Surgical focus

How to live on £1 a day

2008-10-03T13:33:00.000-07:00

3 Oct 2008Since reading this article an obsession has been growing in me to work out how you could live on £1 a day. I don't know whether I'm going to try it or not but I think I've got it figured out:

1. Buy 2kg of rice, 2kg of pasta, 5kg of potatoes and 2kg of oats, all from your supermarket's economy range. This should come in around a fiver, and (with the addition of a few loaves of cheap bread) will sort out your carbohydrate needs for at least four weeks.

2. From the freezer section or from Iceland buy cheap frozen burgers, whitefish fillets and fishcakes. They should come in around £3 and should last you three months (i.e. you won't be eating them very often -- just as well, since the burgers will consist mostly of brain and testicles, the fishcakes of potato, and the whitefish is probably the last one left in the north sea). In each month you can spend another pound or so on (fresh economy range) sausages, bacon, mince or eggs. These will have been produced under the cruellest conditions imaginable. "How to live ethically" is a separate topic.

3. Buy half a kilo of chick peas or dried beans, a kilo of lentils, and a couple of tins of tomatoes and baked beans (another £2-3). If you need them, buy salt, sugar and sunflower oil. These should average around £1 a month.

4. Having bulk-bought these essentials, all that's left for your weekly shopping is milk, bread, occasional fresh meat, and fresh fruit and veg. A loaf of cheap bread and two pints of milk is around £1, leaving you with a luxurious £3 - £3.50 a week to spend on (tinned, frozen or fresh) vegetables and the odd bit of fruit. This is actually quite a generous amount as long as you don't buy anything too exotic. Fresh carrots and onions, and frozen peas are surely the cheapest items. For other things buy seasonally, remembering that the delicious seasonal freshness of your veg will be compensating the drab nourishing utility of your other items. Fruit and veg from the market are often cheapest; you don't necessarily save much by buying frozen.

This remainder also gives you room to buy the odd budget frozen meal, if you're feeling lazy, e.g. chicken kievs or pizza from Iceland (at an exorbitant £1). Alternatively, you might want to spend it on spices (say one pack a month so you gradually build a collection), otherwise your food's going to be on the bland side.

When it comes down to it I would have a lot of difficulty sticking to this plan for an extended period, though, mainly because there isn't much scope for cheese, chocolate, tea or coffee, let alone booze. To make it really liveable perhaps one could add, say, £4 a month of treat money, to be spent alternately on chocolate, cheese, wine, beer, tea and coffee.

I haven't included other household essentials but reckon you can get these for under £3 a month. If you're using a bike as transport (as I do) you'll also need to keep a couple of pounds a month for repairs, light batteries, etc. If I was going to do this I would initially aim to spend £1 a day on food and allow myself to spend whatever I want on other items (drinks, music, films, socialising, household goods, transport). If that went successfully I could see whether I could work the other items in, although I don't think my cd habit would ever fit within any kind of reasonable weekly budget.

I haven't concocted 28 recipes yet to show how you could live off this array of nasty cheap food. For the sausages, bacon, mince and burgers I would probably add them to some kind of spicy tomato sauce with vegetables and serve with rice or pasta, scooping up the leftovers with stodgy white half-stale bread the next day.
Personally I'm not that fond of potatoes but they're a very cheap form of carbohydrate and I can imagine becoming quite dependent on them to fill up. In fact you might want to decrease the amount of rice, pasta and bread in order to get through the 5kg of potatoes that come in an economy-sized bag.

The oats are also an important part since a good bowl of porridge in the morning (more or less) removes the urge for mid-morning snacks. The lentils would get made into curry, kichuri or soup; the beans would end up in a spicy sauce, similar to the meat (sometimes combining with the meat, e.g. chili with mince and kidney beans), or in salads (e.g. with grated carrot); the chick peas could become hummus. Fishcakes with peas and salad; burgers and chips; omelette and mashed potato; sausages and mash -- would form a blander (and easy-cook) complement to all the spicy sauces. For quick lunches (to take to work), you could get cheap jam to spread on the bread, but it would be a lot more nutritious and filling if you can manage always to have some leftovers, baked beans, cheese, or cooked eggs or meat.

None of these things would take more than 10 or 20 minutes to make (plus a bit of soaking, defrosting and oven-cooking time). You could, of course, venture into home baking, but I'm not sure that would actually save much money given the cheapness of supermarket baked products. A more useful direction would be to grow my own veg and herbs. Apparently growing more potatoes than you can eat is pretty easy.

Of course this whole thing is ridiculous, when you're spending hundreds of pounds a month on rent/mortgage and bills. I'm not sure why it fascinates me so much. It really emphasises how ridiculously high the cost of housing is, though. I spend around £12 a day on rent. What kind of warped values are we assigning where just to have a roof over your head costs twelve times the amount needed to eat? Supposedly the era of cheap food is over - no, not yet it's not.

Been a while

2008-10-03T13:32:00.001-07:00

3 Oct 2008

Been away. I'm back now though.

Movies: Brick Lane, Persepolis

2007-12-08T14:43:00.000-08:00

8 Dec 2007 Brick Lane was a little disappointing. A small indie film that occasionally leads you into expecting something grander, visually very impressive, but with a jarring tendency to signpost plot developments a bit too blatantly, something I'm more accustomed to in dumb American action films. You half expect a subtitle to come up saying (for instance) "Watch out! Karim is becoming radicalised following the anti-muslim backlash to 9/11".

Persepolis - much better. Converted from the autobiograhpical graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi, and following her childhood in Iran, and her moves to Austria as a teenager, back to Iran, and later to France, the stark black and white images work beautifully as a film.

2007-12-08T14:10:00.000-08:00

8 Dec 2007

There is no place in the world that does not have structures of authority and domination that are (in my view) illegitimate, and that should be dismantled in the interests of creating a more free and just society. Furthermore, I expect that to be true forever; it’s part of the “human condition”.
Chomsky

2007-12-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

8 Dec 2007

The Daily Mail, as you know, is engaged in a philosophical project of mythic proportions: for many years now it has diligently been sifting through all the inanimate objects in the world, soberly dividing them into the ones which either cause - or cure - cancer.
Bad Science

2007-12-08T14:07:00.000-08:00

8 Dec 2007

Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration." If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"
Dorothy Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech

Earning more makes men's brains light up

2007-11-23T11:56:00.000-08:00

23 Nov 2007 "On receiving a paypacket, how good a man feels depends on how much his colleague earns in comparison, scientists say." (BBC)

Not the first study to come up with something like this, but apparently the first that looks directly at reaction in the 'reward centre' of the brain. I can't remember undergrad psychology well enough to know how sceptical to be about this. But anyway, it's not surprising – money has no meaning beyond the one we give it socially, and that social meaning is intuitively very likely to take comparisons into account. It would be interesting to see if the same results would pertain if the reward being given was say, chocolate, or sex. (More detailed report on Medicexchange.com)
Image source: Wikipedia user Genesis12

Watching Us

2007-11-21T16:11:00.001-08:00

22 Nov 2007 As the recent Discgate fiasco has shown, incompetence, laziness and stupidity will always outflank sly intelligence when it comes to government data collection. This is what makes me think that the paranoid types who fret about ID cards, CCTV, and the plans to make us answer 53 questions before being allowed to leave the country, are worried for the wrong reasons.

The reason they should be worried is this. Governments gather information as a legitimating exercise for arbitrary acts of brutality. This is evident, for instance in the sham trials conducted before imprisoning and deporting asylum seekers, or in the dodgy dossier used to support the Iraq war. Needless information gathering also, of course, acts as a constant reminder both of the government's power over us and of the supposed terror threat surrounding us. They'll never be able to do anything with all that information – they haven't got the capacity to process it (or even store it securely), and generally don't need to, when they can spin whatever information they have into a justification for whatever they feel like doing.

At Least the Trains Ran on Time

2007-11-21T15:04:00.000-08:00

21 Nov 2007 The Times uses the death of Ian Smith as an excuse to go all Major Beaglehole over the situation in Zimbabwe.

Look, I'm not defending Mugabe in any way, but let's get a couple of things straight. First, the British media coverage of Zimbabwe has been disgustingly disproportionate; this particularly struck me when I watched sympathetic local news reports on a white Zimbabwean asylum seeker, contrasting sharply with the coverage of black African asylum seekers.

Second, land reform had to happen in a country where a white 1% of the population owned 70% of the land. In the long run, land reform is important both for equality and efficiency reasons; having a small elite own all the land isn't good in any sense (even the World Bank says so [pdf]). The fact that it's happened in a spectacularly bad way cannot be detached totally from the way this elite held on for so long.

BBC News

2007-11-16T15:08:00.000-08:00

Here's some scarily compliant reporting from the BBC.

What Kind of Reader am I?

2007-11-16T14:50:00.000-08:00

16 Nov 2007

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Book Snob You like to think you're one of the literati, but actually you're just a snob who can read. You read mostly for the social credit you can get out of it.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Dedicated Reader
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Yep it's a fair cop.

On the Rebound: Early Nineties Indie Bands

2007-11-08T16:15:00.000-08:00

8 Nov 2007Perhaps it's the feeling that that they were swept away all too hastily with the debris of grunge, that has given license to so many early nineties indie bands to reform. Pixies, Breeders, Dinosaur Jr, Sebadoh, and now apparently a new My Bloody Valentine album.

And is it just a sign of my own ageing that, while I'm not overwhelmed with excitement to see the bands that I was crazy about when I was 17 reappearing, it's still good to have them back, and I don't see this as selling out? They're all too exuberant to seem like sad old has-beens in need of a new revenue stream – see for example the Breeders at All Tomorrow's Parties in 2002, throwing a big inflatable hammer into the audience; and Dinosaur Jr supplanting Thurston Moore's kid's band as an in-joke in their corny video (the wacky fellows, J managing to keep his double chin up while Lou Barlow still looks about 25).

Shoot 'Em Up: Update on the Arms Trade

2007-11-06T15:07:00.000-08:00

6 Nov 2007

Mike Turner departs as BAE chief exec

Mike Turner took over as chief executive of BAE in 2001. Under his watch the company more than trebled its share price, rode out several rows over costs and a Serious Fraud Office investigation in the UK, and became the “world's biggest maker of armoured vehicles at a time when US and UK military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq has created a huge demand” (Guardian). And neatly shifted much of the burden of risk involved in large contracts, off of BAE and onto the taxpayer.

The truculent Mr Turner called the MoD's bluff, refusing to sign new contracts unless the government agreed to pay more for ones that proved unexpectedly difficult. And he threatened to decamp for America, a much bigger defence market, unless the government started treating BAE like a national champion and guaranteeing it the lion's share of future contracts. He won on all these points.Economist

Yet Turner's abrasive style made him some enemies, including BAE chairman Dick Olver. Moreover a damaging US Justice Department probe is still ongoing and the SFO continues to probe the ‘‘the company’s dealings in at least six countries’’ (FT). According to one defence analyst cited in the FT, his departure may reinforce an impression in the US that the corruption charges are "old news, not worth pursuing".

For all his good work Turner is expected (according to This is Money) to receive a potential leaving handout of £35m and to while his time away until retirement with a FTSE-100 chairmanship.

Other sources: Times (1); Times (2)

Saudi Royal visit

Britain's most sensitive and controversial relationship in the Middle East faces protests and boycotts during a state visit by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, just weeks after a lucrative new defence contract made clear that it was business as usual between the two countries.Guardian

Control BAE month of action

The Campaign Against the Arms Trade is calling upon all local campaigners and groups to take concerted action on the Control BAE campaign in November.

Global Day of Action to Ban Cluster Bombs

On 5th November campaigners in 40 countries around the world called on their governments to attend the Vienna Conference on Cluster Munitions in one month’s time from 5 – 7 December and to support a global treaty banning cluster bombs. Cluster Munition Coalition

That's Amazing! Animal of the Week: the Hen Harrier

2007-10-31T14:38:00.000-07:00

31 Oct 2007It's known as England's most persecuted bird of prey, and no wonder, with Prince Harry denying shooting them on Sandringham (even though he and his friend were the only people known to have been out shooting on the estate at the time) and French photographers tormenting them to get some good footage for YouTube.

There are estimated to be only about 20 breeding pairs in England. A taste for grouse makes it "the enemy of gamekeepers" and

Some conservationists claim there is an unspoken expectation on many hunting estates that gamekeepers will kill any bird or animal which preys on grouse, or risk losing their jobs.Source: BBC

In related news, it's nice to see the foreign press taking an interest in our beloved royals... I can't understand what this story on Viscount Linley is about, though. It doesn't seem to have been covered by our papers so can't be anything major, I suppose.

First image credit: Walter Siegmund (via Wikipedia)

Month of music

2007-10-28T16:56:00.000-07:00

Islaja - supporting Animal Collective in Brighton tomorrow. Reminds me of Movietone. (This song's even prettier)
Will Oldham and Scout Niblett - I'm still not sure that Scout Niblett is more than a pale Cat Power imitation, and that Will Oldham's collaboration mania over the past few years doesn't signal creative bankruptcy. Still this is great though.
(1) I'm still listening to the Nina Nastasia and Jim White album a lot. (2) Jim O'Rourke gets a new toy, the Tenori-On.

Music and Film: Things We Lost in the Fire

2007-10-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

Over-rated Sam Mendes, looking for a title for his new Halle Berry grief movie, seems to have found inspiration in a Low album from 2001. Even the font is the same. And perversely, they don't seem to have used Low's music, instead using an overwrought Frays song.

Film and Music: Control and Stereolab

2007-10-18T15:30:00.001-07:00

Watching Control, the film about Ian Curtis and Joy Division – an amazing film but one that doesn't attempt to make sense of the events it relates – made me feel like listening to... some early Stereolab. It's something to do with the moments in that film where you realise Joy Division made puritan, sublime pop music (at least some of the time), and some excitable part of my brain made the link.

Unfortunately YouTube has a short memory, so the only early Stereolab video I can bring you doesn't exactly fit the point I'm trying to make. If only there was something from Switched On.

That's Amazing! Animal of the Week: the Diver or Loon

2007-10-17T14:09:00.001-07:00

In giving the name Loonwatch to my intended occasional series highlighting dodgy campaigns, organisations and websites, especially those that manage to work their way into mainstream news sources, I didn't realise that Loon is the American name for the diver, a group of aquatic birds, or that there are a number of programmes and blogs dedicated to watching them. Sorry! If anyone can think of a better name, do let me know.

The Common Loon is the provincial bird of Ontario and is depicted on the Canadian one-dollar coin, which has come to be known affectionately as the "loonie".Wikipedia
Air and water pollution, shoreline development, and increasing recreational activities on lakes all pose serious threats to loons in North America, and in some cases are responsible for loons and loon music disappearing from traditional nesting lakes.Sigurd Olsen Environmental Institute

Here are your facts, anyway:

The name comes from its haunting, yodelling, cry.
They swallow small pebbles to help their gizzard digest hard food such as crustacian exoskeletons and salamander bones.
They are considered one of the most primitive birds, having kept their current form for one million years.

Sources: Wikipedia, SOEI. Photo: US Fish and Wildlife Service, via Wikipedia.

Loonwatch: Safespeed

2007-10-17T13:23:00.000-07:00

"20 mph speed limit proposal for towns could be flawed," reports Reuters. Its reliable source for this oddly-weighted headline is Verdict on Cars, an online motoring magazine. It quotes Paul Smith of Safespeed. What is this sinister Safe Speed organisation? Presumably the initials "SS" provide some clue to their political orientation, and they are in fact a front for a vile neo-nazi pro-motoring party headed by Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Littlejohn? Sadly not, although Smith's website provides some little gems of poor reasoning, such as this page denouncing congestion charges, which seems oblivious to the fact that congestion affects people other than motorists. As well as plenty of tips for motorists to dodge the law.

Smith's main argument comes close to existentialism: drivers robbed of their autonomy by Stalinist New Labour, programmed to drive at exactly 20mph in built up areas and 70 on the motorway, will be simply incapable of deviating from that speed, whether there's an open road ahead of them or an entire class of dithering, unobservant schoolchildren. Of course it's pointless to try and engage with these arguments, being as they are merely outbursts of rage of the caged middle-aged male motorist. If you want a picture of the future – imagine a loafer, stamping on the accelerator – forever.

UPDATE: Having done a tiny bit more research on this I realise that Smith is already known to Youtube users as the Bloke on Sky News who acts like David Brent, to George Monbiot readers for his convoluted arguments, and to Wikipedia users who make unsubstantiated (but somehow pleasing) claims about links to libertarian groups. I did my duty and added Safe Speed to SourceWatch

Loonwatch will form an occasional series highlighting dodgy campaigns, organisations and websites, especially those that manage to work their way into mainstream news sources. Apologies to the Loonwatch blog which is a different thing entirely.

The Conservative Party

2007-10-15T16:55:00.000-07:00

A High Court judge has ruled that the Conservatives should not be allowed to keep an £8m bequest by a "delusional" man who thought Margaret Thatcher could "save the world from satanic monsters," according to this beautiful story in the Telegraph. Surprising to see the Telegraph labelling it a delusion.

That's Amazing! Animal of the Week: the Tarsier

2007-10-14T16:33:00.000-07:00

We all know and love the tarsier from its roles in films like Gremlins. But did you know...

they eat primarily insects but also birds and snakes
they catch their prey by jumping at them, and can even catch birds in motion as they jump from tree to tree
when caged they have been known to injure and even kill themselves because of the stress.

I have to say that my own caged pet tarsier has been fine so far. Just let it loose near the bird feeder now and then, and it's quite content. Source: Wikipedia

This will form a regular series until I run out of animals. The title 'That's Amazing' is due to the Fast Show.

Me

2007-10-12T17:16:00.001-07:00

I live in Brighton.

This blog is a poorly thought-out vanity project inspired partly by the pretentious art/philosophy magazines I was reading today in Borders. I'm aiming to post at least one visually stimulating, and one intellectually stimulating article per week. Beyond that there will be no limits at all on the type of content.

It's named after a Guided by Voices song.

I intend to have a few regular features on this blog:

That's Amazing! Animal of the Week – a regular series until I run out of animals. The title 'That's Amazing' is due to the Fast Show
Loonwatch – an occasional series highlighting dodgy campaigns, organisations and websites, especially those that manage to work their way into mainstream news sources. Apologies to the Loonwatch blog which is a different thing entirely.
Shoot 'Em Up: File on the Arms Trade – occasional news gathering on weapon-vendors

As well as this scattershot blog I am thinking about setting up a website on education and international development. It would be a community-generated site collecting news and new research, hosting discussions, and aggregating blogs written by people such as education researchers and teachers working in developing countries. If anyone's interested please get in touch.