A Time of Magic

Mobile homes have something of a checkered past and indeed a checkered present for that matter.

In principle, mobile homes could, and should, be close to the ideal home for just about everyone. After all, it’s rare that anyone stays in a single spot for all of their lives yet many of us would like to be able to upgrade our home over time without having to buy an entirely new one on a regular basis.

In some cases entire villages of them move on from time to time when the inhabitants are tied to some project like a drilling platform, mining, or whatever. It’s hardly going to be a runner to rebuilt an entire village or town on a regular basis so they’re built to be moved.

The big downside though is that sometimes that cheapness gives those villages something of a downmarket reputation. How to break out of that isn’t an easy question to answer though.

The problem is that you’ve normally little choice in what books you need to buy.

Out will pop a recommended list of textbooks from your university and basically you need to buy them. Sometimes you can thin out the list a little but in many cases you can’t as you don’t know ahead of time what ones you’ll need and, of course, the library just doesn’t have enough copies of those books to go around. Secondhand? Well, sometimes but in some subjects the new editions are required and you’ll just be wasting money on older second hand ones.

It’s one of those largely hidden costs of courses that can sometimes substantially increase the overall cost of those courses if the lecturer gets a bit carried away with their recommendations: after all, it doesn’t cost them anything and, in some cases, can even make them money though commissions.

These days it just has to be batteries these days as just about all the other presents require them.

Of course, the snag is that there are just loads of different types of battery around. Most of the time AA batteries will do the trick but as things get smaller it’s becoming more common to need AAA batteries.

But once you’ve settled on the size there are loads of different types of each size of battery around. Cheap batteries are seriously cheap these days if you buy the own brand from the supermarket but that cheapness means that they don’t last too long and use older technology (generally zinc carbon) which means there’s a fair chance of them leaking out and ruining your devices. At the other end of the price range, usually, are the rechargeables. Or at least some of them because lots of them have taken quite a dive in price too. Granted, if you buy the cheapest ones, they won’t last nearly so long as alkaline or lithium ones but then they generally don’t need to as you can recharge them.

And then there are the little tiny round batteries. The versions of these seem to be selected pretty much at random by the manufacturers. Having said that, I have seen recently a really cheap pack of 40 assorted ones in a discount shop which might be worth picking up if you see it: the entire pack cost about the same as two of the batteries within it bought from a normal shop!