when you reach breaking point

OrkneyStar

mardatha wrote: »

Do Jobcentres not let you sign on by post if you live a long way out? They used to up here but not sure if that still applies.

I signed on for about 2 weeks in 2005, I did it by phone (live in Orkney and main Job Centre approx 13 miles away).

westcoastscot

OrkneyStar wrote: »

I signed on for about 2 weeks in 2005, I did it by phone (live in Orkney and main Job Centre approx 13 miles away).

From here you sign on by phone/mail, but have a 70 mile round trip each fortnight to meet with the jobsupport folks - they pay bus fares but nothing towards the hours hanging around waiting for the bus back down the road.

We're pretty much at our financial limit and its a huge worry. I always used to say "so long as I have my health we'll be fine" but now I don't - like others I have a degenerative illness. I plan to continue working for as long as I can. I also generate a little income working from home but do fear greatly for my future. Not sure what else we can do but just hang on.

I do know we're more fortunate than a lot of the people I meet through work, but it's getting harder to see.

WCS

COOLTRIKERCHICK

rhiwfield wrote: »

CTC, dont blame anyone for being worried in the current economic climate!!

Still not sure whether you can conjure up a game changer, like selling an ASDA "staff property" and jumping head first into the smallholding

But I'm deffo on the list for the pork!

Flip it it sound i was blaming you???:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek: NOnoNO.. i mean even though I do panic, I am trying to look atthings from a different Angle... and most of the time where there is a problem, there IS a solution, its just matter of finding/solving it...

Piggies will be arriving in 2 weeks ( going to market on the first friday of the month) so plenty of piggy pics for the daydream thread:D

As for the @sda staff property by all accounts they are only offering 22 hour contracts... ( will carry on this conversation on the other forum)

I have been telling hubby I want more candles, said I wanted to be more romantic:D, but its really to save a bit of leccie;) ( we can normally get very cheap candles through via work

monnagran

I don't know if it will comfort anybody but I was born before the war and I've seen all this before. I've lived through the war and the years of austerity and draconian rationing afterwards, The fifties when things started to get a little easier BUT everyone was terrified of nuclear war. I remember the WVS running a 1 in 4 scheme where they set out to train 1 woman in 4 how to survive in the case of a nuclear bomb being dropped. I was at college at the time and we were selected for training.
I remember how to build a 'refuge' room for the family, how to boil a kettle on a flowerpot upturned over a candle, all sorts of useful things (which I've since forgotten). The sixties were OKish but of course people's expectations were much lower then. I had been married 2 years before we achieved our first (second hand) fridge and I spent several years borrowing my MIL's vacuum once a week to clean the house. There were the chaotic 70's when inflation went through the roof and you went round the supermarket trying to get ahead of the assistant who was zapping the new higher prices on goods. That decade also saw the sudden shortages but you never knew what they were going to be before they happened, so no chance of stocking up in preparation - sugar disappeared for a while, also toilet rolls( very inconvenient - sorry). Then we plunged into the eighties with the electricity cuts and the 3 day week etc. The 90's saw us in recession again and here we are in the twenty first century having to deal with the fall out of fiscal mismanagement on a global scale over the last dozen or so years.

My point is that every generation seems to have something very difficult to cope with but we have done it all before and we are quite capable of doing it again. The difference being this time that, as I said before, people's expectations are that much higher these days and younger generations have had no experience in making do and mending and actually going without the things they are used to. No wonder there is general panic. But they will learn and they will cope and we will survive.

It's not nice to be cold - The dreadful winters of 1947 &1962/3 were like nothing we've seen since, and we didn't have central heating, we didn't even have enough fuel to light fires, we didn't have electric blankets or cosy duvets or double glazing or warm clothes, especially in '47. Then we didn't even have enough food so we were often hungry as well as cold. But I at least am here to tell the tale. Whatever happens this coming year I feel sure that we will survive it and perhaps we will appreciate more what we do have.

Last Sunday I met a man who had nothing, and I mean nothing except the clothes he stood up in. Where to start? A hot meal, a sleeping bag, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap and a couple of disposable razors, a carrier bag of food, a hug and a listening ear. You would have thought I had given him the crown jewels. "I am now a rich man", he said.

I went home and cried.

Things are looking to be difficult and not very pleasant but we have each other and whatever happens we have far, far more than previous generations have had. I will not depair.

PHEW!

adelight

monnagran i loved your post, it does make me hopeful but it doesn't make me feel better now iykwim. I am learning basic skills like that, it's actually good fun too
The difference between then and now is also space. Everyone wants a giant house (what's wrong with kids sharing rooms and... one bathroom?!!) and many people are simply greedy and the ground is running out. More and more houses are privately rented with limitless rents. It's naive of me but I don't understand why people can't just share, why they need their own everything. Those who can grab are grabbing everything for their family's future. I used to be happy for people who could get piggies, live in villages etc but now I start to get jealous too because I don't have that and I don't think I ever will I have mentioned a few times on here that I'm currently leaning towards living in a caravan! To put it into context I do actually have a job and am an "in demand" graduate (they exist!) but I am still terrified of the next five years!

GreyQueen

Bless you for helping that man, monnagran. And here, here to all of the above. My childhood homes were pretty spartan inc being born (quite literally) in a cottage with no bathroom, bucket privvy outside, one cold tap in the kitchen. This was the Swinging Sixties not the dark ages btw.:p Now I hear people bitc.hing and whining and figuring they should have a whole new bathroom suite because the tub and the basin don't match. Ye gods and little fishes, would that I had so little to worry about.

Parents also grew up in homes with no bathrooms, no running water. Great-grands raised 11 in a home where water for general stuff was from a pond and potable water was brought in by gread-grandad in terracotta jars in a pony and cart and strained thru several layers of muslin to make it drinkable.

Funnily enough, my current relatives are not living a brace of years longer than our ancestors 400 years ago.

People had very low expectations and they were mostly met. Hard work was all they knew, my Nan (89) says of her parents. Her late OH, my Grandad, one of the 11 children, recalled his old Mum sitting by the fire of an evening darning sock after sock after sock. Children sent out to work at 14, often in other parts of the country. And they were expected to send money home to help their parents raise their younger siblings, too.

As well as living long and mostly healthy lives, they were very proud people and kept to very high standards of behaviour. You can see it in the photographs. Great-grandad's idea of dressing-down was to roll his shirtsleeves to the elbow. He was killed in a workplace accident aged 69 just before WW2.

Shudder to think what they would have made of the 21st century.......... we're spoiled and silly by comparison and a lot of people are going to be in for a helluva shock when things go back to harder times. I know my Nan worries about her great-grandchildren (18 and 8 respectively). They're both bright and able from stable families but their parents have had it tougher than their own parents did and it looks like it will be tougher still for them.

My own parents have often remarked that this habit of young people moving out of their parental home and living independantly before marriage was unthinkable in their young days (late fifties/early sixties). You could always get jobs back then but the pay was appalling. As Rhiw observed, you will be getting more and more multi-generational families under one roof as people struggle to make ends meet.

We live in interesting times, as the old Chinese curse apparently has it.

Popperwell

Again great well thought out posts...there have been bad times before and the truth is we have lived through difficult times. We seem to go three steps forward and one step back so we are still improving but slowly. As for priorities that's another matter, those on these boards I think do "Get it!" Others are in for a shock and will learn, others will still miss the point.

Butterfly_Brain

Thanks for the information PipneyJane x

lostinrates

GreyQueen wrote: »

Bless you for helping that man, monnagran. And here, here to all of the above. My childhood homes were pretty spartan inc being born (quite literally) in a cottage with no bathroom, bucket privvy outside, one cold tap in the kitchen. This was the Swinging Sixties not the dark ages btw.:p Now I hear people bitc.hing and whining and figuring they should have a whole new bathroom suite because the tub and the basin don't match. Ye gods and little fishes, would that I had so little to worry about.

Parents also grew up in homes with no bathrooms, no running water. Great-grands raised 11 in a home where water for general stuff was from a pond and potable water was brought in by gread-grandad in terracotta jars in a pony and cart and strained thru several layers of muslin to make it drinkable.

Funnily enough, my current relatives are not living a brace of years longer than our ancestors 400 years ago.

People had very low expectations and they were mostly met. Hard work was all they knew, my Nan (89) says of her parents. Her late OH, my Grandad, one of the 11 children, recalled his old Mum sitting by the fire of an evening darning sock after sock after sock. Children sent out to work at 14, often in other parts of the country. And they were expected to send money home to help their parents raise their younger siblings, too.

As well as living long and mostly healthy lives, they were very proud people and kept to very high standards of behaviour. You can see it in the photographs. Great-grandad's idea of dressing-down was to roll his shirtsleeves to the elbow. He was killed in a workplace accident aged 69 just before WW2.

Shudder to think what they would have made of the 21st century.......... we're spoiled and silly by comparison and a lot of people are going to be in for a helluva shock when things go back to harder times. I know my Nan worries about her great-grandchildren (18 and 8 respectively). They're both bright and able from stable families but their parents have had it tougher than their own parents did and it looks like it will be tougher still for them.

My own parents have often remarked that this habit of young people moving out of their parental home and living independantly before marriage was unthinkable in their young days (late fifties/early sixties). You could always get jobs back then but the pay was appalling. As Rhiw observed, you will be getting more and more multi-generational families under one roof as people struggle to make ends meet.

We live in interesting times, as the old Chinese curse apparently has it.

My parents both moved out of home and before marriage, as did many. Some, like my dad, started in work provided accomodation....not uncommon for say, nurses and police men for example. My mother was different, she had been married (but
Ived independantly before that too) before arriving in uk and was a single mum here.

My parents both say that while in some ways things were harder, in other ways they were easier. E.g transport costs. Not only that but my dad parked the car he was proud of having bough on the street in central london for free, where on a normal salary he had been able to buy a flat.


There is nothing wrong with doing works you can afford, after all, if we don't have new bathrooms and heating etc an awful lot of plumbers families will be in toruble.

When we bought the Wreck we could feel the weight of expectation from friends family and our new neighbourhood to see what we were going to do, and i think it was a bit of an anticlimax (people were very interested in the Wreck locally because though its not grand its been an important part of quite a lot of local people's lives). After two years, exactly, we have FINALLY started work (with a wonderul builder whose wife i have been talking to for tears on here). And we can just scraping together do......three rooms, including moving the outdoor toilet inside and putting heating in, but not including any decorative finishes, just getting the structure repaired, the layout down. When the builders move out we might get some concrete paint to paint the concrete floors, because we cannot afford to finish them yet.

We wanted to buy and use everything british, and local, but ideals get pushed when bugets are tight. Local builders were......ridiculous. Our lovely builder, who is worth three times his weight in gold, comes from many, many miles away with his team and they camp in the area over night and return to their families at weekends. Our joiner Is local, but SO expensive.

GreyQueen

Moving out before marriage wasn't done by my parents' generation as we are working-class; labourers and farmworkers and shopworkers. By the time my parents were young, the custom of going away "into (domestic) service" which was the norm for girls in families like ours had died the death. Prior to WW2, all the girls went into service in my family, often in London where they tended to meet the hubbies-to-be.

My Nan was called back from London by her Mum where she was in service from 14-16, just as WW2 broke out. As she changed buses on the last stage of the long journey back to her village, the official broadcast of the declaration of war came out.

Mum was very nearly a WREN but decided not to go for it at the last minute (she passed all the interviews etc and they wanted her) as the only things she would have been doing consituted "skivvying in uniform" as she put it and she wasn't prepared to sign up for that.

I stand by my remark as true for people like my family whose employment didn't offer accomodation and whose wages were far too low to run to even a rented room in shared accomodation. Apart from people who joined the Forces, none of my parents' peers lived away from their parents prior to marriage.