Hmmm.....Cider.
when I first got separated from my ex wife I had to stay in a bedsit, for it was all I could afford on my crappy £10k a year wage after paying for the mortgage on the house as well as rent. The evenings weren't much fun after work, no TV although I did have a PC (zowie! a 150MHz Cyrix and Windows 98).

My budget for food was about £20 a week. Possible, certainly, if you didn't eat posh- plenty of cash for 7 main meals, 7 modest lunches and 7 bowls of cornflakes.

Ah. But no cash left for a drink.

OK, let's rearrange the budget a bit.

Black Oak cider from Tesco, £1.58 for 2 litres of 5% sulphurous cheap piss. 1 to 1.5 bottles of an evening to make time go by quicker.

Leaves just under £6 a week for food.

The amount of meals I've had that consisted of half a tin of baked beans and mini sausages on toast (about 30p a meal) just so I could keep on drinking that sweet, sweet cider as well. When I could have been creative, had pasta bakes, risottoes, even bacon and eggs occasionally- cheap and tasty and effective.

Nope. Mainly beans, spongy mini sausages, toast and LOTS OF PEPPER to make it more interesting.

Of course things have looked up considerably since then, but as I now find myself looking for work after Christmas again, I have seamlessly fallen back into buying cider instead of wine and eating beans and sausages, albeit with grated cheese this time. How easily we fall back into old patterns....

(I'm not skint like I was last time but I'm trying like hell not to spend what I've got in the bank so I'll last a few months....)
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Thu 18 Dec 2008, 18:58, Reply)