COLM TOBIN: Budgeting on the beans as the price of school is hitting home

IT’S  a very expensive time of year for everyone but especially for those of us with kids back at school. It’s not just the usual books, clothes, and pencil cases. ECAs, or extracurricular activities, are kicking off in earnest in and around school, and the costs can be eyewatering.

Art and music classes, 15 different sports, mindfulness, hot yoga, grandmaster chess … you name it. The under 10s now have more hectic diaries than I did for the best part of my 20s. And you’d need the budget of a small African country to finance this carry-on. There are 20 quids and 100 quids flying out the door in little envelopes – I feel like I’m a finance minister in the 1980s. 

There are payment demands arriving for basketball kits, musical instruments and copious accoutrements which may or may not ever be worn … it’s exhausting for those of us who can afford it and I’d imagine that it’s monumentally stressful if you cannot.

This doesn’t include after-school care, by the way, which for many of us takes the shape of a second mortgage. 

We are a nation of panicking hamsters and I really think we need to rethink the whole bloody way we have constructed our work-life world. Again, I say this as someone in a position of some privilege being able to work from home and do the school runs when I need to. 

So it’s been a month of Charlie Haughey-style belt-tightening in our house. The takeaway has been banished – no more Thai Fridays for us, and I’ve taken stockpiling a load of sauces and ingredients from the local Asian supermarket and have been attempting to create my own versions in the wok. The recipes I am reading on the internet are under titles like 50 Awesome Fakeaways! and You Won’t Believe It Wasn’t Deliveroo’d! but in reality, I can’t quite hit the high standards my local street food emporium has set. Still, I will persist in the name of frugality. 

The other thing we’ve decided to do is jettison shopping in my fancy local €20 vegetable shop. I call it the €20 shop because I literally cannot walk into this place without forking out 20 quid. I’ll go in for an apple and I’ll come out with a watermelon, kimchi, a kilo of organic risotto rice, and a bag of saffron.

Therefore, we’ve been diligently hitting the local German discount store. I don’t want to single out the shop here but it may or may not rhyme with piddle. You have to avoid the middle aisle at all costs of course. That’s where they’ll catch you for a set of harpoons, a cave-diving suit, or a set of 365 drill bits. But if it’s the own-brand chickpeas you’re after for your frugal homemade humous, then it’s the place to be. 

I’ve also put the kibosh on eating lunch down in the local village. Working from home, there is no excuse to eat out, but it was often a chance to leave the house and see some humans in real life, as the kids say. So this week I’ve been reacquainting myself with a long-forgotten friend, Beans On Toast, a much-maligned and underestimated meal, associated as it is with grim student circumstances. The humble bean on toast is a real winner at lunchtime, topped off with a sprinkle of grated cheddar to really set it off - it fills you up, it’s meat-free and sustainable, and it’s monumentally cheap and cheerful!  

Sometimes the best things in life are free, or as close to free as you can get. 

No easy fix to drug scourge

We had Cocaine Bear in the cinemas last year, this week it was the turn of Cocaine Boat. My interest was spiked when reports came through on the telly that mysterious things were afoot on the seas off the south coast. Then it emerged that an elite Irish army unit had raided a vessel in what the guards say was the largest seizure of drugs in the country’s history, worth up to €157m. That’s a lot of south Dublin dinner parties… 

Of course, the drug is being used much more widely outside the posher enclaves of our capitals these days. Indeed, Irish people are the joint-fourth highest consumers per capita of cocaine globally, according to a United Nations report. Basically, it’s like the Celtic Tiger on cocaine out there.

Which is all fun and games until it isn’t and anyone who’s ever tried to give up any addictive drug will know that the knock-on effects for people’s mental health and wellbeing are enormous. Not to mention the pretty sickening connection to low-life criminals and the sort of gangland scumbags we are spending millions trying to contain and push out of devastated communities. 

With the Citizens’ Assembly on drugs in Ireland likely to call for the liberalisation of drug laws in the coming weeks - despite Garda opposition - there may be a change in the approach coming down the tracks. I think we can all agree that the current status quo isn’t working. But you’d have to be on drugs yourself to think there is a quick and simple fix. And anyone who has been reading up on fentanyl and the opioid crisis in the US knows we should be very afraid of what’s coming down the tracks.

Sphere won’t go full circle 

Speaking of the States, it was a big week for Bono, The Edge, and Adam Clayton for the launch of U2’s Live At The Sphere residency. It was weird seeing them with a stand-in drummer, as Larry Mullen was benched with an injury. The videos I saw of The Sphere looked really spectacular – a video screen completely enveloping the extremely well-heeled audience for a full performance of the Achtung Baby album as well as much of Rattle & Hum in acoustic form. At 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, the arena could fit the entire Statue of Liberty inside. It’s easy to scoff at them but I would love to have been there. And it’s a show that won’t travel given the scale of the infrastructure. As they say ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’.