Feb 10 2009
A Better Life
In my last post, I promised that I’d talk a bit about how things are finally starting to come together for us here. This blog’s only been around for a couple of months, so you can’t know the mess we’ve been in over the last few years. I suppose I should start with a bit of that. I’ll summarise for today, as it’ll take several posts to cover everything!
Where to begin? Well, we’ve been in a lot of financial trouble since returning to the UK. The cost of living here is significantly higher than I imagined and, well, my lady is not the most frugal of people. At least, she wasn’t: that’s changed over time - or has been forced to. A couple of years ago, I left my job at the RSPCA to earn more money, since we were spending far more than I was earning. This was partly due to the beginning of my partner’s alcohol problem.
I went to work in London. That meant travelling for five hours every day, but the money was good and the job was easy. The place I worked was quite frightening in some ways: it’s a world leader in business education, but the IT department doesn’t know its arse from its elbow (as we say here in England) - given that, without wishing to sound immodest, I was WAY above the level of most of their employees, the work was a piece of cake. The one down-side was their inability to adapt and change: they just stayed stuck in their ways and did little to ameliorate things.
After a couple of months, my back gave out on me unexpectedly. What I thought would be a few days of pain turned into three months and they fired me. Well, they “didn’t retain my contract”, but it’s the same thing. I spent a year recovering, learning to walk properly again and so on, then got my last job at the local Job Centre.
After a few months there, my back went again, which is where I am now - unemployed and struggling. The big problem is that the time off work combined with my other half’s wanton consumption of liquid refreshment had killed our bank accounts. At one point, she was downing several litres of cider every day and that costs a lot. We’d built up a quite monstrous amount of debt in the interim and my last job didn’t pay enough to help much - we were behind on the rent, utility bills and everything. I could barely scrape together enough cash to put a little food on the table.
Over the last month, things have brightened up considerably. Her dependence has reduced a little, although it’s still pretty bad. I’ve managed to get some insurance money from the bank to cover our loan (tip of the day: always take loan insurance). The benefits people have rushed my claims through admirably - probably because I was one of them for a while!
So today, we have a little pile of cash in the bank. I’ve reduced our rent arrears by half - just in time to avoid going to court and being evicted - and my partner is now registered as ‘disabled’ because of her mental health problems. The money from the government comes in regularly, her spending is down, we have decent food and the disability payments cover the cost of her psychoanalysis (which is what they’re for).
If we can manage to survive on benefits for a while, we’ll be even better off - some of the rent is covered, we get free health stuff, free prescriptions and a bunch of other minor benefits. At the same time, this means that she can do some voluntary work instead of just taking whatever job comes along: on the socialisation front, this is great news. And every day, I do my strengthening exercises to get my back into order, I write for a little extra income and am around the house to take care of her (and fix this blog layout, hopefully!).
Like I said, things are looking up. Let’s hope they continue that way.
