A few places very briefly was more traveling than Ford had really done — he had never been beyond the reach of the floo network. It was probably more travel than Ford ever would do, too, unless he somehow managed to miraculously get all the girls married without a hitch and then his mother went to live with one of them, and he was allowed to actually spend some of the money he worked for. Even then, it seemed a bit far-fetched; most people in his social strata didn't travel widely except on their honeymoons, and Ford didn't really ever plan to have one of those. With how things had been over the past year, Ford sometimes found himself dreaming of such small things as being able to buy someone a Christmas present on a whim instead of after careful planning, or getting a new book from the bookstore instead of the library, or even buying the bottle of red wine himself — he was relieved that Lestrange had been the one to order it, though of course he wouldn't show it. When he was dreaming of things like that, things that had been normal before he'd become the head of the family, the idea that he might ever have enough money to do something more seemed, frankly, ridiculous. He wasn't going to get married, or have children. Maybe, if things worked out just perfectly for him, he might reach his thirties and buy himself a cat.

Probably not, though. If he managed to get the girls married, he'd start acquiring nieces and nephews at an alarming rate, he imagined, and he'd likely have too many obligations in the realm of Christmas presents, birthdays, and various outings to do more than keep his head above water. That, and his mother was never going to go live with someone else — he wasn't that lucky. She was probably going to stay in the house and keep spending his money faster than he could earn it until the day he died, and maybe she'd even outlive him. So no cat.

"Well, I don't know that one abandoned manor is going to be representative of the whole country," he said with a shrug before taking a drink of his wine. "But at least you'll be able to say you've been. Outside the Quidditch pitch," he added, with a slightly teasing smile.