Attrition Warfare for the Home

As the new flat comes with absolutely nothing, I'm faced, for the first time in my life, with the tedious challenge of having to buy a complete set of furnishings.

Personally, I'm happy to go for the cheap stuff since I have very little money after paying several thousand pounds in fees to move in, but my girlfriend would rather buy things that have a bit more style.

Anyway, things have reached a head around the subject of curtains, with me dropping hints about how unimportant curtains are and how several of the neighbours don't even appear to have curtains, and my girlfriend espousing the virtues of curtains and loudly proclaiming their atmosphere-imbuing properties whenever she gets the chance.

I see my thriftiness as an anti-materialistic virtue, but perhaps it's more a sad state of mind that I share with the majority of my generation whereby every place we live is merely temporary, like our jobs, and belongs to somebody else, and therefore is too risky to invest in in the way that you'd actually like; I have never had my own home, and I expect that I never will.