Preparedness for when

SpikyHedgehog

Frugalsod wrote: »

The reason is simple. These cuts are others spending so it is a zero sum game. So when they cut certain benefits the impact is greater than the cuts because other things cascade out of control. Imagine they cut family credit by £1000 what do you think will happen if they have no disposable income? Some will feed their kids but starve themselves. Then they will eventually need hospitalisation for malnutrition etc that costs a lot more than the initial welfare cuts. Longer term the welfare cuts harms educational attainment and the individuals long term income prospects. So they end up in a low productivity job with no prospects.

So the joined up thinking is nothing of the sort. It is all ideologically driven so they can cut taxes on businesses and incomes and then fund these services through fees. The plan is to completely unwind the welfare state and then blame anyone needing it for being !!!!less.

I've been in a position in the past where I struggled to afford the prescription charges for my inhalers, then as a single parent I had an exemption card, but now I earn too much for it. I will make jolly well sure I have my inhalers, because I'm (thanks to this thread) better at being prepared for things. But that's another thing that parents may have to make the choice between paying for - food or medicine.

COOLTRIKERCHICK

We are extremely lucky in Wales, as at the moment we get free prescriptions, I know of some people who have moved to Wales purely for this and health care reasons ..but with the ever increasing cut backs its making me think how long this will actually go on for??

I am extremely lucky ( touch wood) over the years I have only had the odd prescription for something minor, but of late I have had blood tests to monitor something,

But I must admit I didn't even think of the this until you mentioned it spikyheadghog..

This will lead to people trying to buy these prescribed drugs off the interweb and flip know what they will end up buying

moneyistooshorttomention

kittie wrote: »

not upset thriftwizard, frustrated I think at what has happened in our society in such a very short span of years. I am remembering when beeching cut all those railway lines and at a stroke, decimated public transport. We have 5 buses a day through my village and they only go 6 miles to one small town and another 8 miles to another very small town. There isn`t one decent supermarket between them, so car driving is essential. The bus starts at almost 9 and finishes at 5.30. Two miles away there used to be a station. Cycling is impossible because of the terrain and the main road traffic

The traffic is going to get very much worse in a short time, every migrant will want at least one car. Trouble is that I remember the old days when many people lived near to their place of work. So yes, it is frustration, esp now that they are talking of spending billions on HS2, just so that people who work in london can spread out and live in the midlands

Very true Kittie.

I don't remember back to pre-Beeching days - but he is one of those people one wishes hadn't been born - courtesy of the destruction wreaked by him. I've often been aware of trains I wish to catch and that used to be there once-upon-a-time to catch - but the trains have gone and the lines have been ripped up.

You don't really appreciate just how reliant on cars people have to be until you live in the country - and see what public transport is like there. In cities and larger towns - then its perfectly possible to be fine without. But - public transport badly needs restoring to what it once was and then improving on from there. Rural lives basically have to be spread out over several communities and even hourly buses are extremely frustrating - and some of the services rurally are much more infrequent than that. One can manage shopping, to a large extent, over the internet if need be (though there is a certain amount one wants to be able to do in person) - and gawdhelpus if the Internet went down ever. But public transport needs to improve a LOT for the purposes of social life - be it visiting relatives or having a Social Life as such etc. That is one of the things I find frustrating - basically no evening buses - as its pretty frequent to think "I'll go to that evening thing" - but if its more than walking distance away - then I have to know someone else from nearby that is going and has a car. End result being - the presence of decent bed and breakfast places is something I check for in any location just in case...

GreyQueen

In our neck of the woods, even pre-Beeching and with private cars a rarity, there was virtually nothing by way of public transport. Mum can recall as a teenager biking 3 miles to see the GP, being told she should be home in bed, and biking the 3 miles back. And feeling rotten.....:( In Dad's large village you could bike 6 miles and hook up with a branch railway line (since Beeching'd). Many villages now only have a once-a-week shoppers' bus which will deposit you in town for about 3 hours and that's it. Fat lot of good to a worker and hard to marry up with a appointments in many cases.

Next week, the parents will drive 15 miles from their town to Nan's village, collect her and bring her back to town for an appointment.

No one setting up this appointment gave a thought to how a 92 y.o. housebound lady in a village 15 miles away was going to get to the town.

And then they will drive her back again, and have a little visit, and then drive back to town. About one-third of each journey is on an A-grade road, the remainder is on tiny twisty tarmac'd cart tracks, where one car has to pull over to let another pass, and where 35 mph is a good average speed. All will be left exhausted by this running around and it will take the best part of the day to accomplish.

We have a societal expectation of very high mobility, fostered by easy access to cars. It wasn't always so, and even urbanites had realtively constrained lives with a narrow geographical orbit, sometimes only a few streets' worth of neighbourhood, which they rarely left. People also worked 5.5 days a week, many country housewives like my grand and great-grandparents' generation were contrained to the homestead by the needs of poultry-keeping, and other small livestock.

Outings would involve walking 2-3 miles, en famille, to another village to visit family on a Sunday afternoon, village social clubs, the church, the pub for mister (respectable women didn't go to pubs) or a charabanc trip somewhere once a year or so. Life was pretty damned static for a lot of people.

Mass transit requires either substantial user numbers or substantial subsidy to be viable. If neither of those things are forthcoming, it dwindles and dies.

I literally couldn't afford to live in a village a few miles out, or even one of the market towns within 10-20 miles of the city; the cost of transport in to work is prohibitive as it has to be a private motor vehicle in most cases. The buses/ trains just aren't there, or they are the tail end of intercity coach journeys and extremely expensive.

ivyleaf

kittie wrote: »

I had to come on here and say that I am reading a glorious book, so gentle and easy to read about how a family survived on so very little, how they foraged for food, how they cooked and cleaned. It is so nice to read. I have just bought the follow up book for 1p

It is `a field full of butterflies` by Rosemary Penfold

so much nostalgia of how things were for many

Just want to share, now going back to my recliner with the book

Thanks kittie, that sounds lovely to read and I've just bought it....far too easy to spend too much on Kindle books with "1 click" though

thriftwizard

We're also pretty badly served by public transport here. There are hourly buses down into the two centres of the conurbation, but both go all around the houses and take over an hour for a journey that takes 10 or 20 minutes by car; OK for infrequent shopping trips, but not if you're working a 10 hour day as OH does. (Or if you need to get to a sick or confused elderly relative in a hurry.) And a day rover costs over £5, and a season ticket doesn't work out a lot cheaper. Housing is very expensive here, as this is where people who work in the big banking & insurance houses down in the city live, so a number of people who work in our little town chose to live in the next town up the road, a small military/market town. Which was fine when there was a half-hourly 20-minute bus service, as there was when we first came, but then that got axed, despite always being packed, and there are now just 2 buses a day, at impossible hours even for schoolchildren, which are empty, so that service is now under threat. So suddenly a whole lot more people needed cars to get to their place of employment... and the only free parking in town is on little, narrow streets like ours, built before cars. Sometimes it's hard for me to drive out of the street where we live!

I know that our council, which has long been one of only a few who get no money at all from central Government, HAS to make cuts and simply has to choose where those cuts will hurt the least. But it seems so short-sighted to cut the transport links, which just pushes the costs elsewhere (NHS taxis, school taxis, elderly folk having to afford their own taxi to hospital) and makes it harder for people to be independent; it's pushed a fair proportion of the cost onto the people who can least afford it.

Rant over!

moneyistooshorttomention

We do indeed have a societal expectation of very high mobility these days GreyQueen - and public transport needs to be regarded as being as basic as the NHS and heavily subsidised if need be. I don't think we can "go backwards" and put that expectation into reverse and I don't think we should be expected to. At a very basic survival level - how indeed is an elderly person expected to get themselves to/from medical appointments that have been made some distance away (unless they can afford lengthy/expensive taxi fares)? - and I don't envy the NHS trying to deal with my Baby Boomer generation if we get put in that position in years to come (could almost feel sorry for them trying to pacify a generation that simply wont expect/tolerate that..:rotfl:).

I've watched any number of incidents recently where an elderly person has obviously come to rely on having a bus stop near them and bus drivers who are driving along these routes at noticeable intervals and am no longer surprised when a driver has clearly recognised Mr or Mrs X and knows exactly where they live and the bus stops right by some remote house (even though its definitely not a bus stop and Mr/Mrs X hasn't rung the bell for the bus to stop). This is clearly a useful/appreciated little service in some areas.

Many people have now moved away - one way or another - from their original communities - and, quite possibly, have a very different mindset to the more static generations of people earlier anyway. I have come to suspect there used to be a widespread "Grandma gives the Nod" outlook when it was widespread to have static communities and Grandma (or other "elderlies") laid down standards of community behaviour/told the community "history"/etc and that outlook is nearly dead now and the vast majority of us are "individualistic" in our outlooks and expect access to whatever facilities/etc we personally require. That cat cant be put back in the bag and us all revert to static lifestyles and "Grandma dictates".

Add that these days we have tv, the Internet, etc and can see wide range of lifestyles/etc/etc that there are and that will ensure we will keep on expecting access to whatever-is-necessary to have that (be it healthcare facilities, social facilities, etc).

GreyQueen

I see it as being there a misfit between the availabilty of work, the affordability of housing near that work and the distortions of the housing bubble we live in.

The market towns in this region are growing rapidly in terms of the number of residences but not in employment opportunties. Some people are not in the labour force, of course, mainly the retired cohort. But for those who are, it can be shocking to find that being 10-15 miles out on the main trunk road through the region, still precludes a reasonably frequent and affordable public transport option.

Let's form a mental exercise of Nan's appointment next Weds, disallowing her age and infirmity. Removing the names, we will number the towns A and B with the village on the main road between them. C is the market town where my parents live and where the apppointment will happen (A, B and C are all market towns, B is the largest by some margin, then C, then A).

It is possible to take a daily shoppers' bus from village to A, departing 9 am-ish. A is 17 miles from C. There is no bus connection at all between the two, and no railway. A is connected on a fast rail line to London, which has distorted its house prices into the stratosphere, but that doesn't help local commutes. You can get a bus (very infrequently) from village to Town B (15 miles), and then a bus from B to C ( 14 miles). On disembarking at the bus station, it's a stiff walk for nearly a mile up to the clinic. Taxis are available.

And reverse at the end of the day. It will take approx 12 hours to do this set of journeys, because of the infrequency of the services. I have spent a lot of time checking this out via the bus companies' websites. The prices are eye-watering.

If I wanted to go from Provincial City to the village to visit Nan, I could take a bus to Town A. To arrive early enough to hook up with the solitary daily shoppers' bus on its return journey, I would have to leave the city before 7 am. After disembarking at the village, I would have to commit to spending the night, riding back into A on the next day's shopper' bus and then waiting until the next bus heading citywards. This would mean a journey of just over 40 miles becomes a two-day undertaking with an overnight stay.:eek:

As a driver for a quarter of a century, albeit one who cannot afford to run a car, it would be cheaper for me to hire a small hatchback than travel around my region on public transport. I was looking at a inter-regional journey 3 years ago which involved a set of mahoosively inconvient changes (8 each way) carrying camping gear and traversing London on a mixture of undeground and overground trains late at night, and which would cost me £200 +.

I hired a small car from a local firm a few hundred yards up the road for less. Drove it with change from 6 hours inc rest breaks.

ivyleaf

GQ, I must tell you before I forget; the other night we were woken at 2.30 by a very drunk couple having a screaming row in the street on their way home.

OH and DS were grumbling ("Bliddy idiots!" etc). No point calling the police as they'd be ages.

I just thought "GQ puts up with far worse than this on a daily basis!", waited calmly until they decided to move on, and went back to sleep. So thanks for that

ETA In the early 60s I used to go with Mum by train from Plymouth to visit Nan in a tiny village in Somerset. Her village didn't have a station, but the one next door, slightly larger, did. We'd get off there and walk over the fields to Nan's.

We'd travel through so many tiny village stations, most with lovingly-tended flower beds, often with the name of the village picked out in white stones. I remember once we saw a Hunt in full cry, and another time a brief flash of brilliant blue - a kingfisher - as we passed a river. Treasured memories

mardatha

It's not often that I stick up for England but I think it's very unfair that you should have to pay for water and for medicines. I don't know how that came about - esp the water charges.
Re preps I think it's important to know about medicinal herbs, I have a Culpeper that's invaluable, full of interesting wee snippets.
This is D Day for me, going for a scan, might know the result on Wed when I'm back to the doc. I'm not worried. Yet lol. Very nervous in enclosed spaces - hell I can't even sit in the cinema nevermind an MRI scanner I can see the headlines now :
"Borders woman runs amok in hospital. Police warning Lock your doors and stay away from the windows"