Eurgh.

Firstly, “eurgh” because it’s gone 1am AGAIN and I should be asleep.

Secondly, “eurgh” because I’m taking part in the Live below the line challenge, which starts on Monday and finishes on Friday.

Essentially, participants have to live on £5 for those five days to raise awareness of extreme poverty throughout the globe, and in addition, raise some sponsorship for the numerous charities that do a fantastic job of trying to alleviate this.

FIVE POUNDS STERLING! I can see that evaporate in a morning, as I’m sure most people can. But having spent months going on about people in this country whinging about not having enough money to feed their families, saying that people need to learn to budget properly and cook a few basic meals, I figured it was time I did something to put my money where my mouth is and show that it can be done to absolute extremes.

I’ve kind of got a plan in my head of what I need to do, but I’m not sure it will pan out in reality when I go to Asda/Lidl/Aldi with my fiver tomorrow.

My meal plans for the week are:

I know that butternut squash is 0.1p/g. Or do I? I got 0.56Kg for 56p the other day, so what does that make? Anyway, I’ll get one of those.

Spaghetti can be bought for 19p a packet

Garlic is 30p a head

I’m sure I can get a couple of onions for about 30-40p

Leeks can’t be that expensive if you get dodgy looking ones

Value potatoes? No idea.

So with veggies hopefully coming in at less than £2 – £2.50, I’m hoping that I can get a couple of cans of tinned tomatoes for about 80p or less.

That leaves things that we take for granted: store cupboard items. I’ll need oil, stock cubes, salt and pepper, maybe some herbs. With about £1.50 in my pocket, I’m not hopeful of getting these.

I should’ve got my arse into gear and gone to the market at closing time today.

The whole challenge will mean a devastating blow to my caffeine addiction. I won’t be able to buy coffee or Pepsi Max. I won’t have funds for fizzy water, but water from the tap is good. I’ll have to get used to it.

It’s only five days. Just five days. Next Saturday, I’ll be filling my fat face on all sorts of shit again. For millions of people around this planet, there’s a lifetime condemned to absolute poverty with no hope of release. We can’t feel guilty for this, we as individuals haven’t put these people in their situation, and by luck we were born in affluent societies where we know it’s our duty to ensure that the poorest are looked after.

So I’m planning to do this properly. But something wound me up tonight; I learned that somebody had got their hoard together for the week by essentially scrounging off people. They’d cadged some free teabags, got some canned food that was going to go to landfill, got some free vegetables from friends, etc, etc and still had funds for actual shopping for the task. That’s not in the spirit of things, surely?

I can feel myself getting really pious about this. I mean, yeah, I can easily live off a fiver if I use the free coffee at work, nick the salt, pepper and sugar there, go to my mum and dad’s for tea, use the “you’ve won a free Big Mac” token that I got from McDonalds last week. But that’s just wrong. I actually want to track that person down and give them a slap. Fuckers. FUCKERS.

“Oh, look at me, being all clever with my fiver. I’m going to Subway at closing time to get free sarnies that they give to tramps.”

FUCK YOU! Do it properly, or don’t fucking bother.

Hark at me. Doing it properly would mean me giving up the trappings of my privileged life and actually doing something to help full time. This can only ever be a gesture and nothing more. At least if one things comes of this, people will for just a second think, could I do that? How do they do that?

Find me at Live below the line

I was a bit stuck as to what to have for my tea tonight, so perused my cupboards and fridge for inspiration:

Sausages, mouldy mushrooms, piece of parmesan cheese, half a packet of reduced fat grated plastic cheese, celery, months old potatoes, older parsnips, carrots.

Having worked myself up to have braised sausages with crushed old new potatoes, it just seemed too much effort (bung some sausages in the oven with onions and a bit of stock, boil some potatoes, I know). I went for the easier option of nachos.

I have hit rock bottom.

With some degree of self-loathing, I switched the oven on an layered the corn snacks with salsa and a jar of pickled jalapeños then topped with the plastic cheese. After twenty minutes in the oven, my hearty snack was ready, after a further four minutes the hearty snack was giving me heartburn.

My love of spicy food is bound to contribute to my downfall one day, but the pleasure/pain high is hard to beat.

Obsessive compulsive cleaners
This TV programme is genius: pair somebody who is obsessively compulsively clean against a filthy scumbag and try to let the OC cleaner sort the scumbag’s house out for them.

Having come from a household where my dad refuses to throw anything away, I can’t stand clutter. I do still have a terrible habit of keeping things just in case, for example clothes that I keep just in case I ever lose three stones in weight, but generally, I chuck stuff out. I also love to keep my home clean and tidy, but although dust depresses me, I can tolerate it to a certain degree.

My house wouldn’t pass muster with the volunteer CC cleaners, but I’m normal.

The thing that amazes me about the filthy scumbags is that they know their houses are full of shit (quite literally in some cases), that they’ve not been cleaned in over ten years in some cases, and that they want help to change things, but they are so resistant to letting people help them.

Amanda is a nature loving pagan who hasn’t cleaned her house in twelve years. She collects stones and twigs when she’s out and about. Her friends won’t visit her. Cheyza’s cleaning amounts to four months a year. You just know from the outset that this is going to be bad, but so bad that it’s brilliant. It also becomes apparent that Amanda’s friends don’t want to visit her because she’s a fucking crackpot who needs a kick up the bum with an open toed sandal. “No, you can’t throw that used tissue away, it’s a life!”.

Of course, some of the best scraps are between the cleaners themselves when they insist that their own methods for cleaning are better than the others’.

I think the natural evolution for this televisual delight is to have everybody thrown into a house together for a year. Cleaning products would be rationed, or earned through the group performing tasks, such as the dirties having to make their bed every day. There’d be a scrap within the first ten minutes.

Bed
Fatigue has taken over somewhat this week, hit my poor ageing body quite badly. The bonus to this is that I’m perfectly justified in coming to bed at 9pm. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m asleep any earlier than usual, but it saves me from smoking an extra couple of fags and from searching for something that might be worth watching in the usually crap 9pm telly slot.

So hooray for my bed, hooray for me not having a TV in the bedroom, hooray that I’m not one of those filthy bastards who only changes their bedding four times a year.

Pigs are the greatest animals on earth. I shouldn’t really need to explain this because it really is so obvious, but some people just don’t realise it and need it spelling out to them.

Tonight’s dinner was pork chop with roast parsnips and undercooked steamed sliced runner beans. I dislike undercooked vegetables and the green part of my plate still had a squeak and that irritated me. Some people like that sort of thing, but quite frankly, they’re morons. Look at Steve Jobs, for example.

The squeaky beans irritated me because I am now paying full attention to my food as I eat. No distractions at all, just concentrating on savouring my food, chewing it properly and eating slowly. Maybe if I’d eaten the beans even more slowly, they might have cooked in my mouth.

The whole slowing down while I eat thing is all part of a new way of eating that should hopefully retrain my body, or train it in the first place, to feel satisfied when I’ve eaten enough food. Anybody who has seen me eat will have marvelled at how I demolish food, cram it in as quickly as possible and finish everything on my plate. Apparently, you’re not supposed to do this as it means your stomach doesn’t get the chance to send the “stop it, you greedy fat pig, I’m full” signal to the brain. Plus it’s terribly bad mannered. Eventually, I’ll be trained to be satisfied with smaller portions and consequently lose weight and maintain a healthy one.

That all makes sense, it’s simple physiology. I am of course mixing all this with a bit of mumbo jumbo that has now installed a hypnotic gastric band. This involved me listening to a recording that took me through the procedure of having a gastric band fitted. In order to be able to do this, you have to be able to descend into a deeply relaxed trance-like state, something that’s quite difficult for me and my fizzy head. Nonetheless, I did feel very relaxed as things proceeded, until the moment when Paul McKenna pronounced anaesthetist as anaetetist. “What did he just say?” and I was pulled out of the trance slightly. Then he said it again, and again. Now wouldn’t you think that if somebody was doing an audio recording that was intended to relax people they’d be very careful with their pronunciation of words, you know, just in case the audience contained people like me?

Anaetetist, for goodness’ sake.

But back to pigs. You’ve thought about them, haven’t you? Thought about how much of them we can eat, about bacon, sausages, other sausages, prosciutto, salami, sausages, crackling. I like to be assured that any animal I eat has had a decent life prior to being brutally slaughtered, so I don’t buy foreign pork (unless it’s salami or prosciutto because I’m a hypocrite) and I only eat the British stuff where the animals have been reared outdoors and allowed to gambol through meadows of flowers all their lives… before being brutally slaughtered.

I have a spare pork chop from tea tonight. I love you, porcine god.

Soup
I’ve taken to eating canned soup for lunch at work; it’s fairly cheap and moderately filling, and warming during the winter months. As I was working my way through a bowl of Heinz cream of chicken the other day, I wondered how long the chicken in the soup had been separated from living creature. I’d be happy to hazard a guess at four years.

Chickens are stupid, they almost deserved to have their flesh mechanically reclaimed and stuck in a can for years on end. You’d never get that happened to a pig… apart from in tinned ham, or whatever spam is made of.

Pee
It’s the 24hr wee collection tomorrow. I’ve been practising weeing into a jug. It’s been going OK, but I am a little apprehensive of those dual purpose toilet visits that happen in the morning. Let’s just leave it at that.