The cost of living crisis makes you do crazy things. 

The cost of living crisis makes you do crazy things. 

Allow me to park that thought for just a moment. 

The other day I was visiting a friend who had a newborn. 

With the bub asleep, my friend and I had a bit of a ‘bemoan-athon.’ As opposed to a moan-athon, which she’d had with her husband roughly nine-and-a-half months earlier. 

My friend bemoaned quite reasonable circumstances - a lack of sleep, lingering aches and pains from the pregnancy and birth, and some anxiety around it being a month or so before her bub could get her vital 'six-week' vaccinations. 

In contrast, my sole complaint did not at all relate to a reasonable circumstance. 

When asked how I was going, all I could pathetically bemoan was, “Yeah I don’t like winter, because it… makes my skin dry.”

My friend looked at me like it was the weirdest thing she’d ever heard, probably because it was the weirdest thing she’d ever heard. 

I mean, the cold weather causing me to have dry skin was the truth, and it was something that annoyed me, but of all the first world problems to bemoan, that was the one I went with?

It wasn’t long before the bub woke up, and I was allowed to hold her and say ‘hello.’ 

After about ten minutes, she started to cry. 

I’m awesome with babies, so I assumed it must have been indigestion or something, but as I handed her back, my friend said, “It’s probably your dry skin.”

I’m certain she was making a joke. And the baby was wearing a blanket and our skin never touched. Yet I was convinced the bub’s tears did have something to do with my dry skin and after weeks on inaction, I now had to do something to rectify it. 

I stopped into the nearest supermarket on the way home and hurried straight for the health and beauty aisle. Just being in that aisle is an embarrassing thing for any bloke, let alone one with horrible memories caused by a prior bad experience. 

Many, many years ago, I was asked by a then girlfriend to purchase Durex lubricant from the supermarket. 

I’d never bought lubricant from anywhere before. It gave me that much anxiety that I nearly crashed my car into the trolley bay in the carpark. I then spent twenty minutes purchasing groceries I didn’t need to give myself the best chance of the check-out lady (there was no self-service back then) overlooking the fact that I was buying lubricant. I then spent fifteen minutes waiting for the health and beauty aisle to have no one in it, so that no one would see me buying lubricant. 

Finally the aisle had no one else in it.

Certain it was only a matter of seconds before an old lady came round the corner and into the aisle with her trolley, I made my move. 

However the ‘grab’ was executed so quickly, that I didn’t realise the little lubricant bottles weren’t just sitting on a shelf, but were individually sitting in a tray of ten, and therefore required greater control when taking one, so that nothing nearby would be knocked over.  

Greater control was not what I used, and I ended up pulling the entire tray off the shelf, and spilling all ten of the lubricant bottles onto the floor. 

While all ten bottles fortunately remained closed, you can imagine my horror at their fall, and my desperation to get them back into the tray and their rightful place on the shelf without being spotted. 

While my now technique with an open bottle of lubricant has never been questioned (sorry, I couldn’t help but put that line in), my technique putting ten closed bottles of lubricant back where they came from was the worst thing ever. Instead of putting the ten bottles back on the tray on the floor and lifting the full tray back into its place, I first picked up the tray and put it back on he shelf, and picked up all ten bottles after that. 

That was when, not an old lady, but a mother with three young boys, came around the corner and into the aisle with her trolley. Yes, right then, just as I juggled ten bottles of lubricant in my hands. 

She looked at me how she should have looked at me - appalled at my greed, and highly embarrassed for me that I needed to take all ten bottles of sex liquid with me. 

So bad was that experience, that - fast forward back to present day - and I didn’t even make eye contact with the lubricant area in my search for a cure for my dry skin. I scurried in to the supermarket, scurried down the health and beauty aisle, found the shelf with all of the moisturisers and… realised identifying the cure and getting out of there as fast I as I could, was not something that was going to be possible. 

Why? Because there were so many moisturisers to choose from!

Supreme hydrating. Skin balm. Blemish and age defence. Rescue and repair. Facial glow and brightening serum. Vinoclean micellar cleansing (I don’t even know what that means). Hyaluronic acid (Or that). Vitamin enriched. Nectar. Invisible. Multi-purpose repairing. Probiotic gels.  

How do you make up your mind with all that going on?!

Furthermore, all of these products were super expensive, like forty, fifty and even sixty dollars, which brings me back to how the cost of living crisis can make us all do crazy things.

After reading the back of a half dozen bottles of moisturiser, I noticed many of them had a common ingredient - oats.

It got me thinking that there had to be a cheaper way, and it soon came to me that there was, and it was only three aisles over.

I used great control in taking a $3.50 bottle of sorbolene cream out of its tray, marched to the cereal aisle and picked up a box of brand name oats for $1.65, paid for them both, drove home, put both the sorbolene cream and the oats into a Magic Bullet, blended them, poured the oat cream mixture into a bowl, scooped up a handful, rubbed it into my face, put some glad wrap over the bowl in order to save the rest, and let the dry skin repairing begin. 

And you what! The sorbolene/oats mixture actually did nothing at all, and I threw the rest of it in the bin.

Funnily enough, I actually upped my water intake a few days later, and wouldn’t you know it, my skin started to improve. 

I can’t wait to see my friend and her new baby again. I’m going to drink a big glass of water before I go, and see if the bub cries when I hold her. 

I'm pretty confident she won't.