Added£1.29Add to basket(A short story of 5050 words)
Mrs Jones lives next door to Mrs Jones
Children's
by Steve Way
'Keeping up with the Joneses' goes completely out of the control and Mrs Jones and her neighbour Mrs Jones try to out-do each other with ever more extreme consumerism!
It started like this. A Mrs Jones lived next door to Mrs Jones. So to be more accurate, it didn’t start like this because of course they didn’t move into their houses at exactly the same time. One Mrs Jones came first, a Mrs Isobel Jones. As was her habit whenever she moved, while she was getting to know her neighbours she spied around to see what they had, to make sure she owned better things than they did. On the whole, she was delighted. On one side of her lived a retired couple who’d seen enough of life, including hardship, not to be in the least bit bothered about baubles and trinkets, on the other a couple she considered very odd as they were far more interested in doing things, like taking their children for walks and visiting old people than buying things. As far as Mrs Jones was concerned they seemed like a couple of grown up hippies. The thing that annoyed her most about both sets of neighbours was the fact that none of them showed any interest (or more specifically jealousy) when she announced to them that she’d bought a new designer dress or bedroom carpet or had had an outrageously expensive hairdo.
It should be noted that Mrs I Jones didn’t come on her own. Mrs Jones had a husband and several children but she mainly only had the husband so he could go to work to earn money for her to buy things with and originally she’d only had all her children so that she could show off by having more children than anyone else living around her. They also came in handy for buying things for, such as clothes and trinkets that she could adorn them with so that she could make everyone around her see what a wonderful mother she was by not just buying bling for herself. Sadly, other than using them basically as living coat hangers Mrs Jones didn’t have much use for her children and took absolutely no other form of interest in them whatsoever, so rather than ever doing anything interesting with their parents (their father was always out working) the children had to amuse themselves. This usually led to them fighting with each other and screaming at each other, which Mrs Jones found very inconvenient. What was the use of adorning the house with living manikins if they were forever squabbling with each other? So Mrs Jones would chase her children out of the house so they could go and fight and scream elsewhere and would only let them back at mealtimes or when there were people visiting that she wanted to impress...
It started like this. A Mrs Jones lived next door to Mrs Jones. So to be more accurate, it didn’t start like this because of course they didn’t move into their houses at exactly the same time. One Mrs Jones came first, a Mrs Isobel Jones. As was her habit whenever she moved, while she was getting to know her neighbours she spied around to see what they had, to make sure she owned better things than they did. On the whole, she was delighted. On one side of her lived a retired couple who’d seen enough of life, including hardship, not to be in the least bit bothered about baubles and trinkets, on the other a couple she considered very odd as they were far more interested in doing things, like taking their children for walks and visiting old people than buying things. As far as Mrs Jones was concerned they seemed like a couple of grown up hippies. The thing that annoyed her most about both sets of neighbours was the fact that none of them showed any interest (or more specifically jealousy) when she announced to them that she’d bought a new designer dress or bedroom carpet or had had an outrageously expensive hairdo.
It should be noted that Mrs I Jones didn’t come on her own. Mrs Jones had a husband and several children but she mainly only had the husband so he could go to work to earn money for her to buy things with and originally she’d only had all her children so that she could show off by having more children than anyone else living around her. They also came in handy for buying things for, such as clothes and trinkets that she could adorn them with so that she could make everyone around her see what a wonderful mother she was by not just buying bling for herself. Sadly, other than using them basically as living coat hangers Mrs Jones didn’t have much use for her children and took absolutely no other form of interest in them whatsoever, so rather than ever doing anything interesting with their parents (their father was always out working) the children had to amuse themselves. This usually led to them fighting with each other and screaming at each other, which Mrs Jones found very inconvenient. What was the use of adorning the house with living manikins if they were forever squabbling with each other? So Mrs Jones would chase her children out of the house so they could go and fight and scream elsewhere and would only let them back at mealtimes or when there were people visiting that she wanted to impress...