Earth Day 22nd April 2024 - What On Earth Can I Do About It?

Global warming is now hitting home.  Dubai Airport closed last week because of flooding.  Dubai, and the rest of the Gulf States, received 18 months-worth of rainfall in less than a day on Tuesday 16 April.  Sea temperatures have risen 1.5C, causing mass bleaching of coral reefs world-wide, with knock on consequences for sea life and the human food-chain.  Spain has been experiencing a drought FOR 6 YEARS!

What the hell can I do about it?  Me?  One person.  Or my household of two????

I first learned about climate change and global warming when my flatmate dragged me along to the public session of a conference, in January 1989.  My takeaways then were: organic gardening; plant trees; recycling; buy unbleached paper products (preferably recycled); go solar powered; support wind farms; use public transport where possible,; drive fuel efficient vehicles but cycle for shorter journeys; and that the mainland Europeans were considerably better than Australians at this stuff.  

When I landed in Copenhagen 4 months later, and saw their rubbish bins with multiple recycling slots for paper, tins and plastics, I was convinced that the latter point was true.  Britain was a disappointment.  No segregated rubbish bins, to split genuine waste from recyclables.  It was 10 years before most local authorities offered households recycling collections for their rubbish.  When ordering office supplies in 1991, it was difficult to buy any recycled paper products - they just didn’t exist - and it took decades for things to improve.

It’s been 35 years since that conference in Australia, and Climate Change is now hitting home.  We can’t just blame governments - the largest contributing factors are the small, incremental decisions that individuals make.  What I’m setting out below are my thoughts, my manifesto, for the changes that we can ALL make to save Planet Earth.

1.  Do Not Waste

In 2020, when asked if he could give one piece of advice to future generations, Sir David Attenborough said “Do Not Waste”.  That is the essence of the Earth Day mantra:

• Reduce your consumption
• Reuse items instead of buying replacements
• Recycle everything possible

Think about it for a minute.  Pretty much everything else I’m about to write boils down into those three words.

2.  Don’t Waste Food

According to the 2024 United Nations Food Index Report quoted in The Guardian, annually about a fifth of all food produced on Earth is wasted, 600 million tonnes of which is wasted by households!  When you think that approximately 730 million people are going hungry every day, that means that the rest of us have to answer for one hell of a lot.

My suggestions to minimise food waste:-

• Meal Plan, so that the fresh food you purchase gets incorporated into the meals you are cooking.
• Turn leftovers into another meal.  Leftover cooked veg can be incorporated into a frittata.  The carcase of a roast chicken can be made into stock.
• Your freezer is your friend.  If you realise that you can’t use it before it shrivels up/turns to mush/grows exotic fungus, freeze it.  Or cook it and freeze it to eat later.  Unless you plan to use it within 2 or 3 days, freeze meat on date of purchase and defrost it in the fridge.
• Buy your fruit and veg loose, not wrapped in plastic.  They’ll last longer.  Produce stored in plastic tends to sweat and the sweat spots are the first places mould will grow, even if you decant them when you get home.
• Store food properly.  Bread lasts longer if stored in a plastic bag in the fridge.  Onions are best left on the counter.  Potatoes need to be stored in a dark cupboard, away from onions (or they’ll sprout). 
• Ignore “Best Before” dates.  They’re more indicative of the predicted lifespan of the packaging, than they are of the product.
• Ignore “Use By” dates.  If it smells OK and taste OK, then it should be fine to eat.
• Eat the whole animal.  If you are a meat eater, then don’t turn your nose up at eating offal. Haggis is delicious, even if it is made from liver, heart and lungs of a sheep.  Seriously, if you eat pâté, then you’re already eating liver.  Respect the animal.  It died to feed you.
• Compost the fruit and veg trimmings that can’t be eaten.  

3. Ask Yourself: Why Am I Buying This?

Do you need another lipstick or are you shopping just because you are bored?  Don’t shop for entertainment.  Whatever you purchase won’t fix the gap that you’re trying to fill.  If you do need to purchase an item, is it the best one for the job?  Does it fulfil all your requirements?  So many times, when we purchase something on the “it will do”; it never does.  Would something you already have do the job instead? 

Instead of trying to fit in with an influencer - who is paid to sell you things - work out what is important to you and to the person you want to be.  Devise your own style and stick to it.  Fast fashion is just flogging you badly made stuff, which won’t last.  Don’t waste precious resources trying to keep up with the Jones’.

4.  Drive The Most Fuel Efficient Vehicle

Do you really need an SUV?  No. Particularly not when, most of the time, there’s only one person in the car.  

Back in 2000, when I bought the Toy, the first priority was to get the most fuel efficient vehicle on the market. That was the diesel VW Lupo, although I bought the cheaper, “SEAT Arosa” version.  Toy averaged 62 miles to the Imperial gallon.  (That’s 4.5 litres, not the American gallon of 3.7 litres.)  Lucky-Car averaged slightly less - at 57mpg - but the replacement to the VW Lupo was horrible to drive, so I went for the Skoda version of the next model up, the Fabia.  

When I think of the number of times Lucky-Car drove through France or up to Scotland, carrying 4 adults plus their luggage, in one small car and still managed over 50mpg… Do you really need an SUV for the school run?  

5.  Do You Really Need to Drive?

The majority of car journeys within the UK cover less than 2 miles. Surely you can walk that distance?  Or cycle it?  Even in my lymphoma-depleted state, I can walk the 1.5 miles to the local Lidl in less than 30 minutes.  (We do that walk regularly.). 

If I lived in the Netherlands, I’d probably cycle everywhere.  When my current employer moved to their new office 7 miles away, the first thing I did was to check out potential cycle routes.  Sadly, there is no safe route.  Only the suicidal would cycle the last mile to the office, down a very busy, narrow country road.

What about public transport?  Surely this should be considered before driving?  I’m lucky to live in London, to have the Tube and reasonably reliable bus services.  Public transport is often not an affordable option in the UK.  You’d need a second mortgage to live in Reading and commute by train into work in London.  In other European countries, travelling by train is quick, cheap and reliable.  Sadly, not here, where 3 decades of privatisation have delivered nothing but higher prices, multiple cancellations and delays.  Most of the time, it’s cheaper to fly to Manchester from London than it is to take the train.

6. Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Spend wisely.  Don’t complain about climate change and then use toilet paper pulped from virgin wood forests!  Buy recycled.  Consider what is in the products you buy and from where they came.  Don’t buy potatoes shipped from Egypt, if you can get ones grown in Essex.

Buy secondhand and don’t be ashamed about it.  Every antique is at least secondhand - if secondhand is good enough for Lord So-And-So, then it’s good enough for you.

7. Vote

2 billion people are going to the polls this year.  Vote for the candidates who will invest in infrastructure, make public transport affordable for all, change building regulations so that all new builds have solar panel roofs, force water companies to control sewage instead of discharging it into the rivers, etc.  Voting is your chance to choose someone who will do something!

- Pam

It’s all about getting the biggest bang for your buck

How’re is your February going?  Are you coping with the bad weather, the never-ending Lockdown and the inevitable tightening of belts?  I’ve always found February to be a tougher month, financially, than January.  In January, you run out of cash early because you were paid before Christmas and end up in debt/overdue on payments; February is when those debts have to be paid back.   (You may remember me mentioning that tough February 30 years ago, when Dumbo left me with little more £20 to get through the month. It was the inspiration for several years of the “£50 February Challenge”.)

We  went to the Butchers’ yesterday, spending £55.70 from the Meat Fund.  Since our meat shopping is all about getting the biggest bang for our buck, I thought I’d share what we bought, what the plans are for it and how many portions we’ll get.  The butcher doesn’t do an itemised bill, so I’m only recording prices where I saw them and can remember them.  Remember, there’s only two of us in this household.

• 1 large roasting chicken - £7.99 - dinner tonight (we’ll eat the legs), chicken fajitas on Tuesday and chicken risotto on Wednesday.  That’s at least 10 portions, plus stock.  
• 1kg minced beef - at least 16 portions when padded out with veg, lentils/beans, etc
• 1 rolled, stuffed, boned breast of lamb 1.2kg - £13.60 - minimum of 4 portions of roast lamb.  The butcher cut it in half for us, so we have two roasts.
• 8 chicken breasts, average weight 200g each - between 16 to 32 portions, depending on whether I double up in a recipe.   I usually only use one in a stir fry or chicken pasta dish that serves 4.
• 8 large chicken thighs - 8 portions of chicken tray bake.  
• 4 pork chops - two will definitely be served as chops, while the other two may get chopped up to make pork-and-beans and a stir-fry.  Either 4 or 10 portions, depending on the outcome.

That’s between 54 and 80 portions of meat-based meals.  As I said, it’s all about getting the biggest bang for our meat-buck.

With the exception of tonight’s roasting chicken, I have just finished shoehorning it all into the freezer.  Everything has been “bagged and tagged”.  I had to do it in stages to maximise space/freeze things in shapes that will stack and fit together, especially since the freezer was pretty full already with lunchboxes, tubs of soup/cooked pulses/homemade ready meals and sauces, not to mention the haggis that threatens to leap out at you... The mince was divided into 4 and carefully stuffed into freezer box to form 4 rectangles.  The chicken breasts and chops were bagged separately and frozen to be as flat as possible.  The chicken thighs were bagged in fours, while the lamb was stood on its end, to freeze upright.  

As you can see, once again, I win at freezer Tetris.

- Pam

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The little things add up

As every knitter knows, it’s the little things we do that add up to something big.  In the case of knitting, the “little thing” is creating one stitch after another, which eventually add up to a jumper.  It’s incremental.  The British cycling coach, Sir Dave Brailsford, makes a big thing about incremental gains.  It was concentrating on the small things that took British cycling from mediocre to world class.

I was thinking about this incremental effect on Thursday morning, when I put another 700g of dried kidney beans on to soak.  We didn’t need the beans immediately for dinner, but since there were none left in the freezer, there was space available and I had a few seconds to spare, it seemed sensible to put them on to soak.  Thursday evening, I took a minute to drain the beans, spoon them into a recycled bread bag and shove them in the freezer.  I’ll probably cook them next week in the pressure cooker, use a third for dinner then box up the remaining 2/3 and freeze for two more meals.  (700g dried beans gives 3x500g boxes of cooked beans. Approximately the same as 2 cans of beans from the supermarket).

What does this have to do with incremental gains?  By planning ahead, not only do I save time but I also save money.  It costs the same to process one can’s worth of dried beans as it does to process 6; about a penny’s worth of gas for 30 minutes in the pressure cooker.  The cheapest tin of kidney beans is 30p in Tesco, whereas they sell 2kg of dried beans for £4, which gives me the equivalent of 17 cans-worth for 24p a can, a saving of 6p.  That 6p/can saved can be utilised elsewhere.  It adds up, quietly, in the background of day to day life*. 

Small things add up.  The principle of incremental gains works whether you’re trying to keep your living costs low or attempting to tread lightly on the earth by keep your petroleum pollution down.  Dried beans aren’t just cheaper, they need less energy to ship and store than the equivalent weight of cooked, canned beans.  Plus there’s the energy saved from not having to manufacture the cans or mine, ship and smelt the metal.  Remember the recycled bread bag?  It’ll be washed out, dried and reused until it starts to fall apart, when it’ll go into the recycling.  (It’s labelled “can be recycled with shopping bags at bigger stores”.  Our council recycles shopping bags, so will recycle the bread bag.).  

“What’s the cost of one bread bag?” you might ask. Not a lot, but that’s not the point.  It all adds up.  Just as you can’t learn and become fluent in a language in a day, so you can’t expect everything you do to create an immediate “Big Bang” impact.  You hear people muttering “why bother? It’s only...” but if everyone does it, then it’ll have a big impact.  

- Pam

* In the UK, there’s at least two, rival television programs that demonstrate how much of an impact these small savings have to your grocery bill,  Eat Well For Less and Eat Shop Save. The participants always look shocked when the savings are added up.  (Schadenfreude TV, I love it.)

On with the Motley

Today is a special anniversary.  20 years ago, today, I joined the discussion boards of The Motley Fool.  The Fool has played quite a big part in making me who I am today: tech savvy; an investor; a knitter again (I’d given up in the ‘90’s).  I’ve made friends through it; discovered new places; learned how other people live and how other countries operate (tax, politics, etc).  The members of the Fool taught me to budget and how to put the “living” into Living Below Your Means (aka LBYM).  Their posts gave me a window into their lives, before Blogs became a thing and long before Facebook.  For all of that, I say “thank you”.  Yes, I am a Fool and so are they.

All of the above brings me to what I want to say today.  I think that we’re witnessing the start of the next Great Depression and we will need the wise counsel of the Fools more than ever.  No, it’s not because the stock market has crashed (the FTSE100 is down over 2,000 points).   It will be the unintentional consequence of The Big Shutdown that we’re experiencing in Europe:  everyone working from home who can;  flights cancelled;  schools closed;  hotels, pubs, clubs and restaurants shut;  shops closing their doors and hoping that their online business will keep them afloat.  All concerts and live performances have been cancelled.  So many lives are already disrupted and it will just get worse.  The British Government has stepped up for regular employees - if you are furloughed, you will get 80% of your regular salary*, paid for by a government grant - but if you are a zero hours employee or self-employed, as I write you are only entitled to the most basic of benefits (£92/week).

In all this, my thoughts turn to what we can do to help. I worry about how bad it will get and how many people will suffer.  I’ve already fundraised for the local soup kitchen and the food bank**, but I want to do more.   Since I am a Fool and a cook, I have decided that I will create a collection of recipes of really cheap meals, based on four principles:-

1. Tasty
2. Filling
3. Nutritious
4. Less than £2 for an entire meal

They will be posted here on the Blog, since it’s free to access, and possibly compiled into a PDF.  That will be my big task for 2020. 

- Pam

* There is an upper limit in the £2,500/month.

** How is it that, in the 21st century, people are relying on soup kitchens and food banks, institutions which disappeared during the majority of the 20th century.

Frugal Friday on Saturday - Housekeeping and the Grocery Bill

On MSE, someone mentioned that they were struggling to get their food bill down  and wondered how others managed to stick to such a low budget for two adults. I was thinking about this when I was soaking kidney beans yesterday, so I thought I’d elaborate a little on how we do it.  Our full housekeeping budget is:-

£120 - MSE Grocery Challenge/general groceries/Farm shop & supermarket shopping

£ 40 - Meat Fund (spent irregularly at the butcher’s and Costco 

£ 40 - Bulk Fund (used for Costco spends, WingYip and booze)

£ 20 - Christmas (for the goose (£107 last year), tree, chocolates, etc)

£ 10 - Garden Fund

——-

£230

====

That’s £60 up from when I started my blog in 2007.  (I think groceries were £100, Meat and Bulk were £30 each, Christmas £10 and we didn’t have a garden fund, back then.)

We eat really well:  plenty of home-made curries, stir-fries, stews, risotto, pasta, the odd roast, some vegetarian dishes.  For a stew, I’ll use about 300g of meat, plus onions, garlic, carrots, maybe peppers, and a (pre-cooked, dried) pulse or broad beans from the freezer.   I don’t do a lot of “meat and two veg” because, frankly, I find that boring.  

Most meals give 4 portions.  For portion control, I dish up the next day’s lunches as the same time as our dinner ( prevents my DH eating a second portion). 

A big secret is planning.  I don’t mean meal-planning, which I do rather badly. (I tend to stand in front of the fridge/freezer after dinner and think “what have we got in?  What needs to be used up?  What haven’t we eaten lately?”, when considering what we’ll eat for dinner the next day.). It’s about thinking ahead and cooking for more than one meal at a time - those kidney beans that I mentioned?  That was for three meals; two 400g portions are now in the freezer.   I’ll do the same with chickpeas, mung beans, black-eyed beans - dried the dried pulses we have in stock.  Since most of my recipes start “fry onion with garlic, add mushrooms”, I’ll cook up double quantities and freeze the second portion as “Base”, for those days when I’m time poor.

It’s also about thinking of the meal possibilities when you purchase meat.  A roast chicken is dinner one night (the legs), Chinese the next (one breast), then risotto (the other meat) on the third night, plus stock.  A 1kg package of cooking bacon from L!dl costs £1.39, will be split into 4 and  one portion can make any of the following:  Cuban Black Bean Stew, Breakfast Pie, Tuna Lasagne, regular Lasagne, “Bacon & Egg McMuff!ns”, Coq au Vin, etc.

Some of it is about buying in bulk, so I’d suggest you put £5-£10 a month aside for buying good storage containers.  (I use Lock-n-Lock; they aren’t cheap but are critter-proof and water-tight.).   Once you have those, save the cash for a large pressure cooker, in which to cook your pulses.

I only have one type of flour in stock - the bread flour sold as “chapatti” or “Atta” flour, which comes in 10kg bags and costs between £3 and £4 a bag.   It gets used for everything that needs flour: bread cakes (add 1tsp baking powder per cup to make “self-raising”); pastry; pancakes;  Toad in the Hole, etc.  A 2kg bag of kidney beans costs around £3.50, which equates to about 15p a can (NB each 400g can gives 250g cooked beans).   That bag of beans will last us at least 4-6 months. 

HTH

- Pam

Making the best use of what you have

It occurs to me regularly that one of the leading principles of frugality is making the best use of what you already have, rather than constantly chasing the “next big thing”.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking IT gadgets, houses, cars or clothes; if your jeans are perfectly serviceable, why waste the money replacing them?  Don’t waste money on unnecessary spending.

I think about this principle a lot, usually when I’m pottering around the kitchen or getting dressed in the morning for work.  I’m still wearing suits purchased  over decade ago.  Admittedly, fashion has been kind over the last two decades - no massive shoulder pads or exaggerated silhouettes - but, beyond stretch jeans, I’ve been ignoring fashion for years. My clothing purchases are driven by a) when something wears out, b) my size - I am fatter than I was in 2008 - and c) the capsule wardrobe concept, where I try to ensure everything goes with everything-else, for maximum wearability.

On the house front, our fridge-freezer died in August 2018 and the replacement annoys me because, while having the same exterior dimensions, the freezer section is smaller and less flexible than the old one.  It is thicker walled and better insulated, but the shelf positions are fixed, with no alternate slots, and there are fewer shelves in the door.  It holds about 20% less than the old freezer as a result.  In order to freeze the goose we purchased at Christmas, I had to remove one shelf and stand the goose up vertically, carefully packing everything else around it.

The goose is an excellent example of making the best use of what you have. We were away at Christmas but when we finally cook it, we’ll harvest 1-2kg of cooking fat, 2-ish litres of goose stock and enough meat for 4 meals.  Nothing is wasted.

- Pam

Money talks

I seem to be obsessed by money at the moment.  It's partially because I'm still finding my feet as a contractor - I'm still trying to work out how much money I need to leave in the company to pay the taxman and stay afloat if my contract with the Swedes ends.  Salary-wise, I'm paying myself £12k less than I was earning before BUT my take-home pay has only dropped £200/month. With a bit of rejigging and lower commuting costs, it's doable and leaves me with the same money-to-live-off each month.  (No, I don't understand it either.  While I used to contribute 9% to the corporate pension scheme, that was out of pretax income and doesn't explain the entire change.)

The other reason, I think, is that team I'm in at the moment are all contractors and they're obsessed by investing in shares and in property.   We had quite a discussion yesterday about the economics of rental properties.  I was surprised to discover that, in a group of accountants, I'm the only one who knew that mortgage interest will no longer be tax deductible on a privately owned rental property, thanks to George Osborne's misguided 2015 budget.  (He thought it'd force buy-to-let property owners out of the market, freeing housing stock for owner occupiers.  He is wrong.  The solution is to incorporate and own your rental properties through a company.  Interest will still be tax deductible and the company will pay 20% corporation tax instead of 40% income tax.  Those people who don't incorporate, will just put up the rents they charge, in order to compensate for the decrease in income.)

One topic that hasn't come up yet, is how people are saving.  Not the amount they save*, but the mechanics.  We've talked about car loans and leasing, but not saving.  Well, not yet. At least, for this I have an answer...Oddly, in the last six months, I have been put on the spot twice about the same thing.  Both times by bank people who wanted to know why I have so many savings accounts.  The first time, I was moving my savings operations to a new bank after the UK operations of ING were finally absorbed into Barclays.  (I can't abide Barclay's Bank.  They treated me like dirt when I was a customer of their's when I first came to the UK.).  The second was when I was setting up my business bank account.

Each time, the answer is the same:  "I micro-budget".  The response is usually a puzzled expression, so I elaborate:  "Each account has a purpose and is used for saving for something specific, so if I want to know how much money I've got set aside for my football season ticket, I can just check the account balance".

Usually, that's enough of an explanation and it's as if a lightbulb has light up.  Suddenly, they get it and want to know more. "What sort of thing are you saving for?", they ask.   I tell them that I've got accounts for the car's services and insurance, holidays, Christmas presents, the garden fund, clothing, crafting, etc, etc.

It's like a formalised version of the Sanity Fund, without the wallet card.  Partially, you can blame Anita Bell - the Sanity Fund is all her idea - and partially you can blame a poster on the Motley Fool years ago, who mentioned that they could have up to 10 sub-accounts when you opened an account at ING, which lead to a wider discussion about how people could use their sub-accounts.   Most people used theirs for saving for annual or irregular recurring expenses (such as car maintenance bills), and called the whole ING thing thneir "Freedom Fund".  "I've got $xxx in my Freedom Fund" is not an uncommon statement on the Fool.  (ING used to facilitate this by showing you the total balance of all your accounts, when you logged in.)

Eventually, I discovered that ING had a UK operation and signed up as fast as the pixels would carry me.  They paid the Bank of England base rate of interest, which was better than the majority of instant access accounts at the time.  Sadly, ING was one of the banks caught in the middle of 2008's credit crunch and their international operations were sold off.  I don't remember who bought them in the States, but Barclays bought the British branch and, about 2 years ago, moved all the accounts to their own online platform, which requires a card and card reader and is a pain because you can't just spontaneously check your account balances while at work.  The final straw in my relationship with Barclays this time, was when they reduced the rate on their accounts to below 0.1%, which in no way compensates for the hassle of dealing with their online portal.

Bye-bye Barclays.  The new bank is paying above the Bank of England base rate of 0.25% on an instant access savings account.  They have an easy to access on-line portal.  Their website is logical and easy to navigate (unlike yours).  Sod off.

- Pam






* This being England, you don't discuss salaries or day rates.  We know virtually everything else - what someone paid for the house, the size of the mortgage, etc, -  but not that.  (For once, I can't get this information from the finance system.  The Swedes aren't time-sheet-costed!)

Frugal Friday - five frugal tips that I've used in the last year

Happy New Year!  Did you have a good one?

In an effort to get blogging more frequently,   I thought I'd kick off 2017 with an injection of frugality:-

1. The cheapest liquid soap on the market is Tesco's Everyday Value (own brand) Foam Bath at 50p/litre.  (It was 40p until recently.)  Chemically, it's the same as body wash or liquid soap and virtually the same as shampoo, but it doesn't smell as fancy.  Use it to refill liquid soap dispensers and as a body wash.  You can even use it as a shampoo, if desperate, but it may be a bit harsh on your hair.  One litre goes a long way.
2.  Love to read and have a smart phone, tablet or Kindle?  There are thousands of free or very cheap books on Amazon.  Join the Bookbub mailing list to receive a daily email of books in your favourite categories, all on sale for £1.99 or less.
3. My local library has a scheme where you can "borrow" audiobooks for free via an app.  You get access to each book for two weeks.  You do have to prove that you live in the borough first, though.
4. They have a similar scheme with an online magazine platform that looks similar to Zinio.  Unlike the audiobooks, I haven't tested it.  (I'm drowning in free Kindle books thanks to Bookbub.)
5. Travelling for work and staying for several days in hotels that provide decent toiletries but only taking carry-on luggage?  Want to save all the free bottles of shampoo/hair conditioner/body wash/lotion?  Get around the airport security rules limiting you to no more than 10 bottles of liquid of less than 100ml each by taking empty 100ml bottles with you and filling them up with the unused contents of the sample-sized bottles provided by the hotel

- Pam

Tales of the Unemployed

If we aren't connected on Facebook then, chances are, you won't have heard my latest news.  My job finished on 5th August.  I was "restructured" out of the company.  It wasn't my choice;  I wasn't given much notice; and the business I looked after didn't have any say in the matter.  In fact, I had to break the news to their senior management.  (Being Finance, the line management that determines your fate and the people for whom you are actually working are frequently totally disconnected.)

Dark, God bless him, came down from Manchester to ensure I wasn't alone on my last day, took me out to lunch and made sure my sense of self didn't feel too battered. He is the most wonderful friend.  With his unerring sense of timing, he'd phoned me just after I'd got home on the day my boss broke the news to me and I cried all over him.  

It was the end of a brutal couple of weeks.  Definitely, the hardest part about leaving was saying goodbye to people.    Because I'm me (and conscientious), I wrote handover notes for whomever will pick up the work afterwards, and I made sure my business boss (Our Man in the Middle East) has copies.  I handed over my projects to someone I can trust to look after them properly.  I couldn't just walk out the door, leaving people who depended on me in the lurch.  (My line manager, on the other hand....)

Since then, I've spent the last two weeks licking my wounds and trying to figure out a way forward.  I have never not worked.  The plan of attack has been:-

1.  Update my CV, which I hadn't done since 2011.  It's been drafted and redrafted, and then summarised.  (The latter was the hardest part, so I enlisting the help of a friend who writes CV's for the National Careers' Service. Thanks Eva.)  
2. Updated LinkedIn.  At some point over the last few years, they deleted the job details I'd laboriously put up in ?2012, leaving only the headline job titles.
3. Signed on with the DWP/Job Centre.  No, I don't need the derisory £73 per week they'll be paying me as contribution based Job Seeker's Allowance but this was a point of principle.  I've paid into the system for 27 years, I'm entitled to the money.  Also, I want the NI "stamps" that come with it, which will go towards my state pension.  (I will probably rant about this in another post, later.)
4. Contacting agencies.  I have contacts at several so have been gradually dropping them all emails.   Two are putting me forward for jobs as I type;  a third, I shall see next week. I spent Friday morning meeting with three recruiters at the one agency, who were really positive about the job market for accountants in the Thames Valley.
5. Working out how to eek out my payoff.  I've got savings and a reasonable payoff coming to me a the end of the month, but my "hope for the best, plan for the worst" conscience tells me it could take considerably longer than I expect to find a new job that will pay me what I think I'm worth.  I've shut down everything I can think of:  the ISA savings; the share investments; the money being set aside for holidays; Audible subscription, etc.   The only things I'm committed to contributing to are the joint account for the mortgage/household bills and the housekeeping.  I reckon I can eek the payoff out to last a year without having to sell off any shares or raid my existing savings.
6. Working out what do with the money.   Beyond picking a savings account into which to shove it all for now, this is still at the daydream stage.  Each month, I'll transfer back the minimum I need to pay my share of the household expenses.  As to whatever is left after I get a new job, well, at the moment, I'm tempted to put it all into an FTSE100 tracker.
7. Spending my profits from the Employee Share Save Scheme.  Under the rules of the scheme, I had to either sell or transfer my shares from the scheme manager when I left the company. I'm currently sitting on a 44% profit so have decided to sell.  As agreed with DH, this profit will be my "mad" money, to spend without inhibition on whatever I fancy.  I'm thinking of spending it on a multi-fuel stove for the lounge, a new "fake Aga" for the kitchen (my beloved stove is 16 and showing its age), and getting my sewing machine serviced.  Probably not what he had in mind, when he suggested I have some mad money, but hey...
8. Figuring out what to do with my days.  This is actually quite hard.  I don't know how to be "a housewife".   I have never been unemployed.   I've been in continuous employment since 1992.   Even when I didn't have a job before then, I did agency nursing.  Without the Olympics or the European Football Championships to keep me entertained (as they did when I was stuck at home with my foot), day time television is mindblowingly boring.   I've started a daily To Do List, just so that I don't become completely zombified by TV and, instead, actually achieve some things.

- Pam

Enough is enough

This is the story of a pair of socks....

You may remember the craze for Jaywalkers, at one point it seemed that every knitting blogger/podcaster on the planet were making a pair. (http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/jaywalker). Ravelry tells me that I knitted my Jaywalker Socks in 2011.  They were pretty:

I remember casting on the 76 stitches and thinking, this is an awful lot of stitches for someone like me with a size five foot (size 7 US/Australian), but the pattern mentioned that there was very little give in the fabric and that someone "with a high arch" (not me) might struggle to get the socks on over their heels.    Little did I realise then that putting the damn things on would be a battle every single time that I wore them.  Since I wear hand-knitted socks to work virtually every day, they became the last-choice-in-the-drawer socks.  Still, I reckon I must have worn them once a month for the last five years, battling to put them on and take them off 60+ times, until this happened last week:

A hole just below the cuff.  A hole that didn't run, even after I threw the socks in the washing machine. (I'd worn them to work that day.).  A hole that, frankly, I've been expecting ever since the first day I wore these socks back in 2011.   You can't blame the yarn, Supergarne Relax Sport Und Strumpfgarn, it knows how to take a beating.  It put up with an awful lot of hauling and stretching over the years, as well as the usual wear and tear from walking and shoes.  

I looked at the hole, today, and did something I should have done back in 2011.  I gave in to the inevitable, and frogged them.  I cut the toe, wriggling the thread through a few stitches

then ripped and ripped.  The yarn has stood up to wear and tear beautifully.  I hadn't realised just how tight the stitches were - it made quite a noise ripping out - and it's definitely more of a 3-ply now than a four.  Am contemplating giving it a gentle soak in warm water before re-balling it up and knitting it into a nicer pair of socks.

Any pattern suggestions?

- Pam

A lesson learned from a sewing machine

(As you may be aware, I am the proud owner of a Brother sewing machine.  It may be 24 years old now, but it does exactly what I always wanted; among its 21 stitches are a one-step button hole, a special stitch for sewing jersey fabric, takes a double needle, a sort of overlock stitch, etc. While it is in desperate need of a service - one of my 2016 challenges is to get it serviced and then to use it more often - this story isn't about it.  This story is about another sewing machine, not mine...)

I mentioned on Facebook yesterday, one of the few pieces of advice I ever dish out to people, when it comes to possessions, is to buy the one you really want.  If you can't afford it, then wait and keep saving up until you can buy the one that you really want, because if you don't, if you buy something cheaper that "will do", it never does.  You will replace the latter two or three times with another that "will do", because you'll always find a fault with it; and eventually it will cost you double what the original would have cost in the first place.  And you still won't be satisfied because what "will do" is never good enough.

This is a lesson I learned from my mother over a sewing machine.  My mum always wanted a super-duper machine that did amazing embroidery automatically, at the touch of a button.  Embroidery was one of her things, although she seldom did it by the time I was born.  It was too hard on the hands and the eyes.  Looking back I think that what she really wanted to do was make and embellish baby clothes - that was her great love - but it was never something that she pursued once I grew beyond 6 or 7 (I'm the youngest).  Her style for children's clothes was classic mid-20th century:  embroidered and smocked dresses, or velvet with a lace collar (she made lace, too).  It was a look that was well out of fashion by the early 1970's, by the time I was old enough to start to notice fashion.  Anyway, I digress...

The sewing machine was always part of our lives when we were little.  If we needed new clothes, they were home made.  A trip to the shops "for clothes" always ended up in the fabric department, selecting a pattern and some cloth, after we'd made a circuit of women's wear and children's wear.  Like knowing how to crochet, I do not remember learning to use the sewing machine or getting lessons on laying out a pattern on fabric, etc.  These are things I have always known, things I learned almost by osmosis.

The other place we would always visit would be the sewing machine department.  Mum would chat to the demonstrators, always checking out the latest models, occasionally giving them a test ride.  In the late 1970's, there were a couple of big home exhibitions at the Exhibition Buildings in Melbourne.  I remember wandering around them for hours with mum, always stopping at the stands run by the sewing machine manufacturers: Singer, Janome, Huskvana, Bernina, Pfaff.  (Oddly enough, I don't remember ever seeing a Brother machine.). We always looked at the high-end embroidery models:  some were confined to built in programs that were selected from a dial; others took an infinite number of cams that you dropped into a slot, which were expensive optional extras.  I remember Singer making the latter.  The machine mum lusted after, though, was the Pfaff:  it had multiple push-button programs and she was convinced that you could combine designs by pushing two-or-more buttons together at once.  

(Remember, this was before computers took over the world. Everything was mechanical or manual. (As an aside, one of the first conversations I ever had about computing was to discuss whether you could program a computer to drive a sewing machine to embroider a picture.  She'd got to me, too.))

Anyway, as I said, mum really wanted a Pfaff sewing machine.  Even if she didn't get one that did all the whizz-bang, you-beaut embroidery, she still wanted a Pfaff.  As far as she was concerned, they were the BMW of the sewing machine world:  German precision engineering, heavy duty but elegant and a dream to use.  They were also expensive, probably the most expensive sewing machines on the market at that time.  I don't remember the exact costs now, however I'd guess a top-of-the-range model was more than my dad's take-home wages for a month.

Somewhere along the line, mum convinced herself that her old, 1960-edition sewing machine just wasn't good enough.  If it wasn't the stitches, then it was too light weight for the type of sewing she wanted to do.   (Built into its own sewing table/case, it would literally bounce about if you went too fast.). That was her argument, anyway.  During my teenage years, she talked herself into replacing that machine. Twice.  Neither replacement was good enough.  Since she kept the original, I remember doing a direct comparison: beyond having a free arm (the original had a flat bed), there was virtually nothing the new machines offered that the original couldn't do; maybe a one-step button hole, but that was it.  (Frankly, though, as long as your machine can do zig-zag and change the length and width of its stitches, it can do a button hole.  I learned how to do that on the old machine.). If they had fancy embroidery stitches, I never saw them being used.  

I have absolutely no recollection of what was wrong with the second machine, that convinced her to purchase the third.  All I can tell you is that she continued to lust after a Pfaff.  Here's the heart of the matter:  mum couldn't bring herself to spend that bit extra on the Pfaff she always wanted and the substitutes never matched up.    

They weren't cheap machines, but individually each wasn't as costly as a Pfaff.  Collectively, however, she spent more on them than she would have done on the Pfaff she really wanted.  I remember discussing it with my dad, who found the whole thing as frustrating as I did.  Yes, Pfaffs were expensive.  No, they didn't have a lot of spare money to throw around.  However, if it doesn't match up to your expectations, why bother buying it?  Dad was prepared to spend the money, but mum would not.  In his mind and mine, mum already had an "it will do" machine, so if you weren't going to buy the one you really wanted, with all the bells and whistles on it, why bother?  Why not just continue to save until she could get the Pfaff?

This is when I learned an important life lesson:  if there is something you really, really want, don't try to make do with an "almost as good as but cheaper" substitute.  It will never do.  You will always find fault with the substitute.  Keep saving your cash until you can get the one you really want*.  I have no problem with you buying a cheap-as-chips "temporary" substitute/second-hand model if you absolutely need that piece of equipment**, but don't fork out two-thirds of the price of the one you really want on something that doesn't add up and then moan about it for years afterwards.  

Certainly, expensive isn't always better.  However, don't settle for something on the "it will do" basis when clearly it won't.  Just don't do it.  

- Pam

* Why do you think I waited and saved for years for a top-of-the-range-at-the-time iPhone?   It did exactly what I wanted, had a good camera and came with the most data storage.  (When it comes to computing, always buy the biggest storage.)   At that point, it's predecessor was 8 years old BUT 8 years earlier, pre-iPhone-invention, the predecessor was the exact phone I wanted so I was happy to wait.

** Of course, after using your "temporary" model for a while, you may decide that it is perfect for your needs and you don't actually want the other one after all.  At least you'll have found out without spending a fortune.