My first post

In November 2010 I started work on a book I entitled "The Art of Making Do for Those Who Have Never Had to Make Do". I wanted it to be a helpful guide on how to weather the coming hard times for so many  relativily affluent people who had never had to think too closely about taking a pay cut or losing their jobs and the physical,emotional and economic struggle that being. what I am going to bluntly call poor entails.  So many things written about saving money  are rubbish - when you have £5.00 to last the week buying virgin olive oil in bulk is not a priority and so many supposedly "cheap" meals when you cost them out properly adding in cooking time with its cost for gas or electricity, any extras like herbs or spices and how many people the meal will actually feed in the real world are not "cheap" at all. I wanted to write a sensible, ethical book that would provide real help and this blog was supposed to be the funny side, if you can call it that, of being skint  trying out all the ideas people tell you about how to save money i.e bake your own bread, keep chickens, dye your underwear.

However, one morning in the New year I turned on the BBC Breakfast News and there was an interview with a lady who had done everything to make the best of a hard time - the bread baking, turning off all the electric appliances on standby, even going so far as to take the bus to work rather than the train which was more expensive thereby putting another 2 hours on her travel time each day and she still couldn't make ends meet; a second person in this piece was in full time work but had to resort to hand outs from a charity which has food banks just like in America. I was stunned.

It was then that I knew what I wanted to write about was going to be more serious, radical and difficult than the brief I had started with, yes I am still going to try all the crazy ideas bread baking and underwear dying included but I want to look at what is really happening to us.

I live in 2011 at the start of the 21st century I do not want to regress 90 years to 1920, the start of the last century for my standard of living and I do not want to go back 70 years to 1940 for a role model of how to live.  We can do better than that, it doesn't have to be that way.

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