One of the first steps to saving money is to have absolutely no waste.
To use everything up of everything that you buy, whether that be eating all the leftovers and composting all the vegetable bits that are inedible, or making good use out of every last drop of something in a tube for instance.
I have spent years now cutting the ends of tubes to get out all the hand-cream, face cream or as in this case toothpaste.
It's surprising what is still left in there after you have already spent a week squeezing, shaking and scraping down the tube for all your worth to get the product out.
Of course I don't want the product to go hard or go off with the tube cut into pieces, so I always cut out a middle section then use the bottom as a top. It works a treat.
My little nail pencil, which was once the length of a normal pencil, is now just over an inch long, it's hard to sharpen it these days, but I will persevere. While it is still there, I am still using it.
All I ask of life at the moment is to live simply, to have enough of what I need, to make the best of what I have ... and to be grateful for each and every day.
What is one money saving tip that you would add in the comments to help others that might not have heard of it?
It's hard to date some photos isn't it, I tend to look at what I'm wearing, how old my brother looks as he's four years younger than me and then where we are. This was taken at Pontins, the Middleton Towers camp I think, we only ever went to two of their camps, but this was my parents favourite one.
I went down a rabbit hole of thinking about the past yesterday after watching the YouTube channel British Nostalgia while I ate my breakfast. They are good videos if you can get over the AI voiceover that occasionally gets his words wrong and puts emphasis in the wrong places, and if you just laugh at the photos not always matching the commentary.
It was very true of a lot of the meals we ate back in the 60s and 70s in Manchester, England.
It's funny, as children we never thought of ourselves as poor, although we lived in just three rooms. They were the downstairs rooms of my Nana's house. We shared the bathroom that was upstairs and had to be quiet so as not to disturb her whenever we used it, but I never minded that. When I was thirteen in 1973 we got a brand new council house and moved out ... much to my Mum's relief.
We ate simply and cheaply, and I could cope with most foods, although even then I hated meat. But I was forced to eat it, we always had to clear our plates ... 'or the starving children in Africa would be upset'. Even as a child I thought that Mum's statement was ridiculous. Mum was not a good cook, which was slightly ironic as she was a school dinner lady! We ate the most basic foods, overcooked to within an inch of their lives, hence my hatred of Brussels sprouts to this day ... and my brother's pea phobia .
So watching this YouTube video brought back a lot of memories, good ones and bad ones ... liver and onions when overcooked would be useful for a cobbler, he would be able to resole leather shoes with the liver glued on with the gloopy onions. Well my Mum's version anyway. 😖
But one thing we never had, but my ex-husband did, was Connie Onnie butties, or sandwiches if you from the posh end of the street.
It was simply condensed milk spread on white bread and topped with another slice, and eaten over a plate or at the very least away from your clothes as they dripped. My ex also regularly lived on 'sugar butties' as a child, just as it sounds they were simply buttered white bread with a spoonful of sugar sprinkled over the butter, then the two slices pressed together, usually taken outside to be eaten while you played or just sat on the front doorstep. No wonder he had so many missing teeth even when we first met! My cheap sandwich of choice was a salad cream butty, just that bread and salad cream, they were very tasty, but Mum didn't really approve.
Of course it was the days of corner shops and very small 'supermarkets' when they first arrived. Our local corner shop had illusions of grandeur when it purchased two shopping trollies. With only two narrow aisles and the meat and cheese counter at the end of the shop, if someone had a trolley in use anyone else shopping with the more usual wire basket, had to follow the trolley pusher around until they finally reached the till, or else try and squeeze past if the person stopped at the meat counter. Luckily I think we were a lot more patient back in the day. 😄
What 'poor food' did you have as a child, or were you 'proper posh'?
This is the post I was going to do on Monday, but I simply did not have the energy and needed to decompress after Sunday ... and then I needed to get it all out of my system yesterday.
We called to Aldi on the way home from visiting Mum, and I think you can tell that I needed some treats as well as a few necessary bits. Two bottles of wine, chocolate, two packs of cheese and pasta, two of so many of the items in my trolley. I think I just get in the habit of picking up twos when I am running out of something, which is no bad thing really.
I did limit myself to one block of chocolate ... but only because I already had some at home. 😁
The receipt for posterity.
The wine and fish definitely bumped the cost of this shopping up, but I was still happily surprised that this was all I spent, I was expecting it to be more.
When I got home I realised that I had taken the photo of the shopping in the trolley before I had added the eggs to it. So I laid it all out again for your perusal.
I really could have gotten way with not shopping this week, but sometimes your sanity tells you that it needs some wine and chocolate.
I did sort of need more pasta though, as I had tipped the last of my smaller sized bags of penne into my large pasta jar on Friday. It used to come in 500g bags, now it seems to be only available in 1kg size. I seem to have lots of spaghetti in my store cupboard but I was down to no replacements of penne, which is obviously my favourite.
So, that's the rice jar and the pasta jar freshly filled, and the shelf is looking very healthy at the moment.
Mum was rushed into hospital once again, in the early hours of Sunday morning this time with breathing difficulties. We were literally ten minutes away from visiting her at her care home on Sunday morning, at the more respectable time of 10am, luckily we were still on the motorway when my brother phoned to say that a voicemail message had just come through on his phone, it had been left in the middle of the night but he has his phone off then. My phone is always on, but for some reason this time they didn't call me. 😕
Anyway a quick re-programme of the Satnav and we were headed for the hospital where after a lot of chasing round departments and wards, as she had only just left the A&E department, we finally found Mum looking very frail and very confused.
We are quite confused too, as there is nothing they can do for her except make her comfortable and give her oxygen, something they could very easily have done at her care home, especially since she has instructions on her paperwork not to send her to hospital except in a real health emergency. Which happened a few weeks ago when she had yet another bowel blockage. They are a nursing and hospice type care home as well as residential, so they have a lot of very qualified staff.
We were most concerned that the hospital seemed to know nothing about her. Luckily we arrived just as the cutlery was being delivered to the beds ready for lunch, she was about to be given a 'normal meal', something she cannot eat now as she is on a NHS Level Five diet. They also didn't realise that she is completely bedbound, doubly incontinent and has dementia, so is unreliable to ask any medical questions of, hence them being told by her that yes she can have any sort of food.
I had a good chat with her nurse and then we had to come away as you can't visit during lunch time. You wouldn't think that this was that stressful really, well I wouldn't have years ago, but when it's been going on in one form or another for over two and half years on a very regular basis it's starting to have a real build up effect.
I sent an email to the care home when I got home, not complaining as such but asking why I wasn't phoned this time, and also suggesting they had some sort of Patient Passport type document, just a photocopy from their file, that could travel to hospital with residents when necessary to give the nursing staff at least a head start. It would save a lot of stress. It turns out they have this in place already, although the system keeps letting them down and the document goes missing somewhere between the paramedics and the A&E staff and then never makes it to the ward. They are now going to be raising this matter urgently.
I needed to get all this down in writing so that I have it for future reference, and my blog seemed as good a place as any.
