Monday 16 March 2015

A Thrifty Lincolnshire Childhood

Ive escaped down to the Christians for a cuppa and a bitch this morning with my friends , weve been comparing our poverty horror stories . Its always a relief when youre talking to people in the same boat ..lol  we discussed toast as a means of hiding the mould on the bread and crumpets and discovered that our mothers did just the same things , told us to shut up and enjoy the Penicillin because it was free .
 The means of telling if a yogurt was gone off , bugger the date if the lid isnt mounding your safe , if the lid is mounding , poke it carefully if it doesnt explode into baking it can safely go , my gran used to use gone off milk in all her baked stuff and she won awards for it .
Cheese , into cheese sauce mouldy and dried up bits will go, also very useful for quiche as the herbs hide any trace of mould .
My Grandma though was the mistress of thrift, shed been a single parent back in the 30s with 5 kids , I can remember her sieving  flour to get the weevils out , whatever happened to weevils? have they become extinct or are there that many residual chemicals in flour that even a weevil doesnt want to live there . Do you still get weevils in organic flour?
She used to make huge footballs of used aluminium foil , then sell them to the rag and bone man , she collected all the glass , newspapers and rags and he paid her pennies for them as well , now the council charges us through the teeth for recycling .
We spent the summer holidays with her each year and across the road was the local dump , back in the 60s villages still had any convenient hole in the ground for the dump , she had the farmhouse over the road that shed had since the 30's because nobody wanted to live near the dump, it took her till the 50s to buy the house and land with the money raised from  stuff she pulled out of the dump. By the time we were 9 or 10 we had it to an art form , we were up stripping cable every morning, I was deployed when the posh cars pulled in to go and look pathetic and ask for stuff as i was such a little weed ..lol ...Did it do any of any harm ?  I dont think so , all my cousins are still experts at getting by , none of us have gone on to be millionaires , we just arent aspirational in the same way as others. But we all suffer from being hoarders because we can see a use for things ...lol  


No comments:

Post a Comment