how to save money by spending two grand

5-star discoveries from my travels* noise-cancelling headphones for the plane. Life-CHANGING. * James by Percival Everett* this IKEA chair* Foster by Claire Keegan (no, I haven’t seen the film but now want to)* flying to London for a day on your own (10/10, even on Ryanair)* Marks & Spencer’s mid-rise barrel-leg jeans, which are just €39 and excellent (I now own three pairs)* Aimee Connolly’s Second Skin dewy foundation (I also bought the Liquid Lights blush in Real Rosy and that’s gorgeous too)* The Pitt, which I watched on the plane home because I just couldn’t commit to a movie with my children writhing around on my lap non-stop. I know I’m late on this one but I’m now fully invested.* this remix of Lily Allen’s Beg for Me featuring Jade, which I have on repeatAnchor Baby is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.men in groupsOn a wet Thursday night on our recent trip to Ireland, we have dinner in Boco on Bolton Street. It’s a pizza restaurant that opened a decade ago in what used to be known as Bodkins, the regular haunt of (I’m told) DIT Bolton St students (the artist formerly known as DIT Bolton St, now known as one of many TU Dublins). I used to go there a lot, when I lived a mere 10 minutes’ walk away. At a certain time of year, when wild garlic was in season – I was never sure when, and to look it up now would feel like cheating – they’d have the most incredible wild garlic pesto pizza. I was always surprised and delighted to see it make its annual appearance on the menu. That I never missed it speaks to just how often I used to go there. This time, I’m here with my American husband and our four (American) children. We’re coming off a long day: Avoca with my parents for breakfast; a scenic-but-long drive to Avondale afterwards, to walk high up in the trees and then to climb up the viewing tower that houses a large, cylindrical slide (down which, of course, we slid); a less-scenic-but-no-less-long drive to the Red Cow Luas afterwards; a rather fractious Luas ride with a four-year-old who insisted he didn’t need to hold the handrail and, as a result, fell over every single time the Luas stopped and every single time it started again; a mad dash around Penneys to find the shorts we’d stupidly promised we’d buy our older sons (not for the Irish weather, you understand, but for back home in the Midwest). So when we barrel through the doors of what used to be called Bodkins, out of a rain shower that’s come – as they have all come, and will continue to come, throughout our trip – out of nowhere, we’re hardly anticipating the absolute throng of men that greets us, upon opening the doors. As our eyes adjust to the dim light inside the building, we find ourselves – all six of us, as well as the very bulky and old-fashioned buggy my Mum has been hoarding in her downstairs utility room for God knows how long – surrounded by men with pints. There’s something about groups of men – three or more, usually – that immediately causes me to feel my breath catch in my throat, my heart stutter momentarily as I assess the potential level of risk. This, in itself, is a fool’s errand: there is no predicting which group of men will ignore you, and which will make a “funny joke” aimed in your direction; which man will decide to usher you past him with a hand on your waist, your hip, the upper edge of your buttock; which of these men will gaze, lasciviously, at your cleavage, or your lips, or your bum, as you attempt to shuffle past. I have been – as, I suspect, most women have been – assaulted by men in groups, as their friends looked on. I have been sexually harrassed by men in groups, as their friends joined in. I have been stroked and pushed and mocked and belittled by men in groups, enough times that a gathering of any significant number of men induces a modicum of terror, no matter how irrational that may feel in any given moment (early evening on a Thursday, with my husband and family, in the bright lights of a bar-restaurant). As one of these (many, many) men catches my eyes, I ask him, “what’s going on?” It seems unusual that this vast quantity of men would have gathered without a single woman in attendance. “A retirement!” he tells me, happily. I think of the time I went with a friend to the retirement of a colleague of her dad’s, who was a member of An Garda Síochána. We were too young to drink, which makes that more than 23 years ago; I suspect that a similar retirement party today would have a different gender split, although not, I’m sure, anywhere near 50/50. As we’re being seated, because I’m deeply nosy – when I’m feeling like flattering myself, I think of this as a curiosity, “no wonder I studied journalism” etc – I ask our waitress where this person is retiring from, “that hires only men”? She gives a wry smile. “TU Dublin,” she says. “But there are two women over there.” She nods a head in the direction of a far corner. “They work in admin.” There is one exception to the rule that has me feeling deeply suspicious, distrusting and downright displeased at the sight of men in groups, and it is men in groups having breakfast. In Fort Wayne, this is a pretty common occurrence at any of the city’s many diners and breakfast restaurants. I’ve seen so many groups of men in their eighties and nineties, eating eggs and shooting the s**t, in Cosmos and Spyros and Sun Rise Cafe and Liberty Diner and Joanne’s and I’m sure I’m missing some because I’ve seen them every single time I’ve had breakfast in this city. And the thing is, I’m sure they are no less chauvinistic than their younger, more spritely counterparts. They’re probably more, honestly; theirs is not a generation, in my experience, that thinks hard about how their “compliments” might make women feel unsafe. (They probably think Harvey Weinstein’s victims “knew what they were getting into”.)But that’s the thing, isn’t it? They don’t know any better. They get a pass. The rest of them… well. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that men shouldn’t be legally allowed to assemble in groups of three-plus (wouldn’t I?!) but I do think compulsory lessons on consent in schools would go a way towards helping men understand that, sometimes, their mere presence makes women uncomfortable. And I mean, if you’re reading this thinking, I’m one of the good ones… I’ve never done any of that stuff, I’m thrilled for you. But if you’re really one of the good ones, you’ll be working hard to feel empathy and compassion for women’s lived experiences – and you might even be trying to have these conversations with your male friends, to help them understand, too. TL;DR I’ll always choose the bear.the digital ageWe’ve bought a digital upright piano. I can’t bring myself to call it a keyboard (which is probably just as well now that I’ve Googled it; they’re not, in fact, the same thing).I grew up with a piano in the house. My Mum would regularly sit down to play Christmas carols, or the first half of Für Elise, while my sister would accompany herself while she practiced her operatic singing. I completed my grade examinations up to seventh, then gave up, inexplicably, one level before I could say I’d “completed” the grades. I was never a huge fan of the classical music I’d have to choose from in the National Academy grade books; instead, I loved to play songs from Coldplay’s first two albums; Goodbye My Lover by James Blunt; Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles; Once Upon a Dream from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the 1959 version. At one stage, I tried my hand at Alicia Keys’ Piano & I, but never got past the opening, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 4, which, in hindsight, I should’ve just learned to play instead. (I did not do the talky bits.)When family came over at Christmas, someone would, inevitably, sit down at the piano and begin accompanying us as we sang Christmas carols as a group. Everyone in my family loves a good sing-song, although I always found it slightly embarrassing in its performative wholesomeness, or at least the perception that it was in some way performative. Looking back on it now, I don’t think it was. Our family is just very musical. One of my cousins taught himself to play piano, not in the way that he can now play Let It Be from memory, but in the way that he can now play almost anything, including very impressive jazz piano. (Yes, his proficiency was – and is – annoying to me, as I struggled through learning my scales.) The idea of buying a digital piano was, at first, horrifying to me – a snob, clearly. It felt a bit like the same sensation I got when the ebook reader was invented, and I insisted that I would never succumb; when streaming started to replace buying music, and I maintained that I’d never give up my CDs. You get the gist – with the notable exception of Twitter, I’ve never been an early adopter. I did buy a handful of CDs recently, when the car I was then driving had a CD player, but neither Bluetooth nor an auxiliary input jack, meaning I couldn’t play music from my phone (where my streaming services live). Brand new, I bought Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. In a secondhand shop, I found a copy of James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, alongside Phil Collins’ Hits, and Bjork’s Debut. I hunted down TLC’s Crazy Sexy Cool next, and Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. I will die on the hill of telling you those five albums make up the perfect CD stack for any road trip. Maybe, if I were driving really far, I’d add the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet, and a Madonna album, probably Like a Prayer, which is my favourite Madonna album solely because it was the first album I ever owned. (This makes me sound kind of cool, but be under no illusions; the first concert I ever went to was fully seated, in the Point Theatre, headlined by The Corrs.)Anyway, all this is to say that I simply couldn’t – wouldn’t – consider buying a glorified keyboard, no matter how much like a piano it looked (or sounded). Instead, I’d asked my husband, for my 41st birthday, to hunt down a free-but-decent piano on Facebook Marketplace, and procure it for me. Asking for a free gift seems kind of humble, but anyone who’s ever tried transporting a piano will know that this task is actually borderline Herculean. It took weeks. This piano fell through. That piano was up a flight of stairs, and not worth the time and effort it would take to get it down in one piece. An aside: my Mum recently told us of a time my Dad decided to push a wardrobe down the stairs in their Kildare home, imagining, I’m sure, that it would slide right down like a pro skateboarder. Instead, it thunked and plunked and crashed right through the window at the bottom. My Dad, she recounted, stood wide-eyed and slightly mollified at the top of the stairs, one foot – the foot with which he had shoved the wardrobe – still slightly extended. “Oops,” he deadpanned. Anyway, we finally found a piano that looked decent and we borrowed a trailer and some caster wheels and enlisted the help of a friend and her husband and went to a stranger’s home at 3pm on a Sunday to pick it up. As it was lifted out the front door, the front left leg of the piano fell clean off, revealing a large, splintered segment of wood, where the leg and the piano had cleaved from one another, something that was caused by, surely, a loud, noticeable, collision.“Oh my goodness,” said the piano’s erstwhile owner (a Facebook marketplace piano shifts ownership the moment you touch it, in my book) as she ushered us out the door, me holding this errant piano leg while Brandin and our friend’s husband lifted the piano carefully on to the casters. I glanced at her with, I hope, a single eyebrow raised sardonically. (This is a high hope as I cannot raise my eyebrows independently of one another. Along with rolling my tongue, this physical shortcoming has been most vexing to me throughout my life.) It took about 30 minutes to load the piano on to the trailer. Between the broken leg and the sheer heft of it and the casters, which were helpful but also awkward to prop up in the right position beneath the base, it was all a bit Mr Bean – now that’s a show I would rewatch on repeat, and which, I’ve just learned, is available to watch on Amazon (in the US anyway; in Ireland, it seems to be available both on Amazon and on NOW). We got it home and in situ – in our downstairs entryway; the idea of bringing it up the stairs was immediately dismissed – with another 30 minutes’ worth of elbow grease, where two further issues, one expected and one not, presented themselves. Firstly, the piano was terribly out of tune. This is normal, with pianos that have been moved – especially in and out of a trailer, especially on and off casters, especially after years of sitting, unplayed and relatively unloved, in a house where (obviously) they’re prone to being bumped and banged and broken – and we’d known that we would, at some point, need to have the piano tuned, but I’d thought (perhaps naively?) that it would be playable, in the meantime. No such luck. The second issue was, and I’m not quite sure how to say this delicately, or non-judgmentally… that the piano stank. I’d been aware of a slight odour from the house, when we arrived to pick it up. It smelled a bit like – and here’s a very niche reference for those of you from Kildare North – Gogarty’s, the bric-a-brac shop on Naas Main Street, which was a treasure trove of toys and antiques and the most random things you never knew you wanted until you saw them, and also seemed to have approximately a dozen cats living in there, something that will, obviously, lend a space a very particular fragrance. If my parents had come home with this piano in 1995, I would have assumed, from my very first whiff of the ivories, that it had come directly from Gogarty’s that very day. I started to Google “piano cleaning”, along with “piano tuning”, quickly learning that there are specialists for the former as well as for the latter, and that a very basic clean-and-tune would be setting us back the guts of $600, an amount of money we didn’t – and don’t – have to spend, at least not on a piano. (Just moments ago I received an alert that we owe $1,500 for the tubes Roman had surgically inserted into his ears a few weeks ago, in a 10-minute procedure for which our insurance company already agreed to fork out $1,600, leaving us to pay the balance.)The piano sat in our entryway for several weeks. I attempted to play Für Elise on it, having printed out the sheet music; I tried to remember my Vanessa Carlton, the opening few bars of In My Place. It was a struggle, not just because I’m geriatric now and remember nothing (but song lyrics), but because, even when I was playing what looked like the right notes, it sounded nothing like it should. Our 13-year-old, who plays trumpet in his school’s marching band, was immediately a very enthusiastic pianist. He downloaded the sheet music for a selection of Panic! At the Disco songs and started to work, diligently, through them.I worried, when he started to play the trumpet, that we’d be subjected to hours of ear-splitting horror, but in fact, it’s the piano I should have been concerned about; I wanted to be encouraging, but there was simply no way you could listen to the notes coming from this untuned instrument of torture without gritting your teeth (and covering your ears). I’m someone who – I’m not sure if this will be a surprise or not – finds it very hard to make decisions. I would, in fact, happily outsource all decision-making (any volunteers?!) for the rest of my life. I struggled, throughout these weeks, to make a decision about this piano; should we keep it, invest the money in cleaning and tuning it, and run the risk that it’s actually just a piece of s**t anyway, and would need to be cleaned and tuned every six months? That seemed like an expensive decision. But what was the alternative? Should we try to find another free piano on Facebook Marketplace? Borrow a trailer and casters and enlist the help of a friend once more and show up and hope that it didn’t have a broken leg and wasn’t infused with the stench of cat pee? Pay $600 to have that piano cleaned and tuned, and then cross our fingers that it was semi-decent? I asked a relative who plays piano (and bassoon, interestingly) and is studying music, what he’d recommend. “You could get a digital piano,” he said, and I thought to myself, well, clearly he doesn’t know as much as I thought he did. But here’s the thing about ideas I immediately pooh-pooh: it doesn’t take long for me to come around. See also: wedge trainers (I owned three different pairs of those Isabel Marant wedge trainers at the time they were very cool, never wore them once, and sold each one on for a profit, as I am an entrepreneur), skinny jeans, barrel leg jeans (lol).It helped that our local music superstore, Sweetwater, had an offer on financing for the Yamaha digital piano I started looking at: pay it off over 36 months at 0% interest, meaning that, for a mere $56, paid monthly for three years, a beautiful digital piano (with built-in metronome! headphone jack! and never needing to be tuned!) could be ours. (Is this why I’m in so much debt?! Don’t answer that.)The biggest issue, then, was what to do with the old piano – you know, the one with the cat stank and the broken leg. Do we list it on Facebook Marketplace and pass our bad piano juju on to someone else? Do we scrap it? (I’ll skip to the good part: we decided to scrap it.) On a Friday evening, Brandin picked the new piano up on his way home from work, and once the children had gone to bed we decided to assemble it (forgetting, as we always do, that any kind of furniture assembly job we attempt to do together leads nowhere good). We wheeled the old piano – painstakingly, awkwardly – out the front door and placed it on the driveway, the plan being that we’d get someone to come and help us load it into Brandin’s truck the following morning. The piano assembly itself took longer than the promised 45 minutes, but neither of us shouted at the other, and only one of us got injured (Brandin, scraped by an errant staple, which later on would necessitate his cleaning the “wound” out with hydrogen peroxide – how, I asked him, have Irish people survived this long without immediately panicking about potentially dying thanks to being scraped with a rusty piece of metal? He didn’t answer me). The children were predictably nonplussed. In other unsurprising news, the old piano sat on the driveway for four days, undoubtedly enraging the neighbours (a perk). I suggested we let the boys take a baseball bat and a mallet to it, but that was immediately shot down as being “too dangerous”. (You may be surprised to hear this but I am, actually, the fun parent, despite my reputation as a feminist killjoy.) Still, Brandin failed to enlist a friend to help him, and so, on a Monday evening at 6pm, I walked out to the piano with a screwdriver and a dream, and we commenced its disassembly. Here’s the thing: kids love destroying things. This was an incredible bonding experience for us. With several screwdrivers and a drill and a crowbar and a mallet and some brute strength and only one injury (to Atlas’ leg, which was scratched by a piece of wood, necessitating the procurement of a bandage and three pieces of Terry’s Chocolate Orange), we finally got each part of the piano into the back of Brandin’s truck. He drew the line at letting us cut the wires that criss-crossed the back of the piano, convinced that one would spring back and split someone’s eyeball in half, which was disappointing, but there was enough destruction and chaos – “can someone please take that mallet away from the baby?!” – to make it a great time, nonetheless.As for the digital piano, much as I’m loath to admit this… it’s really, really nice. The keys are weighted so it feels pretty much exactly the same as playing a regular piano, except that none of them stick, unlike every single piano I’ve ever played. The volume can be adjusted, so no one needs to know what sad music you’re playing on repeat. I haven’t tried the metronome function yet – that always feels a bit too much like being told what to do, which I’m against – but the 13-year-old has, and seems to enjoy it. The one downside is that the baby has figured out how to turn it on and how to up the volume to its highest level. But I suppose I do want to encourage him on his musical journey, so have at it, I say. I even unearthed all of my sheet music when I was at home in Ireland, and though Vanessa Carlton was sadly missing, both James Blunt and Coldplay survived. Lucky Brandin. Thanks for reading Anchor Baby! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rosemarymaccabe.substack.com/subscribe