Rum, this is the recipe I used, and I thought it was a cracker
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/may/02/spring-rice-feta-harissa-pine-nut-sauce-recipe-meera-sodha
If you CBA with all that, you can make a pretty good fist of it by just boiling your rice, stirring through a couple of teaspoons of harissa with a drop of oil and lemon juice, and leaving it to stand for 5 minutes.
Personal spends have been on the up:
£250 on sandals (might not keep - arrive next week - replacing ones that I wore to death)
£120 on jeans (ditto)
£95 on a shirt (keeping it)
Possible £58 on a swimsuit, need to replace the two that I threw out last year after 15-20 years service. Realise I have now reached the point where I need a built in bra in a swimsuit, so Bravissimo it is.
These items together, if I keep all of them, will bring me to 120% of my annual target for clothes expenditure for 2026. It's May. Oh no! What am I like??! Anything else (and I've already seen shoes I want for autumn/winter) will have to be requested as a birthday present. My clothes expenditure gets eked out in easy interest-free instalments using PayPal credit, but still I have to keep a lid on it.
£12.99 - Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo. Again, I have broken my no-book buying rule, but the library couldn't provide this one, even via inter-library loans, oddly. And he is the writer sans pareil of Trieste, apparently.
Housekeeping
£10 - butcher for a chicken. Made a curry with this last night, and have put some in the freezer for DS while we're away.
£12 - various nice items from a Turkish-Cypriot shop locally. Pickles, tahini, flatbreads, that sort of thing. Will last.
£9 - Italian deli, included a box of florentines for a friend. Won't last!
£9 - Sainsbury's, bits for curry, cordial.
DS has taken the joint account card off to the dentist to collect his night guard, not sure what the bill is yet.
Bloody Virgin have put the broadband price up again this month. I am so sick of paying through the nose for this service. When we moved in, BT refused to provide high speed fibre to the house, but they will do it now, so we have a choice. DH (whose job it is) has been putting it off for about 2 years, because the current site for the cable to come into the house, will eventually be where we kick a new door in the wall when we renovate the kitchen. So he has been putting it off, because, difficult. I pointed out that we are likely 3 years off getting this work done, and a saving of £60 or more a month will amount to over £2k over three years, which will likely pay for the new kitchen flooring. So would he please Just. Get. It. Done. We can resolve the new siting of the cable at the same time we get the kitchen reno done. It may have been the first thing I said to him this morning actually. Oh dear.
Weekend likely to be quiet, although I feel I have to catch up with my mum, whom I have not seen since last Friday. I am fully avoidant on this, as she is very negative and angry right now. I'm hoping DH will join me as his presence provides some restraint on her venting.
Still, next week brings payday, Distribution To The Pots, the theatre and meeting a friend at the Hockney exhibition at the Serpentine - this is free, as is my travel there, but we are likely to get some kind of brunch/lunch as well.