Not even halfway into the monthly payday cycle, and I am already running alarmingly low on funds. Every fucking month is like this. Every one. I can't even spend what energy I do have on productive steps forward out of the mire because I am spending my mental energy on making do.
It's so much more work to be poor. Imagine you can never replace anything and everything you have was either old or low quality to start with, and you have to juggle work arounds constantly... I'll illustrate...
Imagine you have so little money for food, you now take risks on what's gonna be ok. Stuff you never really liked but it was in the reduced. A past-best-before company your mate rates. Whatever came out of the foodbank last time you had to. Dinner becomes a game of chance.
I can't believe I am saying this but it's worse than my initial calculation. I over estimated the bread and milk, would you believe. Let me show you what your meal plan on this "nearly pulled it off" weekly shop actually is...
Lunch - 1 fishfinger. No bread at all unless you saved your 1/2 a slice of toast from breakfast
Dinner - 1 and a third nuggets, 1 heaped teaspoon of frozen mixed veg, 3-4 chips
35ml of milk (about 2 tablespoons)
Eat this for 6 days
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On the 7th day you can have a burger instead of your nugget and a bit. It's got no bun, no salad, no cheese, just a disk of brownness though. Eat with your spoonful of frozen mixed veg and your 3-4 chips.
Can we talk about the mental health impact and the social stigmatisation that results from callous mockery and rank dishonesty, such as the piece below.
Poor parents (more of whom are single mothers than any other arrangement) experience real, lasting, and serious impacts.
Let's set the benchmarks. £15 per person per week (£60 for a family of 4) is pretty low. Good job, if you get your family fed healthily on this.
£10 per person per week (£40 family of 4), healthily, is an extreme challenge. If you need to honestly learn how, see @BootstrapCook.
This article claims to "almost" feed a family of 4 on £2.50 per person per week.
I am still confirming the nutrition (@MiniMealtimes app is helpful) but I am going to say this diet barely makes the calorie need of an infant school child if they ate the entire lot solo.
This article titled "I took £10 to Iceland to feed a family for a week and nearly pulled it off" from @kentlivenews is a joke, at the expense of low income families and that joke just ran aground here. 🧵
I'm walking away from social media today and I am going to be very honest with why that is. Take the piss and you will be on instant block, I am not fucking around.
I feel like the appointment of an "opposition" to the Nazi government we have that has already used austerity
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as a means of murdering 130,000 sick/ disabled people, states I can expect nothing better or more hopeful from my future and indeed, it's probably going to get worse.
I don't feel like the woman who sourced a rented house in spite of no references or deposit, in 2 days flat
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I don't feel like the woman who crowd funded a wheelchair in 4 days . I don't feel like the woman who forced my kids school dinners to be fit for their growth. I don't feel like the woman who forced myself round a muddy field in pain all day Saturday for the love of the kids
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I have been polite and I have been nice for a Really Long Fucking Time at this point (over a year). My patience just wore out.
At first I didn't have anything but defence for Keir Starmer because the initial Tory attacks were both bollocks and within my capacity to refute.
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Then I kept my mouth shut, because God knows, when the man *I* had wanted to see lead got elected, the little bitches really should have kept it zipped, and I, being a better person, decided to extend courtesy to them such as they had denied me. "Give him a chance" they said.
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And it wore on and I felt like had given it a chance to be fair, and another one, and another one, and where was Keir? Where was the opposing?
Then the Free School Meals debate, which was probably the one important time KS and I aligned.