Save Me…… from the lack of a comfy sofa

You may well have seen this week that Spain applied for, and got, a hundred billion euro bailout from the rest of the Europe, because its banks are up shit creek without a paddle, and frankly without a canoe as well.

The money comes from special European funds set up to keep the continent stable. Those funds come, ultimately, from taxpayers across Europe. The money will have to be repaid of course. And who does that? Yep, you guessed it, the Spanish taxpayer (in other words, me).

A hundred billion seems like an awful lot for the banks and the government to have lost down the back of the sofa with dodgy deals and risky investments.

But I figure if there´s that much sloshing about to fill in the hole they dug for us, then surely there´s got to be a bit extra floating around for the average taxpayer too, for things we need. After all, we´re the ones who are picking up the bill for the mess.

So, with that in mind, I´ve put together a shopping list of things I really need and I´m going to email it to Christine Lagarde. She´s the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and is the same woman who said a couple of weeks ago that Greeks should be paying their taxes if they wanted a bailout. How I laughed when it emerged 24 hours later that she doesn´t pay a penny of tax on her annual salary of $468,000. I laughed so much, it hurt.

Anyway, here´s my shopping list.

We need a new potato peeler. The one we bought from that shop along the street run by that nice Chinese family has fallen apart now. It only cost one euro but I think it was a false economy because it lasted just three weeks and was finally undone by a pretty sturdy spud which had been in the fridge for only 24 hours.

Next, we need a new fan. Again, the last one we had was bought from the same shop and it gasped its last on Monday. Maybe I shouldn´t be buying so much stuff from them, but they are cheap and they always smile at you when you walk in the door. Except the dad who prowls around the aisles after you, as if he expects you be stuffing merchandise down your trousers if he turns his back for more than a second.

Anyway, a new fan. A good one will cost no more than 35 euros so I think Christine could stretch to that, surely.

Socks. I need socks. I don’t know what it is, but I seem to go through socks like there’s no tomorrow. It’s the toes that go first. And it’s not like I keep my toenails long or anything. I’ve just got this thing with socks. So, yes, I need a lot of new socks please Christine.

We could also do with a little battery-operated alarm clock. That’s because we´re planning to walk the Camino de Santiago in August and it´s quite likely there won´t be many power points along the way to charge up my mobile phone which has a perfectly good alarm on it. So, needs must. And if Christine thinks that´s a bit of an unnecessary luxury, then I could point out that buying it will actually save the taxpayer in the long term. No alarm clock, no wake up in time, no wake up in time no room at the inn at the end of the next day, no room and we have to come home early. By doing the Camino, we lose weight, get fitter and therefore become less of a burden on the National Health later in life, thereby saving the taxpayer a shed load of cash. So I think forking out, say, five Euros for an alarm clock is well worth the investment.

There are quite a lot of other things we could really do with. But the last one is quite big so, in the spirit of thriftiness the banks seem to have temporarily forgotten, I´m willing to forego all of them for this last, admittedly, big one.

It´s a sofa.

We have a small flat and when we moved in there was a sofa in there already. But it was one of those really cheap, crap ones that cost about 99 Euros from IKEA and are about as comfortable as sitting on gravel for hours on end.

The upshot was that we got rid of it and replaced it with two rocking chairs. One was new, but the other was recycled from my mother-in-law who didn´t want it any more. It´s a bit knackered and needs a lick of paint but it works well enough. The problem is that sometimes I just want to come home from work and collapse into a nice, comfy, deep sofa with the wife and watch the TV. And we can´t do that in two rocking chairs.

A sofa - and I mean a comfy sofa. Not any of those crappy 99 euro ones from IKEA – would go along way to improving our home comforts and, as a result, directly reduce the stress after a long day and therefore the number of arguments we have. New sofa = more relaxation = less stress = less arguments = less likelihood of divorce = less need for counseling = less need to get free counseling on the National Health = less burden on the taxpayer.

So, what about it, Christine? Can you afford to let me have, say, a thousand Euros, even eight hundred, out of your tax-free half million dollar salary? I´ll pay you back, honest. And if I don´t, then we can just go back to the same fund that bailed out the bankers because money seems to grow on trees there apparently.