Is Christmas going to be a bit difficult this year with the cost-of-living crisis? Do you want to get some tips on how to make your money go further whilst still giving everyone a magical Christmas? Maybe these tips will help.
Christmas on a Budget
I first wrote this three years ago and it is arguably even more needed than it was then with certain world leaders taking decisions, like going into unnecessary wars and making worldwide trade as difficult as possible that make poor people poorer and rich people richer. If you are struggling the article I am linking to is full of excellent advice for anyone who wants to enjoy Christmas but has less money than this time last year.
What are your favorite side-hustle ideas?
I have a problem with the idea of a side-hustle, quite apart from the name which is pure management speak. What it does is to send or reinforce the message that everything you do must be part of the capitalist system. Out go the ideas of hobbies or volunteering and in comes the idea of constant working seven days a week, fifty two weeks of the year. It tells people that unless they are working for money their time doesn’t mean much any more. As such I will ignore the idea and I will continue with non earning hobbies and volunteering.
I blog but I will not monetise it, another awful word by the way! For a start I can’t imagine anyone would want to pay to read my ramblings but I would also lose the fun of writing the blog. The pressure of producing posts that people are paying for would make me concerned that I am not giving them value for money and if someone unsubscibed I would immediately assume it was something to do with me.
Today I am starting a volunteering post with a charity called Coram Beanstalk. I will be going into a school to help with reading. My role is not to teach but to encourage and to guide the pupils I help to find the joy in reading that so many of us already feel. I couldn’t imagine being paid for that. Again, how could I relax and develop a proper rapport with them if their success or failure could impact any money I might earn? Clearly it shouldn’t be something I should be paid for and I wouldn’t do the job on that basis.
So, no side-hustle for me. I will keep my love for writing and helping pupils to enjoy reading. It might not make me any money but that is definitely for the best.
What are five simple exercises to do at home?
I am going to ignore the arbitrary number in the prompt. Why? Well, ascribing numbers to fitness is at the heart of many of the problems people have when trying to set up an exercise routine. It’s like the 10000 step rule, only adopted because the creator of the fitness tracking watch realised it sounded good. He called the watch Manpo-kei or 10000 steps meter. It sounded like a good target and the Kanji for 10000 – 万 – looked vaguely like someone running. So, over the years producers of fitness tracking equipment decided to keep with the original ‘goal’ until it was given the status of a fitness threshold. Actually, the sweet spot in fitness and cardiovascular terms is around 7500 but that doesn’t look or sound so impressive.
So, what are my exercises. Funnily enough I have hit upon a new exercise regime around three weeks ago just by experimenting and seeing what worked. So, I had been doing yoga for quite a while but that wasn’t really working well enough on its own. My answer was to go back to the old school Bullworker and combine both yoga and Bullworker training in one workout. Turns out they complement each other perfectly. I start off with the Bullworker then I warm down by way of yoga. The effect has been very clear already. My musculature is improving in leaps and bounds and my flexibility is being helped by my increased core strength. I do these exercises 5 or 6 mornings a week before breakfast and they are a great start to the day.
There is a third element to my fitness regime that has proven to be the secret weapon, gardening! Yes, you read that correctly. I have been set the task of clearing the back garden which had become overgrown and full of brambles. I now go out there 4 or 5 days a week and much to my surprise I really enjoy it. The exercises I get from gardening is not set in the way that the Bullworker and yoga are as gardening is literally organic in nature! I might be clipping back brambles one day and then the next I might be digging up roots (see below) and the day after I might be clearing and preparing a section along the fence so that I can plant vegetables and pollinators for next Spring. The different muscle groups I use with gardening mean that I am developing my strength in my legs and back in particular. I haven’t been this fit in ten years and I am totally focused on continuing this combination of exercises for the foreseeable future.
Which relationship has taught you the most about yourself?
Since I got married 36 years ago, I have never stopped being astonished at how much I have learnt about myself and how much I have changed. Janet is the centre of my existence and the person who knows more about me than I knew about myself. She knows what I need before I do and she knows what I will enjoy in every area of life even before I realise it myself.
I suppose I have learnt more about myself in my marriage because I was never truly myself before I did. My life was a kind of void in terms of understanding and appreciating myself. Yes, in a sense that part of my life was important but it was like it happened to a different person. That person had no idea who he was and what he was capable of so he drifted along, made mistakes, many of them, and didn’t make any really good decisions. All that changed when I met Janet and whilst I still made mistakes I finally had direction. Everything I am now is down to my marriage and before then I was marking time in my life.
If you could start a new business right now, what would it be?
I would try to find a way to make money from my writing. It’s an incredibly difficult field to get noticed in and I feel like I could make a go of it if only I could work out where the niche is. That said, I like the freedom of writing what I want to write and if I was trying to make money I would need to write what other people wanted me to.
Up to about a century ago, literacy was a very marketable skill. You could be paid for reading or writing for the illiterate, not much of course as your customer base was generally very poor. Going back further than that, say the Middle Ages, only a few people could read and it was very much the exception rather than the norm.
Nowadays, illiteracy is very rare in the UK I’m glad to say. However, there are still many people who can’t express exactly what they want to say about a person or a situation. At the weekend I wrote a tribute to John Dudgeon, a fantastic cricketer and an even more amazing person. I put a link on the Medway Cricket Memories page on Facebook and almost 200 people have read it already and some have said how much they appreciated it. I think that like anything else you have to have the right opportunity and the right inspiration, like I had with John, to write effectively so it’s not something that I could necessarily do for everyone. It would be nice to be able to write tributes to express someone’s feelings about a life but I don’t think I could make it a business. On balance I think it’s for the best.
When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease
