Preparedness for when

Frugalsod

mardatha wrote: »

It's a bit wild up here - we cancelled the shop lol - NO SWEETIES! this is serious SHTF stuff!!!

Don't Panic!

maryb

It seems inconceivable now that council property could be so substandard (it makes it clear in the article that some of those slums were council owned). Almost certainly though, some of it was due to councils not spending money on existing stock which was due for demolition and the tenants were promised it would be jam tomorrow when they were transferred to lovely new estates (miles from anywhere and with one bus an hour if lucky). Maybe life did get better for those tenants not too long after those photos. And I can remember legislation being passed round about that time to deal with private slum landlords (Rachman)

Interesting to read some of the comments - some who lived those conditions didn't pity themselves. It's easy to take a photo of a grubby child but things are not always quite as simple as that. One of those photos shows just such a grubby child but she is in a knitted cardigan and Clarks sandals.

I remember reading a Tree Grows In Brooklyn about growing up in poverty at the turn of the 20th century. The heroine Francie is supposed to take herself and her younger brother to get their mandatory vaccinations (their mother is at work) so that they can enrol in school. But they are having such a nice time playing in the dirt that she forgets the time and they don't have time to wash before going. The doctor and the nurse curl their lip at her and she burns with shame but turns round and tells him that they are not pigs.

GreyQueen

One thing I've always noticed about children is that even ones from very clean homes who are very well-looked after can default into grubby urchins at the drop of a hat.

My Nan was born in 1923, oldest of 6 in a poor village family. Like a lot of her generation, she doesn't reminisce about the olden days. People were very glad to forget about them, frankly.

She had seldom in her entire life expressed anger or even frustration, but she was moved to write to a local author and pull her up about some of the things she had written about families from their village, including Nan's own family. They were very poor but some of the things this woman had written were factually incorrect and even 70+ years later, Nan wasn't going to let what she felt were derogatory and shaming things go unchallenged.

People were very fiercely proud of their ability to hold it together against all the odds, to be clean and respectable. Most of us are far too young to remember the days before effective detergents, about how hard everything was to keep clean. Nan mentioned that kitchens were whitewashed yearly. Not just cleaned thoroughly, but whitewashed, so that you were clean and seen to be clean. Pride was critical. I have even heard of housewives in mining areas washing windows daily, so determined were they to keep up appearances.

It's easy to feel a bit superior, to feel that it's a pity people didn't have something better to do with their time than chasing dirt and disorder out of their homes, but self-respect, and the respect of your peers, is worth keeping.

I used to live in a squalid bedsit house and keeping everythng together inc the laundry, was difficult and time consuming on a minescule income. I managed to keep myself clean and tidy but it wasn't easy most of the time and took up a lot more of my time and resources than it does today, with my own bathroom and my own washing-machine.

Butterfly_Brain

fuddle wrote: »

Oh, oh now I may just be 35 but when I was 7 I had a blackboard rubber fly past my head and saw a lad hit across the hand with a PE plimsole. It must have died out after that year (1987) as I never saw the like again. Anyone know when officially it was outlawed?

The ECHR branded it a human rights issue and it was banned in 1987

Butterfly_Brain

My computer went phzzzzzzzt at the weekend It turns out it was the graphics card, what with that and the internet adaptor I have not been on for a few days. Anyhow at least DS fixed it for me with a spare graphics card that we had in the house, my computer is a real Frankenstein, cobbled together with salvaged parts from other computers, but it works and that is the main thing

mardatha

I knew people who lived in slum clearance like that and were offered new housing but kept refusing it. They had a choice.

fuddle

So I wonder what it is that makes a person choose whether they want to continue where their parents left off and strive to make their way with what they have, themselves, or opt for the easy come easy go attitude and enjoy aspects of having the Nanny State.

My own mam's upbring was in the bosom of her mam, a housewife of a miner. I would love to know what it was that made my mam choose to live her life and bring her family up to be consumers/service users that sought debt to strive easily and comfortably? Maybe my mam rebelled her childhood?

If that's so, what is it that makes people of my mam's generation (a lot of you I expect) to embrace the strategies/way of life and not rebel against it?

[Deleted User]

I know for me it was the fact that my Mum embraced the whole throwaway, instant frozen food, let someone else do it for you, buy a plastic one, don't repair anything just get a new one philosophy wholeheartedly and completely and we hadn't got the income to sustain it so my brother and I had clothes held together with safety pins, holes in our shoes, and vesta curry for tea YUKKKKK! It was and is the antithesis of everything that I hold dear, she lived her whole life 'on tick' and in debt, No Thank You, OS living for me any day of the year!!!

GreyQueen

There have been concerted efforts for generations now to create unthinking consumers. If you ever get a chance, read Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders or any of his other books published in the 1950s. There's nothing accidental about the way we live, it was designed to be this way so our masters profit.

The question is, why have some of us escaped without the proper programming? In my own case, I was raised by a woman who was herself raised by foster-parents who were old enough to be her grandparents. So, if you like, their Edwardian country values were passed to her in the 1950s (they died in 1967 and 1970) so we have some old-fashionedness creeping in there.

Mostly, I think I have a mind which abhors waste, inefficiency, stupidity, balderdash, witless rah-rah-rah. One of the reasons I cannot bear to watch TV, so much of it is utter carp.

I'm affronted on so many levels when I go to the tip and see people pitching over perfectly usable items of furniture and housewares which could have easily been donated to charity, offered on Freecycle or sold.

A few years back, I was in a supermarket where something obscene stopped me in my tracks. I'm not talking a t*ts and **se red-top tabloid. Even an orgy on the tiled floor would have been less obscene than 250ml plastic bottles of water imported from Canada.

:mad: I could have screamed that I live in a world where the wonders of capitalism transport H20 from one wet part of the planet to another, using fossil fuels, to sell them in small throwaway bottles made of other fossil fuels.

[Deleted User]

OK if we're on about stupid practises how about sending our home caught prawns to Thailand to be cooked and packaged to be sent back to sell in UK supermarkets and the utter utter stupidity of sending cauliflowers from Penzance to Lincolnshire to be processed in a packing plant and then sending them back to the supermarket in Penzance to be sold to the locals AAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! Stop the world, I definately want to get off!!!!!