate and pear dessert, and it came to less that £25. Geneva is a weird place of contrasts – the centre of town is one of the most expensive places to eat and drink in Europe – the suburbs just a few blocks away must be one of the cheapest. In general I spend about £5 on a 3 course lunch and about £15 on a 3 course dinner. That leaves £15 a day unaccounted for, which if I don’t use, gets deducted from my next wage. That comes out at about £105 a week I have to pay back. My company charges the company I am contracted to £245 a week to pay my expenses, and what I don’t use they take back from me – but they don’t return it to the company I am contracted to, the fuckers just keep it. I’m not having those fucks making more money out of me than they already do, so I’m trying like fuck to spend all the cash, even if I’m just wasting it. Thing is, I’m struggling to break my old habits from back home – when I shop in supermarkets in Aberdeen I’m so used to buying the cheapest bread, the cheapest juice, the cheapest meat, that I can’t stop doing it here, and even though it leaves me with spare cash to use, I still come back with supermarket brand products. I guess I’m just not used to having cash to throw around. To remedy this, I’m playing a fun little game of trying to see how much weird stuff I can get signed off as ‘reasonable living costs’. Last week for example, I succeeded in having a £20 toaster signed of as a ‘reasonable living cost’. This week I’ve bought some socks, some mugs, an ashtray and a party pack of balloons. The expenses go in on Monday. If they refuse to pay off these little extravagances this week, then for the duration of my trip, come Sunday nights I am going to go to the supermarket and spend my remaining weekly allowance on loaves of bread. If I have £40, I’ll buy 40 loaves. Food, they said, is an expense they will sign off without dispute, be it sirloin steak, lobster thermador or imported monkfish. If anyone queries my receipt for 105 loaves, I’ll simply reply “I was hungry”.

In saying that though I am enjoying having the cash to be able to pay other people to do the stuff I can’t be arsed doing. Like for example, spending £50 a week having the dry cleaners on the corner do all my laundry, despite having a washing machine, a drier and an iron in my flat. And getting a taxi half a mile home because I’ve eaten three courses in the steak house and I’m too full to walk. All of which gets signed of as expenses. If this is how the other half live, I’m quite prepared to try it on for size for a few months.

Song currently stuck in my head – “Take On Me” by A-Ha.
dissolvoray@hotmail.co.uk