There no reasons for me to excuse our absence from the blog
since May. And I’m not going to, I am instead going to offer some reasons in
brief.
We haven’t really done much all summer. Amanda has used Moho
once for a one night stopover in a place called Pool Bridge out on Exmoor, and
I think we stayed one night on our friends drive earlier this summer for a
party.
And that is the extent of our moho travels this summer. The
reasons for this have been mostly financial, we’ve been skint `again’, due to
the difficulty I had getting a job locally (I really did think with my
background in the city that I’d fall into job, how wrong I was).
I worked a literal, three back breaking months in a garden
centre, Wyevale Group as a wage slave. My opinion of Wyevale is such that I
will never spend a penny in one of their premises ever again. If you haven’t
worked in retail on minimum wage, then you cannot possibly understand why the
working poor exist, and like me prior to the experience, you probably think the
working poor are poor because they can’t be arsed to do better. How wrong that
perception is.
I’ll have moments digression on their behalf. You came into
work in a recession, you did two years college or maybe even university. At the
two year point you had to get a vocational placement or your studies couldn’t
continue. There was a recession, there were no placements available, you had no
income to support yourself and you couldn’t continue with your studies, so you
took on a job, any job just to stay afloat. And three, four, five years later
you’re still there. Because you only earn £6.50 an hour, some weeks you only
get your minimum hours (circa 16 so the company doesn’t have a National
Insurance bill), and if things are really slow you get banked. I can’t imagine
how tough it is in zero hours where a guaranteed 16 hours would be manna from
heaven. Now the economy is in growth, you can’t get further borrowing because
you don’t earn enough and or don't have a guaranteed level of income and or you’re
excluded because modern apprenticeships pay less than half of minimum wage https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage/who-gets-the-minimum-wage
for the first year of the apprenticeship (read all about it from the link).
Paraphrase the above, for those that were made redundant because of the recession.
And then find a percentage of people with moderate learning difficulties to
tick the disability box, and some lovely old ladies earning pin money (though
it’s nowhere near as nice as it was when it was an independent, and they’ve
made us all change our hours or we’ll be out of a job, and I only used to come
in for a bit to help with my pension and some company/banter since I retired
from full-time work ...), and you have a garden centre. And sitting on top of
this festering exploitation dung heap you have a board of directors http://www.wyevalegardencentres.co.uk/about-us/board-of-directors
all wanking their egos trying to grow a business (using the homogensing one
size fits all stack em high sell em cheap technique ... well not really cheap,
well in actual fact really quite expensive) all on the backs of some of the
most unfortunate people I have ever worked with or known in work.
Having been through this particular whringer for a few
months, having been taken on permanently (allegedly), only to find out when my
contract arrived that the centre manager decided to change the terms of the employment
offer after the fact; to a seasonal role (yup an absolute and total disregard
for the terms of offer of employment or contract ... if you don’t like it you
can always leave). I have joined a small IBM outfit a mile from home. As they
are my current employer I am going to be expedient with my feelings about the
overall conditions and the working environment. But I will say, IBM has some
way to go before it meets it’s own expectations of itself. It is better than
than the garden centre by many country miles, but I think it falls way short of
the standards IBM touts on its corporate website.
Back to the main thrust, though I think I may have hijacked
myself above. In the absence of travel, we have concentrated on getting back in
the black and then skidding along the black, doing jobs that required very
little money, like digging gardens and stripping walls, all stuff we have
blogged before and had no intention of boring people with again, but in another
house.
Today as I write, I’ve been at IBM for three months and a
bit, Amanda has been at a Solicitors in Bridgwater for six months. I’ve spent
twelve of fourteen weeks decorating the hall and stairs (proper money helps
with these projects). We couldn’t get finance together for a skim, so I did a
lot of fill and paint, fill and paint, so much so that I have tennis elbow,
which I can assure the reader is a proper aggravation and very painful when it wants to be. I’ve 90% finished the
back bedroom, we just need to find some nice curtains and hang some pictures. Three
weeks ago we had a multi fuel stove installed this was the one really big ticket
item we wanted done before the winter. It only took two days to install, but in
a mid-terrace house without a chimney breast of any description in the
original build, things get a little complicated and quite expensive (though not
prohibitively so).
I’ll post some pictures of the process another day, I will
also post some pictures of the odds and end we have done this year, a montage.
I’m aware that I’ve made the year sound terrible, but the truth is as I sit and
scribble,that aside from the decorating, we have in no particular order been:
Back to Kilve, to Tarr Steps, Salcombe for the fireworks,
out murmuration hunting on Shapwick Heath, up Burrow Mump, dug a pond, planted
a tonne of plants rescued from the garden centre skip, up West Quantocks head, Yomped around an ancient lead mine in Shropshire, visited Iron Bridge, walking on our local beach, out around the confluence of the three river mouths
on our doorstep and a load of other stuff that escapes my mind, and the year
isn’t over just yet.
So that’s that, the Twitter feed down the side proves we’re
alive. And hopefully we’ll be back on the bounce next year when projects drop
below £500 a month, and can be done in the evenings, leaving those important
weekends free.
