Living below the Line: Day 1

 

This week I'm living below the line to raise awareness of severe poverty and raise funds for Action Aid and UK food banks who are fighting severe poverty. Worldwide, 1.2 billion people have to survive on less than £1 a day for food and drink. In solidarity, I'm trying to see how I'll faire on £1 a day for 5 days.

Breakfast: Porridge with mainly water, and a good splash of milk. Tea with a little milk and a little sugar (7.5 p for the porridge and 20p for total milk used today, 4 tea bags - 6p)

Lunch: Improvised (read: couldn't resist): potato scone (12p) and a slice of bread (2p) with some peanut butter.

Dinner: Lentil shepherds pie. 4 portions, I only ate 1.

200gr red split lentils (30p, bought in bulk)
1 onion (10p)
7 potatoes (out of 18 in the pack I bought) (30p)
clove of garlic
1/3 of tomato puree (13p)
Garam Masala, about 1 Tbs  (2.5p)
splash of milk to mash tatties
Spinach, chard and purple sprouting broccoli from the local community garden (free!)
Salt 
total for 4 portions: 85.5p, or one portion = 21.4

Total:
69p

I did have 2 crips, 2 pieces of breakfast cereal and 2 sour wine gums to see me through the day, as well as a tiny leftover from free food that would have been wasted otherwise. Haven't priced the 3 teaspoons of sugar either. Cost for all of these negligible, but let's round it up to 75p total.

Sugar cravings weren't as bad as expected. But I am hungry. I haven't felt quite so hungry in a very long time. The kids didn't like the dinner which was heartbreaking a I spent much longer than usual cooking it and I thought they would like it.

I wondered also about energy costs. The preparation of dinner used 3 pots and pans, plus the oven, more than I usually use. So energy consumption wise, this was an expensive dinner and I don't know how this is measured or if indeed the energy needed for cooking is part of the £1 a day that people all over the world have to survive on.

For now, I'm just really looking forward to my porridge in the morning.

If you want to sponsor me (please do, to make it all worthwhile!), you can do so here.
Remember your donation will be doubled by the UK Government and I'll donate the same again to a local food bank.

Living below the line

I've taken the Live Below the Line challenge: From midnight tonight, I'll be living on £5 worth of food and drink for 5 days, to raise awareness of world poverty and raise a few quid for some worthwhile projects that combat severe poverty.

And yes, you can help me by sponsoring me or joining my challenge! Just go to https://www.livebelowtheline.com/me/cartside

I really need some support in the form of a few donated pounds to keep me going because, you know, I luuurve my food and it's going to be a massive deal for me to say no to chocolate, sugar, cake, and basically all things tasty for 5 days. Oh and no alcohol, not even a glass of red to combat my midnight insomnia.

Today I've done the food shopping and I'm now tweaking quantities to get from £6 to £5. Not so easy because I don't just cook for myself, and I don't actually know how much of a tin of kidney beans I tend to eat when I make a vegetable chilli.

I've discovered some great bargains and I'm surprised how much food is on the table - not all part of the £5 because of tin sizes etc, but still. I think I could possibly not go hungry but everytime I think that, I realise I haven't considered the cost of something. Like spices. Like tea bags. Or butter.

So yes, on totally basic, tasteless carbs and lentils, you can live on £1 a day, but if you want some flavour, some vitamins or anything that makes things taste better (oil/butter), the budget is burst. So it'll be a choice between taste and being full.

It also helps that I can cook for 4 people, which actually keeps costs down a fair bit.

Another challenge though is that as part of my work, I will have to join in dinner that's prepared (on a budget, but the budget is a bit more than the 50p that I'm living on), so I'll have to see how to get around this.

I'm greatly helped by tips from last year's live below the liners and recipe ideas on the live below the line website. In fact, there's a few great recipes that may find their way into my staple dinners.

I'm helped by being a vegetarian, so won't miss the meat. I've included 2 luxury items, milk (kind of expensive compared to other items) and some reduced chocolates that are out of date, because I'm a chocoholic and need to be able to have at least a tiny bit. The latter still burst my budget and I decided to only allow myself half of the pack, sob.

For the fundraising, here's the deal: I've chosen Action Aid who recognise the crucial role women have in the fight against poverty. The UK government will double all donations made. And I'll double all donations again, with any money raised on my fundraising page being matched out of my own pocket to raise funds for a local food bank. So if you donate a tenner, your donation will be worth £30. C'mon, make me dig deep and get donating!

Maw Broon's

In good time for mother's day I received a selection of the Maw Broon's home and kitchen range to review. While I vaguely knew about the Broon's, I had no idea about the extent of the Maw Broon range - or that it included food items. So currently our house is not only filled with left over birthday cake and other home baking, but very tasty fudge, shortbread and caramel shortbread from Maw Broon's, all displayed in rather lovely looking tins. Yum.

There's a stylish tea cosy and shopper yute bag too, and that's literally a tiny sample of what the Maw Broon range has to offer. Admittedly, I do have a bit of a soft spot for the quirky Scottish designs.

Apart from the items I received to test, I quite like the look of the jam making kit (ok, it's not exactly jam making season) and the set of coasters and place mats, and I like the fact that there's different versions of the Maw Broon theme, all vintage in look, some more colourful than others, so that there's really something for any taste.

The price range is more than decent for very pretty and useful items. So definitely a thumbs up from the Cartside home.

--------------
Disclaimer: I received a few sample items in return for a review post. All views expressed are mine.

Seven

It must be true, the date tells me so. My baby is seven. I look at her and can't quite fathom it, such a tall girl, my little girl is most definitely gone, she is her own personality, goofy as goofy goes, and getting into so many things. Not long now, and she'll beat me at Tetris even. I look at the photo from her birthday just 2 years ago, all princessy and pink, and wonder what happened that it's got to be a Star Wars party and that she is clear that she likes "girl things and boy things". Phew. Because, like, I had been a bit worried about that rather sticky pink princess phase.

Still a whirlwind, still very definite of how and when she'll do things, still a people's person. She's fun to be with and ever on the lookout for fun things to do. Every day she challenges me in so many ways - never a boring minute, and always a new perspective on life, love and the universe. I'm actually not sure if she keeps me young or ages me, or both. And she's growing up far too fast.

Favourite song: Ghostbusters
Favourite movie: Lego Movie and Frozen
Favourite food: Eggs, beans and toast
Favourite book: Frozen
Favourite animal: baby deer
Favourite game:Snap and Operation
Favourite place: Glasgow
Favourite present: bicycle, tweeting blue tit, crystal stone, mini build-a-bear, bratz doll, Frozen soundtrack (which we've been singing and dancing too ad nauseam)


Happy birthday Cubling, I love you to the end of the universe. And there may not be one.

The last walk of the year

2013 has probably be the year with the least blogging since I started blogging 8 or 9 years ago (I don't remember exactly when it was). And that's ok, I've been working more hours than ever after having kids, and juggling work, kids and trying to fit in some hobbies means that the choice is between blogging and knitting/reading. While in years past, I went for the former, the balance just needs to be redressed a little. So this little blog may look a bit abandoned, but it isn't really, it's just turned from main focus of my little spare time to one amongst others.

For the first time in a long while, I'm off for more than 2 weeks in a row, it's even a bit more than 3 weeks. So we're spending the holidays with family, friends and holidaying, and what seemed like an eternity of course is now looking like it's running out of our hands far far too quickly.

And in between the torrential rainfalls, whenever there's a bit of reprieve (or not, as was the case today), we venture out for those little walks. Our last walk of 2013 took us to Chatelhearault Park, a gem of a park in Hamilton. The Avon water, or on another walk, the White Cart waterfall, all look rather impressive after the heavy rains.

There's tons of other stuff I could mention, but in all the year's hustle and bustle, the most important moments are those spent without the clock in mind, just being and listening, and taking baby steps at the kids' pace.

So here's to 2014 and many more walks, adventures, making, doing, creating, imagining, seeing, feeling, experiencing, exploring and discovering.

Scottish Ballet's Hansel and Gretel

A good while ago, we were offered tickets to review Hansel and Gretel, a Scottish Ballet production, and considering that Cubling hasn't been to a ballet yet and in fact, I've only ever been to one before (which was a very modern production that, well, was maybe not the best introduction to the genre), it was great opportunity.

From the above you can also tell that I'm no expert and it would seem presumptious to pretend I am and give Hansel and Gretel an expert review.

What I can say that it was a wonderful afternoon out. I was worried that Snowflake wouldn't be able to sit through it at her tender age of just 3, and that it may be aimed at adult ballet goers and not be suitable for children in general, especially as there was a different production aimed at children available too.

So I was prepared for having to nip out to keep a 3 year old happy, of it being a visit fraught with unsettled kids and not much enjoyment.

Much to my surprise this was not the case at all. Cubling was very much following every move on stage and simply got it. In fact, I could ask her what each dancer was impersonating when I didn't get it. Snowflake was also following the basics of the story, but got a bit confused by the changing set and didn't quite understand that the door that lead in was now a door that led out so that we were now looking at the inside of a house rather than the outside. Other than that I was more than surprised how much both children got out of the performance.

I suppose it was classic ballet, an orchestra underneath playing a very nice score, the dancers dancing pretty much as you'd expect a ballerinas to dance, the set design was magical, and both children sat for the full duration (ok, towards the end, Snowflake struggled a little bit, but nothing too serious).

It was dark enough to create serious suspense for Cubling (6 years old) but her fears (of the witch) never materialised because the production team was rather clever by making the actual witch a little bit comic and giving her a light grey outfit rather than the obvious choice of dark clothes. In fact, I was rather relieved because Cubling was so worried about the witch making an appearance that a scary looking witch may have sent her imagination out of the roof.

There were also pleasant minor departures from the traditional storyline which made the story more believable, and less dark. Yes, the witch was thrown into the oven eventually (Snowflake was not happy about this, even though the witch was a bad person, bless) but it was so close to the end that the witch almost instantly came out to the applause, clearly alive and unburned.

There was nothing to fault the production, it was simply beautiful in all aspects, music, dancing, costumes, set (oh the set... I just loved it).

All in all, it was magic on a dreich and dark December afternoon, there was hardly a better way to spend the day.

Hansel and Gretel is still touring until February throughout Scotland.

**********
Full disclaimer: we were given tickets to see the ballet in return for a review post.

We don't need no education

The news that Ofsted is recommending that children should be able to start formal schooling aged 2 in an attempt to close the attainment gap between children from wealthier and poorer families caused me more than a little bit of a jaw drop.

It is true that there is a significant attainment gap between some children from poorer families and some children from wealthier families, which can lead to a difference of up to 18 months at age 5. Of course there are other factors that play into this, and I think the average gap is more like 9 months. However, it has been demonstrated that it's better for a child's educational success to be born rich than clever, as many intelligent children from poor families are overtaken by less intelligent children from rich families between ages 8 and 11.

This situation is shocking and totally unacceptable. It speaks of an unfair society where wealth determines educational levels and the one route out of poverty, education, effectively is not a route at all, but actually favours the wealthy.

In comes Ofsted and suggests that rather than tackling the causes of this sorry situation (poverty and inequality), the sticking plaster of sending kids to school early in the hope to make up for all the damage our unequal society does through a few hours of early education.

This is wrong for so many reasons. Baroness Morgan claims that many deprived children have “low social skills”, poor standards of reading and an inability to communicate adequately, which apparently translates to being “not ready to learn” when they start school.

1. Children are always ready to learn. Children are wired to learn. The reason they fall behind is that they do not have a wide range of learning environments and experiences which isn't going to be helped by sticking them into a classroom.

2. Children up to the age of 6 learn through play rather than formal education. They need free play, active play, develop motor skills, and play with other children and adults to develop their language and social skills. A classroom setting is not conducive to being the best environment to achieve this. I read somewhere that children need to learn to skip before they can learn to read, which summarises how motor skills come before language and literacy.

3. School readiness in the sense of ability to become literate depends on passive vocabulary. In fact, as a parent who raises her children bilingually, I've researched this a fair bit and I know that there's a critical number of words that children have to be able to use before they are able to learn how to read and write (which in our case made me decide to delay literacy development in the weaker language). There is no point in developing letter/word recognition or writing skills before this critical mass of words has been developed. Now one could say that this is to be done through the school setting, however:

4. Any schooling only accounts for a minor part of a child's life and the best case scenario is that schooling can influence between 10 and 25% of the total attainment difference between children (the rest is due to home learning environment, community environment, innate ability). This means that any effort to narrow the attainment gap between richer and poorer kids through formal education can at best be a sticking plaster but not make a real difference.

So what can make a difference? Well, ideally, and excuse me for being political, we need to reduce income inequalities, as these are the root causes for the attainment gap in a complex interplay of factors. Great wealth disparities in a rich nation leads to people feeling they have no control over their lives, people who don't feel they have control over their lives have low self esteem and are stressed in a existential kind of way, which in turn leads to poor health and having to focus on the day to day survival, making it much harder to plan ahead or even manage to move out of the low income bracket. Stress leads to family conflict, family conflict stresses the child, a stressed child cannot learn. Sending the stressed child to school is at best tokenistic and at worst futile (in fact, the attainment gap between rich and poor kids increases during the years of formal education, schooling does not narrow it!).

I'm a realist though and in the current political climate I don't see a change to a more equal society any time soon (although I'm still hoping/waiting for a little more outrage and anger by the general public about this ridiculous situation that the 5th richest country in the world is happy to be leading the way on income inequalities). In the short to medium term, we need to support parents to be their children's first educator, in an empowering way that is based on true partnership rather than the deficit model that some parenting programmes are happy to portray. Fact is that parents want the best for their child, but circumstances mean they are unable to be the parent they want to be (and that doesn't just apply to "poorer" families!)


But if we're really serious about our children's future, this isn't enough because the vicious cycle of poverty (or rather income inequality, because it's not the absolute income that matters but the relative status and difference between the richest and the poorest) undermines healthy child development in so many ways that even the parent with the best intentions and abilities will struggle to make up for the disastrous effects of poverty on child development.

All in all it's just another brick in the wall.