The Blog of Last Resort

Observations, wild theories and cat pics. Brain the size of a planet with the spatial awareness of a drunk dinosaur.

[trippingthelightdyspraxic]

SAVE £££ WITH THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK!

January 6th 2021

IT’S EASY: you could cut £143 from your energy bills and even more on housing costs just by not being poor! 

Money isn’t everything, say people who’ve never had to worry about it. Money can’t buy you happiness/love/insert cliche here. But as more and more of us are discovering thanks to the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s not that simple. 

One paycheck from homelessness

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t worried about money. From my parents constantly having to re-interview for their own jobs at the end of the eighties, holding whispered conversations about how to keep the house; to my own shock at finding my first salary after graduation wasn’t enough to keep the hot water and lights on simultaneously. I’m not terrible with money - I was self employed for ten years and did my own accounts throughout - and yet I’ve never been able to shrug off the awareness that I’m only ever one paycheck, one illness, one political decision away from disaster. I’m far from alone: housing charity Shelter reported in 2019 that three million people in the UK were one paycheck away from homelessness. This inevitably takes a toll on mental and physical health and on the lives of millions more trapped in the cycle of poverty and insecurity. 

The myth of 25p pasta

We’ve all seen the tweets from blissfully ignorant Tories claiming that a bag of pasta only costs 25p. That may be true, but the gas required to boil it, the pan, the cooker and the kitchen itself do not come for free. Cheap supermarkets don’t set up in areas full of rented flats but in out of town shopping parks you need a car to get to, or a bus. 

And besides, who would ever choose to live on plain pasta? Because that’s what money really buys you: choices.

Without money, your choices are reduced to these.

Shall I put the heater on or have a bath? Which will keep me warm for the longest for the least outlay? 

How long can I spin out this bag of pasta? 

What can I sell next? 

What shall I buy with this pound, three courgettes or twelve burgers? 

(The last one is a trick question. You learn to avoid the courgette aisle.)

With an increase in zero hours contracts (Close to a million people by 2019) and an unemployment rate of 4.9% (October 2020), they are stark choices that an increasing number of us are being forced to make. Without job security or a regular income, you can’t save for a deposit or get a mortgage, so you’re forced to rent, usually privately. According to Santander Mortgages, the average deposit needed by a first-time buyer is £51,9052.

If you’re able to raise that, you’ll pay £723 on average in mortgage payments, while average rents are £912. That’s a poverty premium of £2,268 per year. 

And that’s not the only way being poor is going to cost you.

Prepayment electric costs at least £143 a year more than the equivalent unit cost for direct debit tariffs. My energy company quoted me £120 to get it switched, then said they couldn’t actually do this as my 30 year old heaters weren’t compatible. Had I thought about getting them replaced?

Unreliable income means that you are more likely to need an overdraft, at a cost of anything up to 40% interest. 

If you don’t have a freezer, you can’t buy cheap or in bulk. If we use the Macaroni Cheese Meal For One Index for illustration, at Asda it’s £2 chilled or £1.20 frozen. At the Spar on the corner it’s £5 for two. 

If you need a loan, your interest rate is higher than someone who has a good credit rating and a house for security. You’re more vulnerable to loan sharks and payday lenders. 

If you can’t afford to buy white goods and furniture upfront, there’s a company out there who’ll sell you them for monthly payments of anything up to 119% APR. 

If an old car is all you can afford, it’ll cost you more in repairs and fuel consumption. If you can’t afford one at all, your job choices are limited to those on bus routes. 

As we enter a third lockdown here in the UK, it doesn’t look like things are going to improve any time soon. So do YOU know any weird tricks to avoid the cost of being poor? 

Alison J North

Alison J North

[trippingthelightdyspraxic]

PRE-LOCKDOWN TENSION: It’s A Thing.

January 5th, 2021.

Yesterday I felt tense all day. I’d slept badly, I had a vague sense of dread and every little thing irritated the hell out of me. My dyspraxia ramped itself up so that I was not only walking into door frames as usual, but into the walls as well.  Usually when I feel like this it’s a sure sign my period’s incoming, but that wasn’t it. 

JUST SHUT UP KEIR

After sitting at my laptop for two hours failing to get on with any of the three articles I’d started, I began to doomscroll. The tabs open on my screen multiplied: The Guardian, BBC News, Sky News, and as the news feeds turned my brain to vegan gelatin, The Mirror. Every time I hit Refresh, a tiny hit of dopamine - have they actually made a decision yet -  turned quickly to the dregs of disappointment.  A football result. A New Year MBE for someone I’ve never heard of. Keir Starmer calls for an immediate lockdown - cheers Keir, Boris will feel contractually obliged to do the opposite now so basically you’ve screwed us all.

GOD BORIS WILL YOU LOCK US DOWN ALREADY

It was obvious we needed a lockdown. SAGE scientists had been calling for one since before Christmas, and the Chief Medical Officer had raised the alert level to 5, meaning that the NHS was in danger of being overwhelmed.  It was obvious that a lockdown could and should be imminent, but the confusion felt overwhelming. I hadn’t felt like this since March, when I was working in a school library and I’d sat between two year eleven pupil librarians racing each other on their refresh buttons to see who could get the news of the rumoured school closures first. 

SCHOOL IS TOTALLY SAFE. HONEST. 

Had I imagined that planned press briefing from Downing Street at midday? Any mention of it had disappeared from the Live feeds: perhaps I’d imagined it. But if I hadn’t imagined it, why had it been cancelled? What did they know that I didn’t? What new Coronahorrors were being frantically discussed even now, with every Refresh, in some secret bunker beneath Boris’ port cellar? 

Teaching Unions had advised their members the previous day that to go into work was unsafe. My own usually cautious union had, a day later, advised me of the same. And yet the Prime Minister was telling us that schools were safe and we should send our primary aged children in. Always a good girl at school, my default position in life is to do as I’m told unless it involves shopping my neighbours to the Gestapo or eating offal, so I duly waved off my ten year old and tried to disguise the cynicism in my voice as I told her to have a lovely day. 

At eleven o’ clock, two hours, and no articles later, the dread phone call from the school pierced my consciousness like a malfunctioning smoke alarm. 

“S is in the medical room,” the receptionist said. My heartbeat raced -  “It’s not Covid.” - and slowed again. Apparently the class had been watching a film about Odysseus when my kid had freaked out at the Cyclops and come over faint. I almost laughed with relief. “You can phone back later to check she’s OK,” the receptionist reassured me. I forgot. 

I BLAME THE CAT

After a while I gave up trying to work, and sat on the cat’s preferred chair with my legs outstretched. Sure enough, she fell asleep on me. 

“Look,” I told my teenagers, “I can’t do anything, dammit. The cat fell asleep on me. I think I’ll just read for half an hour.” 

Three hours later they started saying things like “Have you had lunch?” as I began the second volume of the Dystopian trilogy I hadn’t even intended to start. 

At twenty past two,  Nicola Sturgeon announced that Scotland would go into lockdown from midnight. Wales was sensibly doing likewise. From past experience it looked like Boris would follow their lead (eventually) and my PLT eased slightly. I shook off the cat and made myself some carb-heavy food. Then at 3.19 came the announcement that the Prime Minister would address the nation at 8pm, ON TELLY.  I exhaled the breath I’d been holding all day. Something that serious was either going to be lockdown or the Queen was dead. 

EVERYBODY WATCH THE BORIS SHOW

Don’t get me wrong. No-one loves a lockdown, and I’m no exception. But by the time the Government finally got around to it yesterday, a YouGov poll had reported that 80% of us would support one. Staring into Boris’ cold dead glassy eyes between episodes of Coronation Street as he announced Lockdown 3,  I felt a relief like I usually only feel once a month. 

Lockdowns, like periods, are messy, inconvenient and painful.  But the tension that precedes them is far worse. As women know, you just have to get on with it. 

Chocolate helps.

Alison J North