The age of the booze cruise has not passed

I've just about recovered from my efforts on Saturday. One of the few remaining pleasures I have is 3 or so glasses of wine of an evening and I can afford this on my limited income by travelling to France once every while to stock up on booze.

People have said 'Surely, it's no longer worth it'. Believe me it is, but it does depend on where you shop. What are the costs? Well, the worst is you basically lose a Saturday - I get up about 5-5.30 a.m., have coffee and get my bits together and then travel the 130 miles to Folkestone, get the earliest tunnel crossing offered, go to Carrefours and buy my stuff, go back to the tunnel and drive back. I use the tunnel to eat and have a short nap and get back by 3.00 pm, which gives me time to rack (where appropriate) the wine and clear rubbish from the car and I'm normally OK to prepare and cook my meal in the evening. Which is why no photos; pardon the pun, I'm a bit driven on a trip like this as it's purely cost-saving and photos of hypermarkets and terminals are not pretty.

Carrefours at Cité d'Europe is currently where the cheapest reasonable VdP or VdT (Vin de Pays or Vin de Table) is and I buy 4-5 cases of what went OK last time (1 or less Euros a bottle), 2-3 cases of more reasonable stuff (about 1.5-2.5 Euros a bottle) and 1 case of mixed 'treats' and tasters of new VdP and VdT so that I have a better idea next time round as to what might be reasonable. I also buy a few cheeses, cheap French coffee (about a dozen packets of ground coffee for my pot of morning coffee - I drink a mug, put the rest in a thermos and take to work so I don't have to drink the instant rubbish - this works out at 10P a day). If you use large quantities of dried herbs, (I use a lot of Herbes de Provence) then it's a good place to buy those in France. I also like Amora Dijon mustard and it's about half the price in France.

This time round I bought 115 bottles and, even assuming the cheapest current UK price (not likely) of £3.50 a bottle that would be £402.50. I actually paid £172 for the total bill, including the coffee and mustard, £26 in petrol and £63 for the crossing. So I saved £141.50. Normally I'd use my Tesco clubcard points for effectively an £18 crossing (4 to 1 exchange on the tokens), saving another £45, but I wasn't sure when the Royal Mail strikes would kick in.

Sadly, when the pound was stronger, the saving was even greater, but don't let anyone convince you that you can't save money doing this! Put it a different way, I bought 115 bottles of wine for £2.26. My personal indulgence of an evening costs me £1.20, say, which is less than the cost of half a pint of bitter.