My post was me being sarcastic tbh, sorry for the use of their. The tax on fuel is just getting stupid now, it was destroying businesses as it was. How much higher can they make the tax on fuel?.
Once this lot got in I had to sell my car. I can't ride a bike because of my dodgy knee so I am housebound. Thank goodness for the bus pass only there are no buses and no where to go. When I go out now I spend all my days sat in the library to keep warm. A pint down the pub is just a long forgotten dream. Thank goodness for my beard as I don't have to waste money on razor blades. I was saving a lot of money on soap and toothpaste but the very lovely mrs Godders didn't like the way I was starting to smell and insisted I started washing and brushing my teeth again. It is amazing the economies you can make when dire financial circumstances force it upon you. I can wear a shirt for a whole fortnight before it needs washing and the same with my socks. I am afraid that due to incontinence I have to change my underwear twice every day so no saving to be had there. Being old or sick in modern Tory ruled Britain isn't a lot of fun. I just hope I don't end up in hospital. Going to prison is a better prospect than that.
No I was laying it all on with a trowel. I am comfortably well off but never forget that there a lot of elderly people who live very lonely and quite isolated lives and really do fit the above description.
The new deal didnt get them out of depression it was the second world war. The new deal helped but it was incredibly wastefull and I dont think we as a country can afford to pay people to scare pigeons as they did back then!
I'm usually just a lurker here, but as a late 20-something I have to reply here. Your generation are responsible for this whole mess to start with. You had free uni education, final salary pentions, and far more other benifits than me & my generation. We're going to be the first generation to be poorer than our parents because you boomers spent all the money, and now you expect us to pay for you to get higher tax relief than us well because you haven't planned for it properly your old age properly. No thanks. God knows the age I'll get to retire at (or if I even get too), but I've already started planning & saving for it. Just like I'd been planning & saving for my first property from before age 16 - I finally bought it 6 months ago despite earning much less than even £20,000\year I saved up enough get a sustainable mortguage (the bank likes 40% deposits). You had the world handed to you on a plate, so if you can't afford a season ticket I have no sympathy as it's down to your own lack of self-disipline over your life-time; afterall, I can & I'm not going to get anything like your advantages during mine but I will still be able to afford a season ticket as I'm not profligate with my cash and know how to save & invest properly for the long term. Somthing your generation seems to have failed at. PS. if you're only getting 0.5% interest on your savings you're not looking around the market hard enough; it's hardly the chancellors fault that you're financial literacy isn't up to scratch.
It is at times like this when I wished I had listened to my Mother when I was younger, what did she say? I have no idea I never listened!
I will help you just this once... Stick a couple of grand into these http://www.tldh.org/ Looking at massive gains come the end of next month when they reveal the applications for new TLD's. Personally, i'm heavily stacked in this one and it's currently making up 40% of my portfolio as I have that much belief in it. Over the next 2/3 years i'm hoping for a rise on my bid price of 600%.
Don't worry St Godders, we'll get the lovely Saints Foundation girls to have the collection buckets out for fans to have a whip-round
Hello Killer and great to hear from you. This thread started as a light hearted tongue in cheek response to the budget and the worries we all face in these difficult financial times. However I must take issue with you over a number of points you have raised particularly some of your most sweeping generalisations. I also think you have swallowed the Tory’s propaganda hook line and sinker and you failed to pay attention in your history lessons at school. The austerity of my childhood and that for all other children in the forties and fifties is simply beyond your imagination. Most of the kids in my class went to school in clothes that had been handed down from older siblings or had been knitted by their mothers. Shoes were repaired at home until they got so bad they went to the cobbler. I still have my father’s last. If we had to wait to be able to afford the cobbler kids went to school with cardboard in their shoes. My mother would turn shirt collars and cuffs to eke out extra wear from them and socks and jumpers would be darned. We had only the radio for entertainment and the library to borrow books from to read. The house was heated by a single coal fire in the living room. In the winter the moisture on the bedroom windows was frozen to a sheet of ice. Only a small percentage of kids went to university because in those days you needed to be pretty clever to get a place. Most kids left school to work in shops, offices or factories. I had a five year apprenticeship being paid a pittance that you wouldn’t believe. I had to go to night school and to college while working and with the help of the people I worked with I ended up with good qualifications. At the age of fifteen when I started work I started saving for my retirement on the advice of my father. I have worked hard all my life with not a penny of benefits from the state and when I studied for my degree it was thanks to a bursary from my employers and I had to do it in my own time and carry on with my job. When I decided to save for a house I had to see the building society manager and I had to save with them for three years to demonstrate that I could keep a financial commitment. I could only borrow three times my salary and that was it. When I married every penny I saved went into buying my home and my wife and I moved into an empty house which we furnished with things that we borrowed, bought second hand, or I made. We had been married three years before we bought a TV. There were no easy bank loans then and HP was an expensive way to purchase anything. I didn’t have a car until I was 28 and holidays were two weeks camping in a field in Cornwall. I can assure you life was not easy and you didn’t just walk away from your wife and children because life was tough like a lot of young men do today. My working life spanned 50 years of 42 hour weeks minimum from when I was 15 through to my 65 birthday. How old will you be after you have worked for fifty years? So as far as today’s economic mess is concerned don’t point a finger at me the culprits are Thatcher and the Bankers, Thatcher for destroying British manufacturing and the Bankers for their sheer greed and arrogance towards their customers. Finally you will be very pleased to hear that my cash earns me an excellent 3.7% tax free interest. And finally, finally being young has always been tough. Get used to it!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto. SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah? THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: You're right there, Obadiah. FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh? FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea. SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: A cup o' cold tea. FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Without milk or sugar. THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Or tea. FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: In a cracked cup, an' all. FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper. SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth. THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor. FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son". FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, 'e was right. FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, 'e was. FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof. SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling. THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor! FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh. FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us. SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake. THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road. FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Cardboard box? THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Aye. FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt. SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky! THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife. FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah. FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you. ALL: They won't! - Sums it all up really.
Godders recall of his early life was almost exactly similar to mine except I did get to University on a full grant because my Dad's wages were too low. Ice on bedroom windows, reversing collars and cuffs, cutting sheets in half and stitching halves together to get rid of the holes, clothes bought from jumble sales, and second hand shoes. It sounds like a different planet. I never had a holiday until I went to Italy when I was 24. The difference was that this was seen as normal, so you didn't feel hard done by. I was well off because I had great parents who put us first..a lot of my friends had similar household incomes but had feckless parents. I do feel for the young who will have to wait so long for their pensions, but they forget this actually reflects the fact that people live longer. Pensioners today contributed NI payments all their lives, but the money raked in from the babyboomers (post-war children) was used to pay pensions for the pensioners at the time. The pensions for the large number of present day pensioners has to come from a smaller number of working people. Everyone knew this would happen, including the various governments over the years.
I believe that is the entire Four Yorkshiremen Monty Python sketch from Live at Drury Lane, typed out to perfection..!
There was a wonderful piece in the Gaurdian once, concerning Yorkshire accents. One of the reporters told a story about how he and a friend, went to Headingley to watch Yorkshire play their bitter rivals Lancashire, at cricket. Yorkshire batted first on a green track and were soon in trouble at 65-7 or similar. Whereupon said reporter remarked to his chum, "Yorkshire are bloody awful today". Before his acquaintance could reply, an old Tyke in the seats behind tapped him on the shoulder and uttered these immortal words "Dos't thy coom from Yorkshire lad?" (No was the reply) "Well then, shoot thy mouth, it's got now't to do wi't thee!" I was in a good mood for about a month after reading this.
Nah, just a generic picture I found on Google. Didn't want to post the actual Hamburglar because he looks like a rapist.
Or something worse than that even. It's the Milky Bar Kid after he's dropped a load of black bombers. please log in to view this image
