What next in the near-endless parade of expensive gadgets?
Mrs Canavan isn’t the type to save money.
Even in these difficult times she has a unique talent for spending our hard-earned cash on completely unnecessary items.
For example, last week I opened the cutlery draw and there in front of me was a glistening new potato peeler.
It was placed on top of the two existing potato peelers we already own.
‘Erm, what’s this?’ I said to Mrs C, holding the peeler in the air.
She was sitting at the table looking at her phone (it’s how she spends about 75 per cent of the day; we stopped having conversations some time around late 2016) and replied, idly: ‘Oh yes, I ordered it off the internet. Great isn’t it’.
I inhaled deeply at this statement.
The pyramids might be described as great, so too the Grand Canyon or Victoria Falls. Not an implement that takes the skin off carrots.
However, I graciously glossed over this and focused on a more basic reason.
‘Okay, but we’ve already got two potato peelers so why did we need another?’ I ventured.
‘I just liked it,’ she replied with a shrug of her shoulders.
I later went on the internet to check how much she’d spent and came very close to phoning a family solicitor and filing for immediate divorce when I learned it was £17.
For that price I’d expect the peeler to not only do the spuds but Hoover the carpet and clean the shed as well.
The write-up accompanying this incredibly expensive peeler read: ‘It makes quick and easy work of removing the uneven skins of fruit and vegetables’.
Well, knock me down with a feather. Isn’t that what every potato peeler is designed to do?
It continued: ‘Complete with a swivelling head and a comfortable handle that cushions your hand.
‘The ergonomic (I had to google this; it means, apparently, designed for efficiency in the working environment) handle, with added grip rings, provides a secure and comfortable grip.’
‘Oh, it’s got added grip rings, I take it all back now,’ I said in heavily sarcastic tones to Mrs C later that night.
‘I told you it was a good buy,’ she said.
She never has been much cop at identifying sarcasm.
Anyway, even by her high standards, my wife has managed this week to buy something even more ludicrous, namely a clock.
Mrs C bought the clock after it was recommended to her by a number of friends. Its function is to keep your child in their bed a little longer in the morning, instead of them running into your room and waking you at some godforsaken hour.
The clock has two settings. One is for night-time, where the screen goes dark and displays stars.
Then, in the morning – you set it for the time you want your child to stay in bed until – the screen goes bright yellow and there is a picture of the sun.
The idea is your child wakes, sees the stars and thinks: ‘Ah, I can’t get out of bed yet, I have to wait until the sun comes on’, thus giving mummy and daddy some valuable extra shut-eye time.
‘My friends say it’s amazing,’ Mrs C told me. ‘It’s changed their lives.’
Only after buying it did she tell me it cost £29.99.
I swear to god my dad booked week-long holidays for that price (the insect-infested cottage in Devon that his mother recommended in the summer of 1982 after seeing a small ad in the Manchester Evening News springs readily to mind; my, what a fun holiday that was).
Anyway, let me say with absolute conviction that this clock is neither amazing nor a lifechanger.
We have had it two weeks and this is what happens.
Mary wakes at her usual time – about 6.15am – sees the clock is still dark with stars on (it’s set to go yellow at 7am) and promptly runs into our room to tell us, in a very loud voice, her clock still has stars on.
Each morning Mrs C says: ‘The point of the clock, Mary, is you don’t get out of bed until it turns yellow.’
‘I know,’ replies Mary, ‘but it takes ages for it to turn yellow and I’m awake now.’
‘Yes,’ says Mrs C, ‘but that’s not the point. You can only get up when it turns yellow.’
‘I understand mummy,’ Mary says patiently, like a kindly maths teacher trying to explain improper fractions to a class of teenage lads, ‘but I was awake so I got up.’
In many ways I can’t blame her.