It happened 13 years ago, but it still makes me feel guilty. I was a wide-eyed backpacker exploring Asia for the first time and six weeks of traipsing around monuments had taken their toll on the trainers I had brought with me from England. So when I spotted a slightly chaotic-looking shoe shop on a high street in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, I gratefully dived inside. But after the owner found me a cheap pair of canvass lace-ups, I didn't just reach into my wallet and pull out a fistful of baht. I bargained. Now there are few things I enjoy more than bargaining. Pretending to walk away when they don't agree to your price, or grinning at them safe in the knowledge that if we cannot agree on a price the only loser is them - I love it. In this case, though, when the price could only have been a few dollars, I should have just paid the full amount.
Instead, I haggled for ages and eventually the dispirited owner gave up and let me have my way. It was a cruel thing for me to have done. His shop was clearly on its last legs. He was elderly, overweight and walked with a limp. Everything inside was a complete mess and there was a shiny, new shoe shop nearby, which had no doubt stolen most of the business. But still I acted with skinflint ruthlessness.
Yet when this all happened, I was not the tight-fisted person I have become today. I was a 22-year-old without a financial care in the world. The previous year I had graduated from university, where I must have blown the thick end of US$2,000 (Dh7,346) on CDs. About a year before completing my degree I had even spent US$250 for tickets to a pretentious college ball, even though the only person in the world prepared to accompany me was one of my sisters. Back then I was too young to worry about bank balances and the need to save for a pension.
And yet, though I was a free-spender during those years, I had haggled over a few baht with a shopkeeper to whom life was obviously not being very kind. The reason was that, soon after stepping off the plane a few weeks earlier to begin a round-the-world trip, money had taken on a whole new value. Within a few days of landing in Delhi, what would have been a trifling amount of money back home in England was suddenly a fortune.
