… I always seem to pick the expensive hobbies? Seriously. Sailing, skiing and shooting are the three primary sports in which I participate. None of these sports come cheap – both in terms of costs associated with purchasing boats/skis/guns, but in actually doing the sport – you need to pay for mooring and fuel costs for boats, you have to pay for flights and accommodation when you go skiing and you have to pay for cartridges and other costs when shooting.
I’ve recently taken up photography as a new hobby – if one shoots with a digital camera, the cost of a new camera is more often than not over £500 for a half-decent one. Let’s not even think about the lenses, which can easily sell for multiple hundreds of pounds for relatively “basic” models, and over £1000 for the “pro” models. If one shoots film, one has to pay for film and development costs. These all add up in a big way (not to mention the cost of the high-end film cameras – especially MF (Medium-Format) cameras).
One “hobby” I’ve been involved in since a really young age is reading. Okay, so at first glance reading isn’t that expensive. But when you’re finishing a £6-8 novel every other day or so (as I tend to do during the holiday season when I attempt to take a break from computers), it gets really fucking expensive. Since coming back from Aberystwyth on the 19th July (less than two weeks ago), I’ve read £73.91 worth of books. That’s almost three quarters of a hundred pounds. My wallet is crying (as is my bank account). It doesn’t help that I have another £49.95 worth of books on order… And that’s for five books alone.
I think my main issue is the fact that I like to buy my own physical books. And I like them to be new. This leads to two major problems:
- I can’t buy books second-hand (well, I can. I just don’t want to and would probably refuse to do so)
- I can’t borrow books from the library (see above)
- I can’t read eBooks (they “feel” wrong)
Buggeration. Anyone want to recommend some cheaper hobbies for me? Pretty please?
On a side note, I’m starting the Infinite Summer project when my copy of the book arrives tomorrow (albeit about a month and a bit behind schedule), Infinite Jest is apparently about 1000 pages long and relatively difficult to read. Hopefully this means I’ll put buying new books on the backburner for a wee while – especially as I’ll have another 3 books to finish after it.
Tags: Expensive, Infinite Summer, Photography, Reading, Sailing, Shooting, Skiing
Cheaper hobby = pleasing me, I buy second hand books and you could fund it =3
Do you know how delightfully middle-class that post makes you sound?
Jokes
Know what you mean about the books. Though I quite enjoy looking at old books, the kind with leather hard back covers and thick yellowed pages.
Noes, I have enough trouble funding my own reading habits!
Delightfully middle-class? Me? Well I never!
I do enjoy those kind of books, actually. We have a relatively large collection of books from the early 1800s-onwards at my Grandmother’s house which have been handed down through the generations – I think there’s a first edition Dickens in the collection, alongside other books…
Think about how many generations have read those old books on the toilet Welp! Now think how silly your refusal to buy second hand books is… seriously, if it really bothers you that much wipe the cover with some disinfectant wipes.
I don’t think *any* of my family (alive or dead) (but especially the old dead ones) would ever have read on the loo… Unless they were books specifically for reading on the loo, in which case, I’m fairly sure they would provide some more lightweight reading as opposed to the kinda books we have in the collection…
One of my hobbies is very cheap. Astronomy.
No, wait for it. You can go to a local astronomy club’s open house or star party, often for free. You can look through their scopes, and don’t even have to find stuff yourself. All you really have to do is go outside at night and look. From a dark sky site, the Milky Way is gorgeous. And you don’t need anything more complicated than a blanket to watch meteors (the Perseid Meteor shower peaks tonight).
I bought a ten inch scope that has a computer to help find stuff for $700. I’m pretty much done buying stuff.
But if you really want to pour money down a rat hole, you could combine photography with astronomy. Astrophotography is, uhm, astronomically expensive. But you can get really good pictures if you spend $9000. And have a big vehicle to haul your stuff around. And have at least 3 hours of patience to meticulously set up your stuff each time. And you have others who’ve spent $20,000 or more to find out what works and what doesn’t at hand so you can optimize your expenses.
But for my money, the HST pictures on line are cheaper and better.
A pair of binoculars will get you into bird watching. Mine were $25.