£10 on a record player down at charity shop... best toy ever (at least, at age 10 when you don't have your own stereo yet). So much so that it had to mysteriously disappear while i was at uni to be finally gone for good.
£1.50 on three kid's VHS videos for the children's hospital shift. Money well spent and wouldn't have discovered if not dropping stuff off.
Hasty-edit: It's to put on the combi TV in the scan room to keep the brats distracted and hopefully fairly still while we try to get a proper image of what's going on inside them. Though we like to watch as well. The videos, that is.
God, i'm not making it sound any better, am I...
£40 on a secondhand, pentium-120 laptop. Uber useful dispite the age, total lifesaver (both for work on the go, and providing a source of solitaire/tetris/GTA in boring moments), and long lasting once i clocked it down to 60mhz. Still going since buying it 18 months ago, only had a couple glitches that sorted themselves out both times, nice and compact, silent (no fans - at all), laughing my ass off at people dropping £500 or more on a big lumpy notebook that makes a racket, runs a half hour less on a comparable charge, gets hot, is a thief magnet, goes out of date in six months... and gets used for almost exactly the same duties, bar internet surfing (which i can do in enough other places, such as here), and is probably less competent with them. e.g. MS word taking forever to load and being keypress-unresponsive. Heheheh...
£15 on an Alba portable CD player, of which can be literally said
they don't make them like that any more - at least, not with the same features and sound quality for the same low price. Damn.
£110 on a Novatech Npod (again with the "dont make them.."). About a month's worth of compressed music? Check. FM stereo radio (with recording)? Yep. Built in surprisingly-good mic for bootlegging concerts and other performances? Indeed. Super high speed link for carting documents about? You got it. Completely unexpected ability to connect direct to digital cameras and USB pendrives to backup their contents when 18 miles from the nearest computer? Oh my god, yes, worth the purchase price alone.
£650 (...and "the rest") on a certain little blue car....

the stories of which have gone round enough
£2500 on a certain silver car. Still not a great fan of it, it's still stodgy, thirsty and devoid of all character, but it goes pretty goddamn quick for "69hp" and has totted up very little in service costs the last 12 months, even with brakes and cambelt. Hmmm.
£10 on a head-lamp. Uber, uber, uber-ma-flooberly useful.
... i think i should stop there
