the complications of dyeing undies, fdr and huey long

Since the last blog I have been busy cleaning the blue dye stains from my hands, face, work surfaces and clothes, although I live in the Celtic Motherland of Wales I don't think painting your face with woad is really a fashion statement and dye is like grouting once you have started you have to finish and it will get into every room but I can report it is not worth doing.  Fortunately I had some dye so I didn't incur any costs but the results gave me 3 different shades of blue - one for the lace, one on the fabric and a third for the elastic so my undies looked like I had put them in the wrong wash.

While I was scrubbing my face and kitchen I started to think about things that do work - turn off all the electrical equipment that is on stand by and you will save £20.00 a month. Go through all your stuff and decide what you can live without - the dvds you never watch, old toys, any quilts and sell them on line e-bay, gumtree etc, if you have any old mobiles off they go that will give you some cash.  Do not sell your  gold, if you have any, on line or through one of those companies that advertise on tv,  go to a jewellers and shop around.

It's funny what you think about as you clean I started to think about Huey Long, a Governor of Louisiana from 1928 -1932 he was amazing he was too poor to go to college as he couldn't afford the books, I bet some of us are starting to feel the same about attending university and he worked as a door to door salesman in one of the poorest states in America in 1934 he created the "Share our Wealth"  programme with the motto "Every Man a King", proposing new wealth redistribution measures in the form of a net asset tax on corporations and individuals to curb the poverty and hopelessness endemic nationwide during the Great Depression. To stimulate the economy, Long advocated federal spending on public works, schools and colleges, and old age pensions in a state that only had 300 miles of paved roads that programme is extraordinary and he made sure every school had free textbooks. Of course as is the fate of nearly anyone who tries to make a difference he was assassinated in 1935 when he was a Senator but he changed the lives of the ordinary people and so did Franklin Delano Roosevelt always known as FDR he was 3 times President of America from 1933-1945.
Sorry if this is all a bit boring and historic but if you don't know the context and backstory you will never change the present or the future.
FDR's "New Deal" during the Depression of the 1930's kickstarted the economy by, again, public spending on infrastructure and public works. What those guys did is the absolute opposite of what our government is doing to us. Don't believe what is continually pushed as a basic given that there is no money and we have to "tighten our belts" (remember Herman Goering said if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth) every time some politician or tv guru says that repeat out loud after me "bullshite".You see there is plenty of money in our country it is just in the wrong hands; ultra rich people don't start small businesses or care about the community (they don't have a community just countries they live in for short periods of time to avoid paying taxes) and until we have laws that close the loopholes exempting "Non Doms" and people like Phillip Green and various big companies from paying the taxes they owe but have so far reneged on we will continue living in an unjust society where the Depression will seem like good times.

I drew on "Wikipaedia" for the facts about Huey and FDR because I didn't want to make a mistake about dates etc but the rest are my own words and I will expand on them in future blogs along side gardening and shopping (I hate both).

[

My first post

In November 2010 I started work on a book I entitled "The Art of Making Do for Those Who Have Never Had to Make Do". I wanted it to be a helpful guide on how to weather the coming hard times for so many  relativily affluent people who had never had to think too closely about taking a pay cut or losing their jobs and the physical,emotional and economic struggle that being. what I am going to bluntly call poor entails.  So many things written about saving money  are rubbish - when you have £5.00 to last the week buying virgin olive oil in bulk is not a priority and so many supposedly "cheap" meals when you cost them out properly adding in cooking time with its cost for gas or electricity, any extras like herbs or spices and how many people the meal will actually feed in the real world are not "cheap" at all. I wanted to write a sensible, ethical book that would provide real help and this blog was supposed to be the funny side, if you can call it that, of being skint  trying out all the ideas people tell you about how to save money i.e bake your own bread, keep chickens, dye your underwear.

However, one morning in the New year I turned on the BBC Breakfast News and there was an interview with a lady who had done everything to make the best of a hard time - the bread baking, turning off all the electric appliances on standby, even going so far as to take the bus to work rather than the train which was more expensive thereby putting another 2 hours on her travel time each day and she still couldn't make ends meet; a second person in this piece was in full time work but had to resort to hand outs from a charity which has food banks just like in America. I was stunned.

It was then that I knew what I wanted to write about was going to be more serious, radical and difficult than the brief I had started with, yes I am still going to try all the crazy ideas bread baking and underwear dying included but I want to look at what is really happening to us.

I live in 2011 at the start of the 21st century I do not want to regress 90 years to 1920, the start of the last century for my standard of living and I do not want to go back 70 years to 1940 for a role model of how to live.  We can do better than that, it doesn't have to be that way.