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As The Workhouse Approaches....How To Do Everything To Avoid It, the Old Style Way
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Old Tractor that doesnt have to be so bad ! I have had neighbours who did grow up that way and I can tell you they were THE happiest most contented people I ever met. No "I'm bored" and no "I want" and not even an "If only I had".... they grew up used to nothing so everything was a bonus!
I think porridge for breakfast is great.. that's what we have. You can tart it up with cream, fruit or nuts in tiny amounts if you want to.
Home made soups made in the pressure cooker or crockpot. Using lentils, barley, bacon ends & any garden veg you can get. You can make many different kinds of soup so you don't get bored. With home made bread, very filling, and maybe a slice of bread and jam to finish with.
So that leaves us with one meal a day really to find - as supper can be toast and cheese or jam.
Suggestions for that one meal gratefully accepted !0 -
flowertotmum wrote: »grey,wet,humid..90% humidity according to our barometer thingy ...and thats never wrong.
love to you all..
ftm
very humid here too and the outside temperature is climbing quickly now. Watch out for blight as all it needs are humidity of 90 plus temp of 10 or over plus 2 consequitive periods of those conditions for 11 hours. That is going to happen over the next few days
You can block spores reaching toms by blocking with something, I will be using polythene with small holes in it. The spores can travel a long way
Later I will be putting shading net over some stuff as the temperature difference will be too much esp if the sun is out. It will also be too much for humans and animals as we `older ones (over 40)/ unwell ones` won`t be able to ad-apt. We need more time so I for one am staying indoors if it gets too much too quickly. I have already changed the beds and put light cotton sheets on0 -
Bring it on!
its chucking i down here and our fire is lit.0 -
Dole diet - do you remember the Bernadine Lawrence book "feeding your family on £5 a day"? I love that book - really good wholesome food and enough of it to properly fill you up!!! You could probably still use that to come in under jobseekers/esa.0
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:rotfl::rotfl: same here OT. Oh Kittie can I come down there and live beside you? WILL look for that books westcoast ta !0
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Urghhhh, I do wish the weather was a bit different. It stopped raining and the pavements are drying out but it's muggy and overcast and the humidity is unreal. This is my third day of feeling dizzy and nauseous and lifeless and I blame it on the barometric pressure. I've always been a bit weird with thundery weather and think this is an extension of that weirdness.
Kittie, couldn't agree with you more about the simple life foodwise in the immediate post-war years; sounds very like my parents' upbringing in rural England, minus the exotica like kasha. Mum remembers eating an awful lot of suet, which bulked out both meat dishes and sweet dishes. No one was fat because the men worked 5.5 hard days on the land and the women had very physical housework to do; even the laundry was a marathon task and in my Mum's childhood home they didn't even have running water, it had to be pumped up and carried in from the yard. The kids were out of the house at school or at play; my Grandma always said "Yer neither sugar nor salt!" if a kid would complain about a little rain. Nobody at our kind of income could come within a sniff of car ownership and people biked or walked everywhere apart from the odd charabanc to the coast in the summer. And yes, chickens were expensive and a rare treat, usually an old hen gone off-lay or a surplus cockerel.
I've seen breakdowns of food as the proprtion of the household budget and it was much higher than it is now but, the critical fact is that the housing costs were a lot lower by proportion.
I work for 5 months a year just to pay the rent on a very basic council flat, which is £200 pcm less than identical flats in the same block rent for in the private sector. Add in the council tax taking another month's take home out of every year's income. Of course, not being able to qualify for a mortgage on grounds of being too poor means that I can't pay one down and hope for some golden years at the end with only maintenance costs to find.
The people I really feel sorry for are my younger colleagues in their twenties and thirties who are being bled white by private landlords so they work to pay the rent and can't save enough for a deposit (some of them are working a 2nd job at evenings and weekends to hold it all together as it is and they are mostly in shared homes).
One of them, a bloke in his twenties, was renting a house with a pal for £600 pcm. The landlord came around by appointment to do an inspection, pronounced himself very satisfied with how they were looking after the place, then announced he was giving them notice that he was upping the rent to £750 pcm.
:mad: The guy who told me this said he'd badgered the landlord as to exactly how much he was paying to BUY the house and it was £150 pcm. Landlord couldn't find an decent answer when the young guy asked why he couldn't be satisfied with a £450 mark up each month* .The tenant got a sheet of paper and wrote out his Notice to Quit there and then, he was so disgusted by the grasping so-and-so. He's now renting elsewhere with his girlfriend.Unless housing costs as a proportion of income reduce dramatically to former levels, which I can't see happening, increases in food and fuel are going to have dramatic effects on the ability of a lot of people on modest-to-low incomes to keep themselves together. If we have to spend more on the food, there'll be a lot of other things/ services/ experiences which can't be purchased instead. The knock-on effects on the wider economy haven't been seen yet; imagine the impact on tax revenue, fuel selling, mechanics etc if even 5% of present motorists are priced out of car ownership, as just one example.
Oh well, let's gird our loins. I am about to hoik a whoopsied chicken out of the freezer to defrost for roasting tomorrow and then it'll be stretched to chicken soup and chicken pie and feed me all next week. Plus I have visited the Magic Greengrocer and made out like a bandit; my £2 got; strawbs (2 punnets), a melon, a bag of tangerines, a whole cucumber and a bag of onions. Fruit salad here we come (minus onions of course!:o) And possibly minus the cue.
* I use the term mark up rather than profit because I know that there are costs attendant on supplying property for rent, although I believe they can be deducted against tax.
EDIT Kittie, thanks for the timely reminder re blight risk; I'd forgotten that possibility having still mentally been stuck in a drought. Will have to keep a very close eye on the tatties. Good luck all us gardeners, we'll need it!Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
John Ruskin
Veni, vidi, eradici
(I came, I saw, I kondo'd)
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It's winter here - don't think we'll get summer now, and if we do its too late for the garden. Have stopped sulking about my 2 inch tomato plants after re-reading "garden in the hills" which reminded me that we have years like this where the veggies don't do anything, and half my perennials don't show. Time to turn my attention to winter veg I think.
Has anyone made window quilts???? I'd like some for the bottom half of our bay windows - too chilly to sit in winter without a rug, but the views over the bay are lovely. My main concern is them getting damp, we're single glazed - suspect i'd need to turn them each day to keep them aired??0 -
:mad: The guy who told me this said he'd badgered the landlord as to exactly how much he was paying to BUY the house and it was £150 pcm. Landlord couldn't find an decent answer when the young guy asked why he couldn't be satisfied with a £450 mark up each month* .The tenant got a sheet of paper and wrote out his Notice to Quit there and then, he was so disgusted by the grasping so-and-so. He's now renting elsewhere with his girlfriend.
* I use the term mark up rather than profit because I know that there are costs attendant on supplying property for rent, although I believe they can be deducted against tax.
rather depressingly, that mark up will be the deposit on the next property. And the next...‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’ David Lynch.
"It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.” David Lynch.0 -
short_bird wrote: »rather depressingly, that mark up will be the deposit on the next property. And the next...
I know; we have slummy landlords in this city who have empires of 100+ former council homes. They're vile.
Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
John Ruskin
Veni, vidi, eradici
(I came, I saw, I kondo'd)
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Unless housing costs as a proportion of income reduce dramatically to former levels, which I can't see happening, increases in food and fuel are going to have dramatic effects on the ability of a lot of people on modest-to-low incomes to keep themselves together. If we have to spend more on the food, there'll be a lot of other things/ services/ experiences which can't be purchased instead. The knock-on effects on the wider economy haven't been seen yet; imagine the impact on tax revenue, fuel selling, mechanics etc if even 5% of present motorists are priced out of car ownership, as just one example.
You're so right GQ. I don't get how our so-called Chancellor doesn't seem to understand what an economy is, ie. people work and earn money which they then use to buy goods and services which other people work to make/provide so that they then can buy goods/services which other people work to make/provide etc.etc.etc... and all paying tax of course. Do the powers that be not understand that if people lose their jobs or take cuts in income then the whole thing grinds to a halt?0
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