How six years in the city rewired my entire relationship with small change

I have lived in this city for six years now, and I still cannot quite believe how much of my actual, real life gets organised around which supermarket happens to be doing a decent meal deal that week. This is not a complaint, exactly. It is more of an observation about what London does to a person’s relationship with money over time.

The meal deal economy

There is a genuine, functioning micro economy built entirely around the humble meal deal, and if you live here long enough you develop opinions about it that would frankly embarrass you if said out loud to anyone outside the city. I have strong feelings about which chain currently offers the best combination of sandwich, snack, and drink for the money, and those feelings shift roughly every few months as prices creep and portion sizes quietly shrink.

What nobody tells you when you move here is that this constant, low level tracking of small price changes becomes a kind of background hobby. You start noticing things. You start caring, genuinely caring, about whether a particular shop has swapped their crisps supplier in a way that has quietly reduced bag size by what feels like a meaningful margin.

Rent as a permanent weather system

Rent here does not feel like a monthly bill so much as a permanent weather system you simply learn to dress for. You stop asking whether it is reasonable and start asking only whether it is survivable, which is a genuinely different and considerably more limited question.

I moved flats twice in the past three years, both times for reasons that had nothing to do with wanting to move and everything to do with a landlord deciding the market could apparently bear a rent increase that bore no obvious relationship to anything happening in the actual flat itself.

The commute calculation

Every Londoner I know has, at some point, done the exact maths on whether walking forty minutes to save the bus fare is worth it, and the answer changes considerably depending on weather, mood, and how much you are currently trying not to think about your bank balance.

I have walked genuinely absurd distances in the rain specifically to avoid tapping my card, then immediately spent the money I saved on a coffee that cost more than the bus fare would have, which tells you something about the actual coherence of my financial decision making on any given Tuesday.

What actually makes it worth it

And yet. Despite all of this, despite the genuinely absurd cost of simply existing here, there remains something about this city that keeps pulling me back into justifying the whole arrangement to myself, usually around eleven at night when I am walking home past some entirely unremarkable stretch of street that happens to catch the light in a way that makes the whole thing feel briefly, foolishly worth it.

I do not know how to properly explain this to people who do not live here without sounding like I am trying to sell them something. But there is a specific kind of alive feeling this city produces that I have genuinely not found anywhere else, expensive meal deals and all.

More London life writing at Lowri Griffiths, Bohiney.

The specific ritual of the reduced aisle

There is a particular time of evening, different at every shop but always roughly predictable once you have learned the pattern, when the yellow sticker reductions begin appearing on items nearing their sell by date, and knowing exactly when to arrive at exactly which shop has become a genuinely useful piece of local knowledge I did not expect to develop but now guard with something close to pride.

I have timed entire evenings around this. I have walked slightly out of my way specifically because I know a particular shop tends to reduce its bakery section around a specific hour, and there is a small, entirely disproportionate satisfaction in arriving at exactly the right moment.

A small confession

I have, on occasion, timed an entire walk home specifically to pass a particular reduced aisle window, and I have absolutely no intention of stopping this behaviour any time soon, whatever that says about me.

A note on the sandwich itself

I should say, for the record, that I have genuinely strong opinions about which specific sandwich filling represents the best value within any given meal deal, opinions I have refined over what is now a genuinely embarrassing number of lunchtimes.

Closing thought

None of this is a strategy I would recommend to anyone with more sense than me, but it works, more or less, and I have stopped apologising for it.

Another small thing

I have also, I should mention, become genuinely skilled at spotting which self checkout machines are more forgiving about slightly overripe fruit, which is its own small talent I did not set out to acquire.

More on this soon, I am sure.

Last thought, honestly

I will probably still be doing all of this exact same thing in another six years, and I have made a specific, deliberate peace with that possibility.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/