It was getting tough in 2006 and the workhouse still threatens us in 2011

PIGSMAYFLY

Evening all I want to get things off of my chest if I may.

I have had a bad year this year (well my life hasn't been all that good either but thats another subject) Nothing and I mean NOTHING has really gone right for me and LO and to top it all off we have been house bound during the last few days holiday I have left from from work. (We live in very bad part of London I have witnessed looting from my window and gangs heading past en masse past my home plus I work in a store where i travel through the rough parts of town on a bus to get to work where not much of the high street is left)

The point is I am sick to the back teeth of all this crap happening on my doorstep and I so badly want to move. I have few true friends and family to hang around for so i wanna move asap. I guess what I am saying is what kind of things do you think I could do to save money/make money asap. Sorry to dampen the mood

Just after finishing typing this a fight kicked off outside waking LO. Oh give me strength! Hope everyone is safe and well x

ginnyknit

Well pigsmight fly, we can't help you move tomorrow but if you follow lots of the advice on here like I did very soon there will be light at the end of the tunnel. Start planning for winter now (well tomorrow its late now) stocking up to save you time money and energy, cut back where you can. make your home draughtproof and buy lots of cheap fleecy blankets to line curtains and wrap you both up in.

You are not dampening the mood, its awful out there and Im so sorry you are in the middle of it, I hope you and LO are safe. We are here for support and I have recieved it lots of times and felt much better just knowing that someone is there hugs ginny

bluebag

PIGSMAYFLY wrote: »

Evening all I want to get things off of my chest if I may.

I have had a bad year this year (well my life hasn't been all that good either but thats another subject) Nothing and I mean NOTHING has really gone right for me and LO and to top it all off we have been house bound during the last few days holiday I have left from from work. (We live in very bad part of London I have witnessed looting from my window and gangs heading past en masse past my home plus I work in a store where i travel through the rough parts of town on a bus to get to work where not much of the high street is left)

The point is I am sick to the back teeth of all this crap happening on my doorstep and I so badly want to move. I have few true friends and family to hang around for so i wanna move asap. I guess what I am saying is what kind of things do you think I could do to save money/make money asap. Sorry to dampen the mood

Just after finishing typing this a fight kicked off outside waking LO. Oh give me strength! Hope everyone is safe and well x

Oh do I kmow how you feel, I hope every day I win the lottery so I could just move, that's all I would want, just a nice normal street.

I am a bit old to try and save up to move now,I am still trying though, 'every little helps' and maybe one day I'll get there!

In the meantime I just try to keep my little family warm, safe and things as pleasant as possible within what I am able to do. I find it helpful to have a few short cheap breaks away from the 'whacky shack' as I call it. Makes saving to move a bit harder, but keeps me sane.

Keep on keeping on, it's all I can do. I try to be cheerful, because if I don't, I find I sink. Take care and remember you're not alone.

GreyQueen

Goodness, is it just in my part of the forest, or has autumn arrived elsewhere, too?

Last night, about dusk, the weather suddenly got all kicky with an autumnal-type gale. The trees are starting to drop leaves and it feels to me like mid-late September not early-mid August.

That got me to thinking about the past few seasons. We're mostly in different parts of the UK, from the top of Scotland to the bottom of England, from Ireland & Wales to the eastern counties, but the weather I've been experiencing for the past 12 months has seemed a bit "previous" for the season, by about 6-8 weeks.

Such as the viciously-cold snap at the beginning of Dec 2010; we don't normally get such cold weather full-stop, and if we do, it's be in Jan-Feb. Then summer drought started in February and all the plants were advanced just in time to be burned by mid-May frosts. Summer seems to have been and gone and now autumn is here and it's decidedly grey and chilly.

I'd be interested to hear others' experiences. I'm going to have to change my gardening strategies slightly, as well as food storage, and must get a wriggle on with things like treating my wooden allotment shed, which I'd normally do Sept-Oct time when the gardening has slowed down somewhat.

Re plums; I see trees side-by-side which have small plum-shaped plums which are plain scarlet on one tree and plain deep yellow on another. Are these the same kind? They taste the same; just like regular plums.

LOL at Mardatha's hens in the rain; there's an old country saying which I've heard about describing a human being as a "wet hen"; they do manage to look both peeved and pitiful at the same time, don't they? Now that I've realised that their pedicures are being ruined I shall be much more sympathetic.........:rotfl:

I really must get up to the lottie after work to get rid of the rotables and harvest some more runner beans. I caught up with the runners 3 days ago and have given some to a neighbour, but I expect there will be another helping ready. And those turk's turban squash (where-oh-where are my butternut squash sob sob) need to be kept an eye on as they are decidedly uppity.

I hope everyone has a good day and that those in the wet bits manage to stave off imminent trench-foot.

ceridwen

kittie wrote: »

In 1958, I was 10 and had 4 younger siblings. My dad worked all the hours he could, day and evening and we were poor. Someone was taking a bottle of milk off our doorstep every day until the day after they took the one that my mum had laced with cascara, a strong laxative. It worked and the THIEF got the message loud and clear

There you go - job done. No innocent parties hurt and end of problem...result.

I think many of us will have been on the receiving end of theft - and then we know, in practice, what its like and how upsetting it is.

The first (yes I DID say "first":() time a break-in happened to me my first reaction (as a pretty dyed in the wool "liberal" thinker at that point) was sheer astonishment. The astonishment was because I honestly (in my naivety - well in my defence I WAS young at the time) thought that thieves only stole from rich people or at least the obviously fairly wealthy. It had simply never occurred to me that someone would steal from someone as poor as myself - because I obviously didnt have enough (never mind surplus). The accommodation I was living in was such that no-one/but no-one would have lived there by choice. It was obviously such low standard accommodation that anyone living there was only doing so because they were so poor. The thief clearly didnt care - they broke in anyway. That was sure one BIG wake-up call. I've had other thefts since - so it wasnt even a one-off...theres clearly a lot of them out there:(:(.

I've also had jewellery (of a type that might well have sentimental value) stolen when I lost it in the street. I knew pretty much exactly where I had lost that jewellery and left a reasonable period of time and then went and asked for it back at the local police station. Only - it HADNT been handed in. The person who found it had stolen it. It was worth a little bit - but not that much - and the thieves must have known it might have sentimental value - but didnt give a darn about that.

**************************

Re the foragers code - I've read it "set down in stone" in more than one book I have on this and certainly usually been told it by professional foragers. I think - over the years - it has been more "set down in stone" because of two factors that wouldnt have affected our ancestors:

- theres just so many more of us (I've had more than one Professional forager and book saying "You cant have 60 million people foraging". Part of the reason why Britain is WAY WAY over sustainable population level is because there simply isnt enough wild food around for us all to take what we please - even though our ancestors probably were able to in the less-populated country they lived in....). My oldest foraging books dont mention it - but the modern ones ALL do.

- the problem has been compounded by the fact that WAY more of our countryside is no longer available to forage in (ie because its been built on).

Between the two factors there is a lot less food and a lot more people wanting it. I was a forager myself (self-taught) years before it became fashionable and am far from happy that its now become so fashionable. So "fashion" is another thing that is making it difficult.

Jolaaled

I know a lot of us are thinking about canning/bottling techniques at this busy harvest time (thanks for your inspiration, Kittie!).

I found this clip on Youtube, to be really helpful as it's quite detailed and shows how simple it can be.

HTH

Red_Doe

I'd be interested to hear others' experiences. I'm going to have to change my gardening strategies slightly, as well as food storage, and must get a wriggle on with things like treating my wooden allotment shed, which I'd normally do Sept-Oct time when the gardening has slowed down somewhat.

I'm at the very north tip of Scotland, near Cape Wrath. The weather has just become, over the past decade, 'unreliable', the best word I can think of to fit.
Seasons seem shorter and jumbled and to be honest, where I am, there's not much difference now between summer and early winter. A mere handful of bright, sunny, warm days doesn't make a summer!
Most of the time we have prolonged wet, windy and colder than average summers, which badly affects growing. Winters are longer and more severe...last couple of winters temperatures regularly went below twenty degrees, thought I'd left the days of iced up windows indoors behind, but nope!
Winds are also depressingly more regular and damaging, we always get gales up here but they are often even more severe and more of them.
Apart from the obvious effect on veg growing...I was lucky to get anything from my garden this year...it has a pretty depressing effect on people's moods and folks seem that bit more down solely due to the weather...if you can't, at this time of year, look forward to a few sunny days or mildness, then might as well skip the next few months and drop straight into winter, get it over with quickly!
I don't put it down to Global Warming, but do believe it's Climate Change at work. I've always lived in the north and have seen it in action over decades. The weather is simply, no longer reliable.

3v3

GreyQueen wrote: »

Goodness, is it just in my part of the forest, or has autumn arrived elsewhere, too?

Last night, about dusk, the weather suddenly got all kicky with an autumnal-type gale. The trees are starting to drop leaves and it feels to me like mid-late September not early-mid August.

That got me to thinking about the past few seasons. We're mostly in different parts of the UK, from the top of Scotland to the bottom of England, from Ireland & Wales to the eastern counties, but the weather I've been experiencing for the past 12 months has seemed a bit "previous" for the season, by about 6-8 weeks.

Such as the viciously-cold snap at the beginning of Dec 2010; we don't normally get such cold weather full-stop, and if we do, it's be in Jan-Feb. Then summer drought started in February and all the plants were advanced just in time to be burned by mid-May frosts. Summer seems to have been and gone and now autumn is here and it's decidedly grey and chilly.

I'd be interested to hear others' experiences...

How interesting, I was having this very conversation IRL yesterday! (Mainly because I made the remark, "I can smell Autumn in the air", which I can, it has a definate smell to it, truly ).

I know the year I was born there were heavy snowfalls at the beginning of December (not unlike we experienced last December). Unfortunately, I was too young to recall how the rest of that year went

Not convinced it is terribly worrying though. I have a book (somewhere) of old country wisdom and as the weather in the UK has traditionally been variable and unpredictable, due to being caught between two different weather fronts, these snippets of old country wisdom were the way to determining what to do and when on the farm, e.g. "Oak before ash, we're in for a splash; ash before oak, we're in for a soak". And even then, the country wisdom wasn't infallable

I think it is Mother nature's way of reminding us not to take her for granted and to be more vigilant of her moodswings through using our senses to what is happening around us in garden/hedgerows.

Red_Doe

Clare, huge thanks for the link! My OH speaks fluent French so it won't be a prob for me, yay.

HariboJunkie

I'm pretty far North too and in the 10 years we've been here can say that the only predicable thing about the weather has been it's unpredictability.
The growing season has always been shorter here than in previous places we have lived and although we are supposed to have our own mild microclimate (warmed by the Gulf Stream :rotfl:)the prevailing weather is wet and windy regardless of the season.
The last 2 winters have been noticeably colder though, like Red Doe, minus 20 wasn't unusual at night.

Hoping for a let up in the downpours today to get some chanterelles picked and check how the hazelnuts are doing.