Tips for getting through the credit crunch

With all the media hype about the credit crunch recently, I decided to start cutting back on spending a bit in case I found myself out of work. Not that a recession would make any difference, I tend to lose my job every 6-9 months, recession or no, probably because I keep pissing my bosses off.

I guess at this point I might also want to put my lack of recent blogging down to the credit crunch, but that would be lying.

This week though, I've decided to make the best of the global financial crisis and use it as an excuse to be even cheaper than usual. I decided to cut down the outgoings by shopping in charity shops as always and generally not going out. Same as every other day. And not shaving. That should please some of my readers...

Some of my super buys this week include this Vietnam national football team shirt (2 quid from Fara charity tat shop on Shepherd's Bush Green)



And this ceramic replica of Chthulhu the octopus-headed embodiment of evil from a little charity shop in Roehampton. (£1.50)



In fact, I found that shortly after going frugal I started to get a little obsessed with the idea. Thing is I don''t give a damn about saving money as such, but just the feeling that I have sniffed out a "bargain" is enough to make me quite happy.

As a result, I have started visiting The Money Saving Expert every day and scrolling through the forums for bargains, for no other reason than to be a bit tight.

For your information this is what I found:

P&O are giving away a crate of 6 bottles of wine worth £28 when you book a day trip to France for £30! Credit Crunch?! What credit crunch! The gang are heading off to France in the first weekend of December and knowing us we'll be taking most of the rest of December to actually drink the wine.

Travelodge are doing a load of rooms for 9 quid - That's gotta be a bargain, even if Travelodge rooms are usually next to motorways! A night next to a motorway for 9 quid has gotta be a bargain!

Anyway I'll let you search the rest yourself. I was out today though, playing squash with Matt and he tells me that Poundstretcher are now selling selected porn mags for a quid.

So if you were worried the credit crunch might hit you hard in the pocket and you'd have to make cutbacks, fear not poundstretcher saves the day again!

I must confess I am a little worried about what sort of quality pornography you can reasonably expect for a pound, but apparently it's been security tagged for theft.

Can you imagine going to court for that...

chocolates

I don't usually eat chocolate, but I just bought these in Belgium and they are covered in mathematical differential identities so that's ok then

Picking cherries

A while back, having been sacked from yet another teaching job I was flicking through the job pages looking for a job with as little responsibility as possible, when I saw an ad for a cherry picker.

Looking at the salary I could hardly believe my eyes, and called them immediately.

"Do you have a forklift licence?" was the first question they asked me.

"No," I replied, "but I used to pick my own strawberries as a child"

Turns out that a cherry picker is one of those hydraulic ladder things with the bucket on the end that you stand in that they use to lift people up to high places.

D'oh

Sanchi - why did you do that?

Dade - watch this right the way to the end. It starts off like a pretty wooden 'fu movie...

Subliminal messages in the bathroom

I was brushing my teeth earlier when I noticed in the mirror that my bottle of Wash and Go, which was upside down on the bathside, seemed to uncannily read

Eco Mash

Have any of my readers ever experienced such subliminal messages in strange places?

Horoscopes part 2

Having decided to live my entire life by what the horoscopes tell me to do following their particularly accurate and not-coincidental-at-all advice on Monday and Tuesday I found in the papers on Thursday the happy news that I should "Go out and spend a load of money to cheer yourself up"

WOOHOOO! I'm not one to believe in bogus claptrap like religion or other related psychobabble but if Mystic Meg tells me to go out and crack the credit card out and get lashed then who am I to argue. So far so good.

Friday was a little less of a self-indulgent one, and i was told that I had to listen to some of my friends opinions over the weekend for a change. So give me some opinions and I promise I'll listen to you this weekend cos the astrologer told me to.

This is a one-off so you'd better make the most of it.

Demonstration eyeballs

I went to the opticians the other day to get some contact lenses for carnical annd while there I thought I would look into the more snazzy cosmetic ones too.

The optician was really nice and gave me a few trial coloured lenses to try out.

Today I went down to Brighton with Mr S and The Amber one and in a bit of a rush out the door I thought I'd slip the contacts in.

Having brown eyes naturally, the orange wasn't immediately noticed on the train and when I turned to Mr S and asked him if he noticed the eyes, he hadn't. So I pointed them out and got him to look a little closer.

As he peered inwards he said

"Actually geezer the colour isn't exactly obvious but why the hell have they got the word 'DEMO' written across them?"

"They do?! Shit!" I had previously harboured fantasies of getting hundreds of free contact lenses from opticians and having ladies peering deeply into my eyes drawn like moths to flames to their mystical artificial allure. So much for that plan. May as well tell em I get all my clothes from Oxfam as well. Back to the drawing board then.

A mountain to climb

I took up a beginners climbing course the other day and was dead pleased to find that not only did my course only have one other person on it, that other person was female and a babe.

After a couple of hours of course, I thought we were getting on quite well and that maybe I could stand a chance next week. I made her smile and everything.

It was only when I got down the pub I realised that I had been wearing my T-shirt back to front the whole time and that she was most likely laughing at me in pity.

D'oh.

Horoscopes

Having left teaching at the end of last term I started work as an e-learning advisor in auniversity a few weeks back. It's been a pretty tough few weeks, mainly trying to get my head around the structure of university and how it works, but also trying to adapt to now being a passive resource rather than an active one.

Being totally bored at work and in the UK in general I have started serious daydreaming lately. The words "GO TO VIETNAM!" have shot through my head more than once and I have been actively looking at the international jobs boards to see if it's a possibility.

It's not that I can't do the job I have, I just find that the pace is so different from schools, and I'm not on the front line. In short, I feel that advising on e-learning so someone else can do the teaching hasn't come to easily to me. Still, just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth trying to do.

So on Monday, I was daydreaming about when I could next shoot off to the sun and, sat on the train I picked up the free rag and read the horoscope, which read,

Bored at work? Why not plan a holiday so you have something to look forward to. That will calm your nerves.

Damn. That sounds like a good idea. So I started planning to go to Trinidad for carnival next year.

Yesterday I was sat around daydreaming on the train about when I could soonest get back in to a classroom when I picked up the same rag and it said

Don't make any rash decisions. It may be a drag at the moment but it will be a good investment if you just stick it out

Bloody hell. It's like Mystic Meg is watching me!

So I've decided, on the basis of this evidence to leave all future decisions to the the horoscope dudes who write in the London evening papers.

Watch this space...

NOOOO Carnival season is over

Thames Festival Night Carnival, originally uploaded by Mr Jam.

Just enough time to get one more in though...

The final countdown

Just to check
>>>has the large hadron collider destroyed the world yet?<<<

Camping the Israeli army way

I saw this in the bus station while waiting to go from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea.



They just don't make soldiers like they used to.

The room/flat situation deepens

I've been looking for a new place to stay, and have checked the Guntree South of the river (wimbledon, roehampton, putney) and north of the river (Hammersmith, Ladbroke Grove) and today the situation has got so bad I have been looking at the gay section.

Personally I am not sure how a room can be gay and I don't know why it should matter that there is a gay person in the house, but I have noticed that in the gay section they have ROOMshares, where you stay in not just the same house but the same room.

Not yet sure I am ready for that one.

Ripped off and pissed off

So this week I haven't been on the internet a lot because I have been trying to move into a flat. I found out that the guy I paid the money to, isn't actually the owner and he's tried to rip me off £1300 and hasn't given me a contract.

As a result I find myself without a roof over my head and he now has a months rent.

His name is Richard Boardman, and he's a lawyer, so if you ever come across this name watch out as he will rip you off.

Flatshare

Just been browsing through gumtree for a place to live in London now that I'm back and working here and stuff.

The choices I was faced with at the top offer me either

1. South London
2. North London
   
3. Gay London
   

and I'm trying to work out if Gay London is anywhere near Roehampton where I start working next week. Anyone heard of this place?

Israel chronicles - Day 2 - 8 August (from the blogphone)

Up early and on the 11am bus, no 444 from Eilat with the intention of stopping at Masada and Ein Gedi. Manage somehow to sleep through Masada and ended up in Jerusalem. Doh. Shacked up with Sam and Grainne and booked into the Hebron hostel for 3 nights. Went out to look for food and ended up in one of the most holy temples in Christendom, apparently the site of Calvary, the hill where Jesus was crucufied. Not a bad series of mistakes if i must say so myself. Continued walking and ended up at the Dome of the rock, the most photographed monument in the world, sacred to christians, jews and muslims as it was the place where Abraham offered his son as a sacrifice to God before God said he was only joking about the whole sacrifice thing. For the muslims it was the place where Mohamed said Beam me up Goddy and the Big Man turned him into Superman and he ascended to Heaven. Pretty mental stuff huh!

After this and chatting to a pretty autistic American jew (alright correct that to read 'being talked AT by a pretty autistic American Jew') we made our way down to the Wailing wall where we saw loads and loads of jews praying and being really communal. That was really humbling.

But by that time i was ravenous and couldn't hang around being humble, so the three of us went looking for food, but the Sabbath had started.

In judaism, the Sabbath means total rest. This means in the more orthodox cases that you can't even break bread cos that would constitute doing work!

So getting someone to cook us food was going to prove a little difficult in a country populated by Jews.

Luckily for us the archenemy was close at hand and we made a beeline for the Palestinian quarter of town where we picked up a pizza and sat on the terrace doing some of the most interesting people-watching i've ever done.

As the prayer time ended, streams of orthodox jews came streaming out of the square and made their way home past our restaurant. Armed soldiers and police lined the streets and me and Sam watched fascinated as the most beautiful Israeli girls (yes Israeli girls are absolutely stunning. ALL of them.) strolled past with these really strange looking guys with long sideburns and black suits and hats.

As they went past our restaurant we noticed a very odd thing. On the opposite side of the road was a Palestinian guy and he appeared to be shouting at the owner of the place we were eating at.

The owner appeared to shout back. Then we noticed that one or two of the jews would look at him and smile condescendingly.

It would seem that the Palestinian was taking the opportunity of the Sabbath to slag the Jews off straight to their faces! As it was the Sabbath i guess that jew-baiting was fair game as punching a mouthy Palestinian in the face probably constituted doing work so they knew they were safe!

After a short spot of night shooting with the Canon i rambled through the alleyways back to the Hebron hostel and wondered what this fascinating city still held in store.

Israel chronicles - Day 1 - 7 August (from the blogphone)

Mainly travelling from Cairo to Taba. Slept most the way.
At the border at Taba you have to jump off and walk across on foot, then taxi to Eilat from the border (40 shekels)

Lots of hassle at the border becuase i have UAE and Kuwait stamps all over the place. Took about an hour and 50 questions to get through. Seemed like posturing really. Told the border guard i am not remotely interested in Middle Eastern politics. Initially not too hopeful about getting in as my passport has only 4 months left til it expires but it turned out they didn't really care much about that.

Met 2 travellers, Grainne and Sam who were coming from Cairo on a tour and were stoped at the border. Their bus left them there and continued driving to Jerusalem and i ended up in the same hostel dorm with them. Good old Lonely Planet!

Then went out for sushi. Cost about 26 pounds i think but am gonna blame the currency conversion newness rather than indulgence for that. Great Salmon Nigiri that melted on the tongue.

After that went down to the beachfront where there are loads of market stalls and cool stuff for sale and bought a beer in Three Monkeys where i noticed i kept falling asleep so went back to the Arava hostel and called it a night.

Whatever happened to the Dosaboys?

I'm meeting Ivan tonight for a drink.

Check >>this<< out. Chances are he'll put me under and make me drive a crap vehicle across South America. Fingers crossed.

No sign of Nick though. Maybe he's killed himself.

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You know it's carnival season when... - Part 1

You know it's carnival season when I look like this and when vitamin enhanced chocolate milkshake constitutes a full meal.