It's easy to live on £1.00 a day when someone else buys you lunch. Obviously. So not a lot to say about yesterday and today overall. My parents came over to visit for the day and we went for lunch and then had a look around the art gallery in Manchester. It was quite good, particularly an exhibition of photographs by local Martin Parr of normal people doing normal things, but taken decades ago and so looking indescribably alien. I was touched by the display of pictures of patients from Prestwich Hospital (what was, back then, called an "asylum") in the 1970s. The tedium. The untreated psychosis. The institutionalisation. The freedom? Or the opposite? Their faces, their clothes, their gestures - a lot about these pictures was familiar to me. My first job as a mental health support worker was working with older men who'd spent their entire adult lives shut away in Prestwich Hospital, for illnesses that today would barely get them two half-hour home visits a week. I thought I even recognised a face or two (about the right age), but I wasn't sure.
After lunch, which was courtesy of Dad, came some time of my own to kill. I'd elected to cover another night shift (why do I do this to myself?) but it was barely 5pm and I didn't have to be in for another 2 plus hours. A sensible thing to do would have been to settle in to a corner of quiet pub (if such a thing exists in Manchester on a Saturday night) with a glass of lemonade, but I'm not being sensible. And the day's budget was £1.22. I don't think that'd even stretch to cover a lemonade. So I found a bag of pitta breads for 60p in Tesco and did a couple of laps of the Northern Quarter before jumping on a bus into work. "If you called your Dad you could stop it all..."
Snacks overnight were homemade bread and chutney from summer, preceded be a sneaky tin of microwaved beans over the remaining pitta bread. When I finally made it home for sleep around 9:30am, I heated up 2 more tins of beans and scoffed them down. That was that. Beans, beans, baked beans. The stockpile is running very low now indeed.
Today's budget was £1.62, from which I rustled a bag of spuds and another broccoli (£1.50) so it's roasties and broccoli for dinner. Plenty of that to see me through to tomorrow. Tomorrow's budget: £1.12.
Oh, and you know what? There's a Facebook group called "Feed Yourself for £1 a day". It has over 10,000 members now.
Related posts
£1.00 a Day Eating Challenge: Round Two, Day One
£1.00 a Day Eating Challenge Update
Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site. I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog. So it's really nothing to be afraid of. Cheers.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Your comments are welcome.