The Kombucha Years

It begins with our regular delivery driver, Richard, plodding his way up the garden path, one arm wrapped around another suspiciously Nike-shaped parcel. Before the poor bloke has even reached the front door, my husband bursts out from behind the hedge. There isn’t an inch of dignity in it. Like Sir David Attenborough narrating the courtship rituals of an especially twitchy middle-aged male. “Here we see the elusive Husband in his natural habitat. Having detected the arrival of a parcel, he attempts to intercept it before his mate becomes aware of its existence…” He stealthily relieves Richard of the parcel, thanks him in little more than a whisper, and tiptoes back towards the house, cradling the box against his chest like he’s smuggling contraband rather than a pair of size nines. I watch the whole charade through the living room window. He honestly believes he’s getting away with it. It’s almost impressive. Bless him. After twenty years together, he still underestimates the observational powers of his wife. He slips inside, quietly flattens the cardboard box, buries the evidence beneath the recycling, and strolls into the lounge as though nothing had just happened. I give him five whole seconds. Then I wander into the hallway. “New trainers?” He doesn’t even look up. “No… I’ve had these for years.” Years. Right. They’re so blindingly white I feel like I should fetch my aviators. Not a single crease. Not a speck of dirt. The soles have never so much as kissed the pavement. “The label’s still on them.” “They were on offer.” Ah yes. The ancient language of husbands. Everything is on offer. Black Friday. Clearance. End of season. Buy One Get One Free. Some mystical corner of the internet where spending two hundred pounds somehow qualifies as saving money. I hold the trainer up. “The label literally says two hundred quid.” He nods enthusiastically. “Exactly.” He smiles. “So it would’ve been rude not to.” Truth be told… this isn’t entirely fiction. My husband has always gone through phases. There was the coffee phase, where owning one cafetière simply wasn’t enough because apparently each bean required its own carefully calibrated brewing method. There was the gadget phase. Actually… let’s not talk about the gadget phase. I’m still recovering financially. But nothing… absolutely nothing… came close to The Trainer Years. Nike. Adidas. New Balance. Converse. If a shoe company existed, chances are he’d developed an unhealthy attachment to it. Every colour imaginable, including several I’m fairly certain don’t occur naturally outside a tropical fish tank. Our hallway began looking less like the entrance to a family home and more like the footwear department of JD Sports. Every few weeks another pair would mysteriously appear. Not arrive, you understand. Appear. As though they’d simply manifested overnight. I’d notice immediately. “New trainers?” “No.” “I’ve had these for ages.” Liar. I’d know. Because unlike his old trainers, these ones practically glowed. The kind of white that feels like it hasn’t met real life yet. Back then it was irritating. Now… it feels rather different Because we can’t really afford trainers now. Not fancy ones anyway. A few months ago my husband lost his job. Not because he wasn’t good at it. Quite the opposite. His manager had spent years trying to bully him out of the company. Death by a thousand paper cuts. Years of office politics, impossible expectations, and quietly moving the goalposts until staying became harder than leaving. Eventually… Cunt Face got exactly what he wanted. Around here, we don’t use his real name anymore. He’s simply known as… Cunt Face. Not the most mature nickname, admittedly… …but some people earn their titles. Years of unwavering commitment to being an absolute bellend. So now… we’re counting pennies again. Not because we want to. Because we have to. The supermarket trolley suddenly feels lighter. Not through choice, but because half the things we’d normally throw in now stay quietly on the shelves. I’m no longer allowed down the homeware aisle. “No Amanda.” “You don’t need another cup.” “But this one has a Highland cow wearing heart-shaped glasses.” “No.” “It makes tea taste happier.” “It’s still a no.” It’s amazing how quickly your priorities change when money becomes tight again. Suddenly the things that once felt like harmless little treats become luxuries. Branded cereal. Decent coffee. Proper butter. Kombucha. Especially kombucha. It takes me back to another chapter of our lives. One I’d almost forgotten how to revisit without wincing. We weren’t just short of money. We were poor. Not the sort of poor people romanticise years later because it “built character”. I mean properly poor. The sort of poor where every unexpected expense felt like a personal attack from the universe. The sort of poor where the car making a funny noise wasn’t an inconvenience — it was the beginning of a panic attack. A £30 repair might as well have been thirty thousand. Every morning, the sound of post dropping through the letterbox filled me with equal parts hope and dread. Usually it was another bill. Another reminder. Another letter from the bailiffs. Occasionally, tucked quietly amongst them, would be an invitation to use the local food bank. We never went. Looking back, perhaps we should have. But pride is a strange thing — even when you’ve got very little left, you somehow convince yourself you can’t afford to lose that as well. Instead, we developed what could generously be described as our signature dish. Sausage pasta. Calling it a recipe feels rather ambitious. It consisted of pasta, the cheapest tomato sauce available, and supermarket-brand sausages that looked as though they’d been assembled entirely from pig anuses. Three ingredients. Endless variations. Well… one variation. We ate it constantly. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. If we’d been feeling particularly adventurous, we’d have it on Saturday as well. By Sunday I was beginning to suspect I actually was a sausage. Even now, I can’t walk past those suspiciously cheap blue-and-white packets without experiencing a mild bout of sausage-induced PTSD. Trauma, it turns out, comes in surprisingly affordable packaging. And yet… For all the stress, all the worry and all the endless sausage pasta… they’re still some of my favourite memories. Because when you don’t have money… you stop buying entertainment. You create it. Friday nights became our luxury. We’d scrape together enough change to visit our local Blockbuster. God, there’s a sentence that instantly ages me. We’d spend the best part of an evening wandering those aisles. Reading the backs of DVD cases as though we were literary critics. Picking films up. Putting them back. Returning twenty minutes later because perhaps we’d judged them too harshly. In truth, we probably spent longer deciding what to watch than we ever did actually watching it. Decision-making was the evening’s main event. The film was almost an afterthought. But that was never really the point. It gave us somewhere warm to be. Somewhere to laugh. Somewhere that wasn’t home for an hour or two. And if we’d had a particularly good week, we’d treat ourselves to a paper bag of pick ‘n’ mix before heading home. Not much. Just enough to convince ourselves we’d gone wild. Sadly… I was usually entrusted with choosing the film. A responsibility I consistently abused. To this day, I remain astonishingly good at selecting films with brilliant covers and absolutely dreadful plots. It’s a talent. The Human Centipede looked significantly more compelling on the box, admittedly. Feeders somehow managed to lower the bar even further. After enough Friday nights, my husband stopped asking my opinion altogether. An entirely reasonable decision. I’ve since accepted my title as the World’s Worst Film Picker with considerable grace. There were picnics too. Not because we were the sort of family who adored picnics… …but because they were gloriously cheap. Not the Instagram sort with wicker baskets, artisan bread and little bottles of elderflower presse. More the “whatever’s-in-the-cupboard” sort. Cheese sandwiches wrapped in clingfilm. Crisps. A flask of tea. Maybe a packet of biscuits if payday happened to be nearby. The children chasing pigeons around the park for two hours while we sat on a slightly damp blanket pretending not to notice. Those afternoons cost almost nothing. Yet somehow they gave us everything. Nostalgia has softened the edges. Perhaps memory has quietly edited out the stress. It has a habit of doing that. But I genuinely remember being happy. Not because we had very much. But because we stopped measuring life by the things we couldn’t afford… and started noticing everything we already had. And yes… there was also rather a lot of sex. Turns out poverty is surprisingly romantic. Mostly because going out costs money… and staying in didn’t. Our sofa had already belonged to three different families before it found its way into our living room. A hand-me-down… hand-me-down… hand-me-down. Complete with a pull-out mattress. Luxury. The children were little then. Fast asleep upstairs. We’d watch Dexter. Reach roughly the halfway point. Pause it. Become… distracted. Resume the episode considerably later. Poor Dexter must’ve spent half his fictional life frozen mid-scene while we attended to more pressing matters. Perhaps romance doesn’t require expensive holidays or boutique hotels. Apparently all it really needs is exhausted parents… …a knackered third-hand sofa… …and impeccable timing. Then one day, while I was heavily pregnant with our third child, my husband announced he’d decided to go back to university. “What are you going to study?” I asked. Silently hoping for something sensible. Medicine. Law. Accounting, perhaps. Something with a reassuringly predictable career path. He smiled. “Disaster Management.” “Oh.” Not exactly the answer I’d been rehearsing in my head. But looking back… perhaps he was trying to manage the biggest disaster we’d ever faced. Poverty. What followed wasn’t overnight success. Far from it. It was years. Years that often felt endless while we were living them. Years of studying after work. Assignments spread across the dining room table. Late nights. Early mornings. Coffee-fuelled deadlines. Missed evenings together because another assignment had to be finished first. One degree became a Master’s. Then came opportunities overseas. Turkey. Dubai. Geneva. Months apart. School plays watched on grainy video recordings. Bedtime stories told over crackling phone calls instead of tucked-in duvets. The sort of sacrifices no CV ever mentions. People see the rewards. The salary. The qualifications. The passport stamps. They rarely see what it cost to get there. The birthdays missed. The homesickness. The years quietly traded for a future that still existed only in hope. He sacrificed years with his family because he believed, stubbornly, sometimes infuriatingly, that life could be different. That our children’s future could be different. That we could be different. And eventually… After more hard work than either of us ever imagined… and after coming closer to breaking us than either of us would probably admit… he was right. For the first time in our lives, money stopped being frightening. Not unlimited. Not extravagant. Just… enough. We bought our first house. A sentence that still feels slightly surreal to write. Bills stopped arriving like threats. They were still irritating… just no longer terrifying. If something broke, we fixed it. Without first wondering whether we could survive a few more months without it. The weekly supermarket shop no longer involved adding numbers in my head before putting something back. For the first time, I could reach for something because I fancied it — not because it happened to be the cheapest option. My husband discovered gourmet food. And I… I reached the dizzying heights of financial prosperity. I started buying kombucha. Twelve bottles. Fifteen quid. Off Amazon. If that isn’t the very definition of “We’ve made it,” I genuinely don’t know what is. Then life did what it so often does. Just when we thought we’d finally found our footing… …it moved the ground beneath our feet. The job disappeared. Our roof decided it had no further interest in remaining waterproof. The plumbing packed up. The washing machine retired without notice. Our electrics became less “family home” and more “a strikingly worded email to the insurance company waiting to happen”. And just like that… the budgeting spreadsheets came back out. Amazon wish lists stayed paused like Dexter mid-killing spree. The treats disappeared. The little luxuries quietly slipped away, one by one. It’s funny how quickly your world shrinks when money becomes uncertain again. You stop browsing and start calculating. You stop wandering. You walk into shops knowing exactly what you need… …and leave with precisely that. Nothing more. The homeware aisle becomes somewhere you pass through rather than linger. Which is exactly why my dream annoyed me so much. Because there stood my husband… smuggling home another gleaming pair of trainers while the rest of us were carefully stretching every pound. I felt personally betrayed. “How could you?” I shouted, holding them above my head like evidence in a court case. “They were on offer.” He shrugged. Of course they were. They always are. The funny thing is… the more I’ve thought about it… this dream wasn’t really about trainers. It was about money. Or perhaps more accurately… What we allow money to convince us of. I’ve lived with nothing. And I’ve lived with enough. I’ve known the constant anxiety of checking the bank balance before buying milk. I’ve also known the strange peace that comes from not needing to. Trust me… the second one is infinitely preferable. And I would never pretend those two lives feel the same. Financial security is wonderful. It deserves every bit of praise people give it. It quietens a part of your brain that never truly rests when you’re struggling. “Can we afford it?” “What if something breaks?” “Will there be enough?” You sleep better. You breathe easier. The future stops feeling like something to survive and becomes something you can actually plan for. I’d never romanticise poverty. There is nothing noble about lying awake wondering how you’re going to pay the next bill. But if it gave me one unexpected gift… Perspective. It taught me that happiness was never hiding inside another Amazon parcel. It never arrived in cardboard boxes. It wasn’t waiting in a new pair of trainers… or behind the words “Add to Basket.” It was already there. Quietly waiting for me to notice. It was hidden inside terrible horror films. Second-hand sofas. Cheap picnics. Children laughing in the park. Watching Dexter… eventually. Conversations that lasted long after the television had been switched off. Making each other laugh because laughing was free. We spent years believing that happiness would arrive once we finally had enough money. Then we got there… only to realise we’d accidentally left quite a lot of happiness behind… in a Blockbuster aisle… on a damp picnic blanket… and on a third-hand sofa that had absolutely no business being that romantic. Maybe that’s why the dream made me laugh. Because somewhere deep down, I think my subconscious was trying to remind me of something I’d almost forgotten… that no pair of trainers, however white or however expensive, will ever compete with the life we’ve already built together. Having said all that… I really do wish my husband would hurry up and get another job. I could absolutely murder a kombucha.