The day breaks grey and miserable, rain gently thrumming against the window. Teddy has been howling through the night, my daughter reckons it was because the weather got blustery.
Yesterday, Sunday, there were photos of all the people working on the green spaces of Tod, at least 50. The weather will freshen up all the planting. We went to the garden centre and came back with a lot of stuff, we are going in for 'vertical' gardening against the fences - new trend.
I hate it when people and bloggers become all self-righteous, it will follow from the fact that some people do not have enough money to buy food or fuel. So the cry goes up educate the poor, make them work for a living. Fine, but life doesn't always work out that way. Jack Monroe has gone into battle mode, watch out Lee Anderson, she is a mean bitch when aroused.
I don't know the answer, except, I do not wish to live in a country where children do not get decent meals and are hungry and that includes their parents. Will the Green's eternal cry of a decent Basic Income work, or perhaps a form of food rationing cards, so that no one has to struggle for food.
Or perhaps? this is Utopia of course we can share enough of our great wealth in this country in a more fair way?
Who else to have a niggle at. Well the PM and Jacob Rees-Mogg are demanding everyone back to work behind their desks, a sort of retrograde step you might argue. Of my limited experience of two people who work from home, they do their work, exercise daily and are quite happy. Okay they work on computers but so many of the workforce do just that. Should we be actually listening to politicians telling us what to do and how to run our lives?
996 - Then there is Elon Musk praising the slave labour techniques of the Chinese workforce as they work 12 hour days 6 times a week, this in the Shanghai Tesla 'giga factory'. Not a very nice world, and I noted yesterday that the Chinese have their own model of electric car at $5000. Now that's cheap but then if you are driving people to exhaustion the cost is high.
Perhaps Elon Musk would like to live in parts of China that have been locked down for months. I was listening to "From our own Correspondent" on radio 4 and hearing about those dragged from their homes into compulsory huge isolation centres and old people starving to death in their own homes as they have no one to order them food and are not allowed out to get any.
ReplyDeleteBe interesting to hear what Jack M does as she is all for people cooking from scratch too - bit like the man said
China has a bad reputation of authorisation, people like Musk take advantage of a slave market and as you so rightly say should try the same regime as a worker and not try to inflict the same on their own people. No wonder the American 'oligarch' fight the unions.
DeleteYou set me thinking about meals and in particular school meals. I passed the scholarship in around 1943 and went to Lincoln Girls' High School (at the time a fee paying school but compulsorily taking in a few scholarship girls each year - I was one and I remember a few others. At first I had to take packed lunches because my parents could certainly not afford to pay for my lunches. Then of course in came the 1944 act and from then on I had school meals -I can't remember whether they were free or subsidised or what but I do remember the stigma I felt whensuddenly I could have food. Children are hurt by things like this. It certainly meant that (only having one child) I made sure that he was never ever labelled in this way.
ReplyDeleteI think that was a fear of being looked down on by fellow pupils Pat. Your experience was slightly different to today. Then we had just come out of war, the food on offer was limited. Today, no matter how you look at poverty, it is there, with no food on the table. Many people of the older generation can put a meal on the table quite easily. Yesterday my granddaughter was surprised when I saved a small dollop of potato. Soup I said for thickening, and today I cut up sweet potatoes, carrots, obligatory onion and a handful of pearl barley. Delicious, but she has never had to face a home without any food in, though, and I think it is a bad habit, but she is the first to cry takeaway should we be stumped as to what to cook.
DeleteI lived in Southwark in London for many years up to 2018. Friends with children at school there told me that every child got free school meals irrespective of the parents' means. The reasoning was that it cost more to administer a means-tested system than to simply put on meals for every child. The bonus was no stigma for anyone. All the leftovers go into another dish in our house. Their house was always well fed because she grew up on a sheep farm and they grew their own vegetables, but waste was anathema, and acknowledgement of seasons essential. What to cook was never a question - the answer would always have been whatever you can find in the garden and pantry.
DeleteFree school meals was the answer, no questioning. I remember the 'dinner money' shelled out each week for my children and the teachers not making a fuss over who could or could not pay, they wanted it that way.
DeleteAs for cooking what was there, either pantry or garden, we were brought up to think how to utilise and economise. They stopped cookery lessons in school, too lightweight but now we are heading for too many children going to university and the skill crafts left on the side.
I think that food vouchers or coupons would be a good thing - someone I know has real problems with food and knows nothing of nutrition (children go to school having had a chocolate bar "breakfast"). She hates to spend money on groceries, but is happy to spend food money on dressing up clothes (esp. for daughter). I despair.
ReplyDeleteI would have thought everyone must know about nutrition Jennie. The chocolate syndrome, practically packed into every cereal and breakfast. I mean what the hell is a breakfast bar? Except something to spend more money on just underlines how far we have got in 'fashionable food'. Johnson has just thrown out of the window the latest effort to curb fatty food, buy one get one free. I would say to people check the price on that one. ;)
ReplyDeleteYesterday a roast chicken for four. Today chicken stripped of all meat, add mustard and cream, breadcrumbs on top and bake in oven - delicious. But if I was poor, where would be the mustard and cream or even the chicken come from? It is so easy to cook down to earth food when you know how, but the money needed to buy that food is a whole different matter.
DeleteI think we will be reduced to class war. The poor driven to the wall and the rich unable to hire the poor, too tired to work. I hope I am wrong.
ReplyDeleteSo do I Joanne, but the problem needs to be addressed with these new entrepreneurs suffering from greed.
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