A day of numbers today

ONE

One front lawn cut, and edges strimmed, probably for the last time of the season. Nice and stripey!

TWO

Two computers picked up from the chap who has fixed them! Very cheap as well. But they work.

THREE

Three loads of washing hung out and dried - I might catch up with the family one day.

FOUR

Four cupboards inventoried today - lots of stores for the months ahead.

FIVE

Five (or so) miles to go to fetch the girls from school and then to take the YFG to piano lesson

SIX

Six more jars of Sweet Chilli Jam made tonight, now warm and in the jars.

Neighbours

The new neighbours appear to be a man and his son, whom we think is about 16 or 17 - the girls have seen him around at school and believe that he was in the year above the EFG, so he may be at 6th form this year, or he may not...there is a dog of the Border Collie variety...and that is all we know.

Gentle Otter

There is a blog I read about tonight, which has moved me to tears of shame and frustration, and to a wealth of admiration for a very determined lady.

It moved me to write an email to the First Minister of Scotland, the MSP for the area, and the MP for the Perth & Kinross area. I wonder if they will reply.

"Dear Sirs

I have recently been reading about a farmer in rural Perthshire whose home is threatened with a demolition order because the landlord hasn't effected sufficient repairs to keep it in a habitable condition. The farmer and his family are living in appalling conditions, with no electricity and no safe, clean running water at the moment, as their supply has been contaminated with eColi through no fault of their own.

Read for yourselves here

http://gentleotterblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/awful-news.html

and if you have the stomach for it, go back through this poor lady's writing and read of the terrible things that they have had to endure in the past year. I read it and wept for her situation and for my shame at not knowing that people still live like this in the UK.

I lived in the neighbouring county of Fife for 10 years, and had no idea that this sort of Third-world existence could be allowed to happen in Scotland. I am ashamed that the powers that be in the UK can allow this sort of thing to continue - to allow the landlords so much power over their tenants, so much control over their circumstances and be allowed to get away with such paucity of responsibility.

I want to join the others who must have been in touch with all of you over Gentle Otter's situation in calling for support for her and her family in this abysmal situation - and look at the tenancy laws of Scotland and England/Wales with the intention of reforming them in the not too distant future.

Although Gentle Otter is a blog name, you can contact her through her blog and I am sure she would be delighted to hear of any support and advice you can offer to her. Please stand up and be counted and let her know that these countries of ours are not going to let the laws continue to allow people to be treated like this - she and her husband depend on that farm for their livelihood, and their home, and she is determined not to be forced out of a home that her husband's family have tenanted for over a century.

Yours sincerely

(I signed it)"

Knowing that I lived within about an hour's drive of the area where Gentle Otter lives, I am ashamed that I didn't know that people still lived like that in 2011. I'm not completely naive, but I did think that clean water was pretty much a given, but GO doesn't even have that most of the time, and the house is now under a demolition order, as I said in the letter, so she is facing a pretty dire situation. She is being very decent and refusing to publicly name her landlord on the blog, but I have my suspicions, having lived in that area and knowing a tiny bit about some of the landed estates.

If you are so minded, please add your voice to the others contacting the powers that be to ask them to help her and other tenant farmers in Scotland (and England/Wales, as the tenancy laws are weighted in favour of the landlords everywhere, it would seem). Email addresses are available at the Scottish Parliament website, for the First Minister, and her local MSP, Richard Lochhead.

Tonight I am giving thanks for a dry house, clean running water and showers that work without a second thought, a washing machine that cranks to life whenever I need it, and the simple fact that this house is ours, and I don't rely on a landlord. I am very fortunate. And I don't work even half as hard as this brave lady.

Sweet chilli jam

I had a little disappointment this week in that I thought I was growing peppers on two plants I bought from the local nursery, but I discovered that they are in fact chillies! So I had to look around and find out what to do with them, as I have never used them in cooking as I don't like hot and spicy food to that extent.

Both plants are well covered in chillies, and I picked about 15 of them last night. There are still more to come!

I found this recipe on the BBC Good Food website for Sweet Chilli Jam and the FH highly recommends it - says it is lovely! I have tasted a tiny spoonful and the taste starts off very sweet in your mouth but then the chilli kicks in and you taste the "bite" of the spice, and it is quite OK even for me. For the FH, who loves more spicy stuff, he says it is "Just right" so if you like spicy stuff, I'd say, "Have a go". The only downside to this recipe is that it calls for 8 red peppers, and at 70p each, that outlay was quite extravagant for 4 small jars of sauce/jam. If I can find a cheaper source of the peppers, I may make some more...

The house next door

It's quite a normal looking house, but people don't stay there long!

We moved into our house in June of 2004 and the first couple moved into the house next door in the September. They were quiet, very quiet, and very much kept themselves to themselves. Then they decided to sell up, but the time wasn't right, so they ended up renting it out instead, and a lovely family moved in; they were coming back to England from Portugal, and were a couple - English woman and Portuguese man, she didn't work at first whilst they settled their son into the village school but he works for Tesco. Then they were told that the house had sold, so they had to move out, which unfortunately co-incided with them splitting up, so she and the son went west and the man went east.

The new owners were another couple, but older this time. A very nice couple, quite reserved but very pleasant company and we get along very well. But they have decided to leave, and they are moving out right now. The new owners take possession at noon, and we are sitting waiting like the nosy neighbours we probably are, to see what they look like, whether they are another couple or a family; the girls are interested to see whether there will be children; I am hoping that there isn't a dog (nothing against dogs in particular but we are surrounded by a particularly noisy bunch of dogs here!).

Of course, we are hoping that they don't mind chickens, that they won't be making remarks about the state of our working garden, etc! We are one of the families in the estate which actually uses the land we have, rather than looking at it as many do as a piece of grass to be admired! In between the veg beds, chicken runs, driveway and sheds/greenhouse, there isn't much grass in our garden and our plot gets a bit, shall we say, "untidy" at times?!

So, we wait...and hope!

Storecupboards and pantries

One of the two wardrobes we have moved into the garage for pantry storage. The FH has re-jigged it since I took this picture, but it gives you an idea of what we are doing. Lots of Branston beans bought on the buy-one-get-two-free offer at Tesco recently, UHT milk, etc.

This is a work in progress and I will add more up to date photos when we are nearer completion.

Do you shop often or are you a once a month kind of person? Do you live near a supermarket, or perhaps you have to travel miles to a shop? Have you tried supermarket home delivery, or maybe they won't even deliver to your postcode? And do you menu-plan or fly by the seat of your pants?

All these things might affect your attitude to keeping stocks of food in the house, and your economic circumstances probably affect it more than anything.

There are various blogs and websites which take opposing views on this - you just have to google "stockpiling" and you will easily find hundreds of pictures of vast pantries and piles of tins and packets. There are similarly websites which advocate buying only what you need each week. I really like this blog at Grocery Cart Challenge where Gayle attempts to feed her family of 6 on only $60 a week at the grocery stores. She gives lots of recipes and thrifty ideas, as well as a weekly menu plan and pictures of what she buys. I like to check out her menu plans now and again for new ideas!

I stand somewhere between the two extremes, although as we are heading towards winter, I am veering over to the stockpiling side. As I said in an earlier post, I really hate driving in snow, so if I think there will be any, I'm staying home until the cold snap passes, and we live on what we have in the house - so I want to be sure that we have some decent stocks in hand.

On the other hand, regular and long time readers will know that I have done Challenges where I spend £100 in a month on essentials and use up what we have in stock - this is going over to the other side of the coin.

There are definitely pros and cons to each method, and I do like the pros of the stockpiling! It means that when things that we use weekly are on sale, I can stock up, knowing that the items will get used because they are part of our regular shopping. Things that will bear long term storage are best for this - tins, bottled and dry goods, for example. Just make sure you rotate the stocks so that the oldest stuff is used first!

The biggest benefit to the other method is money in the bank! It allows me to save for something I need by not shopping. When we wanted to buy the woodburner a year or two back, we simply stopped shopping for anything other than what was essential - and we soon had the money we needed, because we had the stocks put aside of what we needed. Most of what I bought those months was fresh fruit and veg and dairy products.

Amy Daczczyn in her Tightwad Gazette books (I have all three - bought at the beginning of our frugal life and well worth it!) talks about a Pantry Principle. Instead of menu planning and then shopping for what you need to make those items for the week, you go shopping and buy only what is on sale, keeping a price book so that you know you are getting the best deal on most stuff. You then plan your meals from what you have in stock. It does work out cheaper in the long run, I believe, but it also means that some items may be absent from your diet until they come on sale again! If you can manage with that, it works.

There is an Australian website called Simple Savings whose owners have written a book, the $21 challenge in which they give chapter and verse on how to do a challenge week, now and again, to use up what you have in stock, and spend only $21 to supplement your stores. There are some great recipes in this book, and I am going to be trying some of them out soon. This idea is similar to my £100 month challenges.

The week that was

I can't believe how fast this week has gone past!

Yesterday I did manage to take the girls and our two friends, S and K, to Wimpole Hall and Home Farm. Despite the weather forecasters predicting grey cloud for the day, the sun shone bright and clear and there was hardly a cloud in the sky all day - it was fantastic weather for the summer we haven't had!

We started off at Wimpole in the house, and had a good wander around there for about 90 minutes, enjoying all the old things and historical atmosphere. It was S and K's first visit, and they both said how much they liked it. It was interesting to see how much had changed since we were last there in 2008.

After that, we walked up to the Farm, a good ten minutes' walk away. The girls loved the Adventure playground and the Hay Bale maze, enjoyed seeing all the animals, and were very keen on the ice creams!! There was a quick stop off in the National Trust shop before we left where we gathered a couple of small souvenirs of the day. A thoroughly good day was had by all and we were all tired out by the time we got home.

Today we have had a bit of an up and down day - the FH has been out a couple of times, the girls have both been chatting with friends, the weather has been great again and I got a couple of loads of washing dry, but the down sides have been me having an upset stomach for a while, and the YFG having a bit of a moan this afternoon!! She's better now and happier, thank goodness.

I have discovered a new-to-me author, whose name now escapes me, but his first name is Nicolas, and I devoured a book in two days - and there are lots more by him for me to enjoy, so I will be looking out for them in the library soon.

Now I am going to see if I can sort out some photos and edit them into some of these posts! Don't hold your breath, though...

Just a quick edit to say that I have managed to get some photos in there of the wardrobe, some pickle and some fab cake made to Mary Berry's recipe, so it may be worth a quick flick through some of the older entries to catch up on the photos - although there is one of my sore foot you may want to avoid if you are foot-phobic!!