Even cheap thoughts can count

Over past days we’ve been appreciating what Santa brought last week, while savouring a stay-at-home New Year celebration.

Thankfully, Christmas morning broke happily at Edmonds Towers. She Who Knows and myself unwrapped gifts over breakfast in bed.

We also like to open one present each on Christmas Eve – which was when the problem arose . . .

“You bought me a book costing just £2!” she accused me, quite wrongly as it turned out.

That price label I’d overlooked, even though on its front cover, actually read, ‘£2 off’.

It cost me a lot more than that.

Still, it took us back to a distant birthday when I procured her a fur-lined, suede jacket – from a charity shop.

I’ve perked up my act since then so, this year, felt unfairly accused over that book.

Still, her other presents from me – fancy (expensive) cream, special (luxury) chocolates and cosy (embroidered) slippers then, ahem, a diamond necklace, left her joyful and, eventually, honest with me too.

“Actually,” she coyly admitted, after I’d opened many thoughtful gifts – books on poetry, cricket and grammar – plus classy wine, along with some manly cosmetics to repair over-indulgence, “that new woollen hat I got you, which you like so much, was from Poundstretchers.”

So, never mind a so-called £2 book, she’d spent only half of that on one of my prezzies!

Still, after a slap-up steak meal cooked, for once, by me on New Year’s Eve, yesterday we were out and about and able to laugh it all off . . .

Both her £2 discounted book and, sported proudly and widely admired, my even cheaper woolly cap.