SLAVING over a ruled notebook and a shoebox full of receipts has been keeping me out of mischief. Yet again, in spite of the money man's annual telling off, preparing the accounts has been a last-minute affair.
Every year the resolution is to do a little bit of book keeping on a weekly basis but it never happens.
Aged 16, the examination board awarded this candidate an "E", one up from an "F-for-fail" for maths, and it's still a subject that holds absolu
tely no interest. Mind you, given the economic crisis, it does seem that the old shoebox method is a more efficient fiscal policy than many.
It is a time for getting back to basics, for reaching for another jumper rather than the central heating switch. Regular readers will know that this is a policy long-advocated by the Husband…
Our heating goes on annually in October and is turned off in March. This year, instead of the luxury of one hour at each end of the day, we had to choose when to have our 60 minutes of warmth. Children's bath and bedtime won, the theory being that they'll get dressed quicker and stop faffing around on a morning with a bit of chill in the air. On the flipside they'll hopefully be helped on their way to sleep with a little warmth.
One of my grandmothers is celebrating her 90th birthday. It was a happy coincidence, as she was a farmer's daughter and then wife, that the four score years and ten coincided with the village school's harvest celebrations. They did some super singing, but we didn't get We Plough the Fields and Scatter. And Harvest festival at the church fell on the same day as a christening invitation, so another year has slipped by without a good sing of the favourite hymn.
Looking at the history of harvest festivals, I stumbled across something called Plough Sunday in January. This service, on the first Sunday after Epiphany, dates back to medieval times but is new to me. Apparently, in the olden days the parish's ploughs, bedecked with ribbons, would be dragged to church to be blessed. Then, on Plough Monday, the ploughs would be hauled around the village on the lookout for contributions to a night of ale drinking. There'd be a lot of recovery going on come Plough Tuesday, but then work would begin in earnest. Sounds what a lot of people could do with. A bit of a jolly before noses back to the grindstone.
There's a lot of talk about us rearing some pigs, and, with advocates getting excited about "filling the freezer", this Ken Dodd joke springs to mind.
"Tonight, when you get home, put a handful of ice cubes down your wife's nightie and say: 'There's the chest freezer you always wanted'.
As one critic of the octogenarian comedian's latest show put it, it's advice like that which will get us through these hard times.
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