Preparedness for when

Perplexed_Pineapple

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

Handy for treating piles too.

Too much information BB, too much information :eek:

ragz_2

GreyQueen wrote: »

Nearly 50 years ago when I was a sproglette, Dad earned £16 a week as a builder's labourer. Our rent was £1 a week. These were pre-decimal pounds, but even then, £1 was cheap. Our neighbours in the other cottages on the row thought it was extortionate as they were paying half that in rent (10 shillings).

I can earn, net, in TWO HOURS what my father earned in a WEEK when I was an infant. But my rent for a tiny council flat is £80 a week. So I have to sell 10 hours' labour to pay a rent on a much smaller, gardenless living space. Dad sold 47 hours' labour a week for his £16 so he took 2.94 hours to earn the rent every week.

If money had smiliar spending power, shouldn't I be able to rent something simiar for about £24 a week? A two bedroom, one attic cottage with a large garden.

They're not real pounds. Your money in savings is depreciating as we speak.

So if your dad's rent was so little of his income, where did the rest go? I assume your mum didn't work as well, but was food a lot more expensive then, relatively speaking? I know we spend nearly twice as much on rent as we do on food now, also fuel and bills etc.
The proportions must have changed dramatically?

melanzana

Hello all, this is one of the best threads on MSE. I am a lurker, because I am sometimes in awe of all your capabilities!

The thread and contributions are like a comfort blanket, knowing you have all the essential items, and food, and can hunker down if necessary. I think we are really made for survival, and enjoy the challenge of preparing for that, should things happen. It really is very comforting.

Anyhow.. I live in Ireland at the mo. fab place. People are mad as frogs sometimes, but in a really good way. Neighbours really look out for you and all the rest.

And the elderly are looked after really well by the State. Really well. I like that. And no one complains. It is the right thing to do.

I live a simple life now. Didn't always! And do you know what...it is so much nicer to enjoy the simple pleasures, family, friends, the odd blow out of food and dare I say it wine! ( they prefer Guinness here and thats good too).

I have really learned that I don't need anything more now. No wants, just needs, if you get me.

Just replace things that are beyond redemption.

Decorate when I think it's desperate enough to need it. And so on.

Materialism is gone beyond a joke.

I'm not saying I dont enjoy the pleasures of life, course I do, but in a much more sensible way now.

So thanks so much for making me realise all this.

And I have a few wind up torches, candles, and cans of food stashed away.

and many many bottles of vino under the bed. Otherwise how would I explain that the wine was a prepper thing! There would be far too many questions there!

Enjoy this thread a lot. Thanks.

I

DawnW

ragz wrote: »

So if your dad's rent was so little of his income, where did the rest go? I assume your mum didn't work as well, but was food a lot more expensive then, relatively speaking? I know we spend nearly twice as much on rent as we do on food now, also fuel and bills etc.
The proportions must have changed dramatically?

I was only a child 50 years ago, but thinking back even 40 odd years when I first got married, clothing and any kind of consumer goods, electricals etc were proportionally much more expensive than now. And some foods also.

When I was a child at home, things that we take for granted now we just didn't have. Washing was done in the sink, with water heated up in an outside boiler that Mum used to light a stick fire underneath. She used to boil up nappies and white cotton bedding in that as well. There were washing machines, but not that we could afford. No telly either in my early childhood. That may be why I hardly ever watch the thing now :rotfl:Likewise, no cars or holidays, though the buses were better, even in our little village, and a train trip to the coast about 12 miles away was a great treat.

People, certainly working class ones, had much less - carpets for example were very expensive. My parents had a square of linoleum covering an area in the centre of the room, with stained floorboards on the uncovered area. The only 'carpet' was a rug in front of the fire. There was no central heating (or not for the likes of us) but just a fire in the front room. I remember not having a bathroom, just a tin bath used once a week, a sink with a cold tap and an outside loo in our council home. Gradually these things arrived and we took them for granted after a while.

We didn't consider ourselves poor. We were better off than many, always had clean, tidy clothes, good shoes and enough to eat - it was just normal.

COOLTRIKERCHICK

morning all

When we eventually move into our little smallholding, ( in the middle of a major restoration, doing it VERY slowly, when we can manage to save a few pennies) One of the rooms, I want to turn into a larder/stock room, I like the look of some of the ways that peeps store their stuff on American preppers, but I would go as extreme as them.. so instead of everything spread around in different cupboards, or different parts of the house, it will all be in one room..

mardatha

Hi Melanzana - my mum was from Galway and I've had a few good holidays in the west of Ireland... it's the one place I feel at home outside of Scotland
I grew up in the 50s and my mum did the washing in a gas-fueled boiler in the kitchen, but we had telly and carpets and a holiday twice a year, a few days away at Easter and a week in summer. Maybe we had more because I was an only one? But my mum wasn't a prepper- she used to keep hardly any food in the house and just go to the shops daily.

GreyQueen

ragz wrote: »

So if your dad's rent was so little of his income, where did the rest go? I assume your mum didn't work as well, but was food a lot more expensive then, relatively speaking? I know we spend nearly twice as much on rent as we do on food now, also fuel and bills etc.
The proportions must have changed dramatically?

Dad's remaining £15 (£11 in winter when the days were shorter - outside labourer remember) went to keep Mum as a SAHM from when she was 7 months pregnant with me, and my brother is barely two years younger than me, so there were four to feed. Apart from a bit of fruit and tattie picking, Mum didn't do paid work outside the home until we were 7 and 9.

Food was the biggest part of the budget, and coal was a major expense. Coal for the fire for the fireplace in the living room. Coal was so expensive that it had to be bought winter and summer as if you left it all to the winter quarter, you'd never be able to aford it.

It was an estate cottage but don't imagine an upstairs-downstairs situation as the big house and the aristocratic family was long gone and the estate was owned by an insurance company - household name at the time, long defunct.

Clothes and shoes were a lot more expensive proportionate to income than they are now, and such things as charity shops and boot fairs didn't exist. There was the occasional jumble sale but with everyone so much poorer, and production still picking itself up after the war, secondhand stuff was absolute dross.

We didn't have our own transport other than a small motorbike which was unreliable. Dad used to bike 2-3 miles to a main road, chain the pushbike up for the day to a fence, get picked up by the builder's van and taken to sites to work, then the same in reverse at day's end.

We didn't own carpets until I was nearly in secondary school, and were so hard up that we had to bring scrippy-scrappy bits of lino from the old house and from Grandma's house (she passed 12 months before my parents moved to the place they still live now).

Like Dawn, I can recall the stained floorboards and the little bit of lino or a rug in the middle. In the council house living room it was Marley tiles, though.

We went everywhere as a family on pushbikes and just didn't have holidays until we were about 10 and 12, it was a daytrip to the seaside on a coach once or twice a summer. In our early teens we were taken to the Lakes and Snowdonia and once to Scotland. Folks got a phone after I left home at 16, I went abroad for the first time in my early twenties and was never on a plane until my early thirties.

It was a very plain-living but healthy and loving home and I'm glad of a sound grounding in what's important and what's not.

Goldiegirl

GreyQueen, your recollections seem very similar to my own.

We never had a car - my dad used to cycle at least 10 miles to work and back again each night, and was doing that well into his 40's, when he invested in a small moped.

We had a tin bath and outside loo until about 1973, before we finally had some alterations done and the luxury of an inside loo. No central heating either.

But I certainly didn't feel deprived. In fact as an only child I was considered to be very fortunate in that I tended to get more toys for Christmas and didn't wear hand me down clothes from older siblings.

Holidays were a week away in somewhere like Margate. Although I live in Kent now, I grew up in Essex, and the trip to Margate seemed epic. My poor dad lugging two suitcases (actually by today's standards the suitcases were very small) down to the station, a train to Tilbury Riverside, the Tilbury ferry to Gravesend, on the train to Margate, and then the excitement and luxury of a taxi to our 'digs'.

As a child, I could never have for seen the travelling that I'd do and the life I now have. My husband and I have always worked hard to achieve what we have. But as he's from a similar background too, we never ever take for granted our current life - we remember our roots.

GreyQueen

Yeah, I think a lot of people in their twenties are pretty spoiled but don't actually appreciate the fact.

Mum was also a carer for her elderly fosterparents and nursed them both thru terminal cancer by the time she was 28, first Grandad and then Grandma. We had Grandma at home with us for the last few years and one of my earliest memories is finding her dying..........:(

Gotta go to the t'office now, laters, GQ xx

[Deleted User]

Hello MELANZANA welcome to the thread, it's so nice to have new folks to chat with and new folks bring new perspectives and ideas with them, so don't just lurk pet, join in it's such a useful place to be, Cheers Lyn xxx.