Personally, I Blame My Fairy Godmother Read Free

sports car, cherry red with bright lemon-yellow seats, which I know makes it sound like a packet of Opal Fruits on wheels, but trust me, the colour scheme did actually work. Anyway, I got it on one of those car-leasing HP deals, where the idea is you drive off in a brand, spanking new set of wheels immediately, then pay it off by the month. Perfect deal for someone like me; live now, pay later. Trouble is, I got so scarily far behind in repayments that, one night last week after way too many glasses of wine at some art gallery do, I crawled home at all hours in a taxi to find the car gone from my driveway. Just gone. Disappeared. So I thought it was stolen, natch, and was on the verge of ringing the police when I found a letter on my doorstep telling me it had actually been repossessed. Course I was way too morto to tell anyone the actual truth, so I decided the best humiliation-avoidance tactic was to stick to my original ‘stolen car’ story. Which I would have got away with too, only Emma Sheridan, my best friend and co-presenter at work, bounced into the production office a few days later and told me she’d just seen my ‘stolen’ car in the forecourt of Maxwell Motors with a big ‘For Sale’ sign stuck on it. Definitely mine, she insisted, sure how many other bright red Z4s are there on the road with lemon-yellow leather seats?
    So I was rightly rumbled and had to confess all, but the thing about Emma is that she’s not just a showbiz pal, she’s a genuine pal. In all the years I’ve known her, there are two things I’ve never, ever seen her do; repeat gossip or eatchocolate. As discreet as a nun in a silent order about her own private life and yet the only woman I know who’s honest enough to admit to Botox. Bless her, when I came clean about my money woes, she even offered me a cash loan to tide me over. So now, whenever anyone asks me when I’m getting a new car, lovely, loyal Emma laughs and waves it aside and tells me it’s nearly cheaper for me to get cabs all the time.
    Whereas the actual truth is, the way things are going, I’ll probably end up walking everywhere from now on. Barefoot. In the lashing rain. With newspaper tied with twine around my feet and bloodhounds baying at my heels. Singing the orphans’ chorus from Annie, ‘It’s the Hard Knock Life.’
    Worse, though, I think, as a fresh wash of anxiety comes over me, is that there doesn’t seem to be any end to my money troubles. Ever. You see, with myself and Sam, there’s always the next night out, the next weekend away, the next trip abroad. Easter is only round the corner and we’ve already booked to go down to Marbella which I can’t afford and yet at the same time, can’t get out of.
    Honest to God, I sometimes feel like I’m stuck on a never-ending financial hamster wheel where I’m constantly stretching my almost-melted credit cards just to keep pace with him. I’m not even certain how it happened, but somehow I’ve got sucked into a world where appearances are everything and it’s like I’ve no choice but to spend big just to hold my own against all my new, posher, wealthier friends.
    This house being the perfect example. The logical part of my brain, which let’s face it, I don’t hear from all that often, tells me that it’s completely mental; the place is ridiculouslyexpensive and way too big for me, but when it first came on the market…hard to put into words, but it was like all my childhood fantasies finally coming true. I just had to have it, simple as that. So now I’m a lone, single person renting a five-bedroomed mansion which I can’t even afford to get the downstairs toilet unblocked in. Christ alive, let it be engraved on my tombstone. ‘Here lies Jessie Woods. Fur coat and no knickers.’
    On the plus side though, I really have made a heroic effort to economise this month. In fact, I distinctly remember suggesting to Sam last weekend that there was no need for us to bother eating out in Shanahan’s