Dear Jilly Luke, I tried to top myself six months ago, in my ‘Beatrix Potter cosy’ poverty.

I’d like to apologise to Jilly Luke, who I have never knowingly met but seem to have mortally offended with my ‘conventional attractiveness’ and taste for middle eastern food. In an article that compares me to a tax evader, published today on ‘Left Futures’, I am ‘middle class’ for ‘not spending the afternoon drinking White … Read more

Recipes for Kim: Cheese and onion pasta

This cheese and onion pasta recipe is part of a personal project, Recipes For Kim, where a reader has sent me a list of the ingredients in her kitchen cupboard and I promised to write some recipes around them. These aren’t costed, as this isn’t my kitchen cupboard, but I will add them to the … Read more

Hunger Hurts – Still. A year on…

Today is exactly one year since I typed out, on my battered old Nokia, the words that have been reblogged and repeated in international news reports again and again and again over the last twelve months. The post, entitled ‘Hunger Hurts’, starts with the line: “Today has seen fourteen job applications go in…for care work, … Read more

£10 A Week Food Shop: Shopping List etc…

I’m often quoted as saying I spend around £10 a week on my food shopping for me and Small Boy, which is usually met with a mixture of disbelief and shock, and a quick roving eye over my thin but soft-around-the-edges figure. The latest example of this was when I set up my business account … Read more

In Memoriam: Helen Constantine

When I was a child, I spent my summers at a large and sprawling house in Plymouth, and these are some of my earliest memories. Playing hide and seek in three gardens, watching baby chicks bathe in a sink of water, sitting in the smallest ‘secret’ garden with a book all afternoon; these are some … Read more

The Fear-Of-Homelessness Merry Go Round

Here we go again. I left the pub on Monday, and I cried when I told my boss lady that I was going, because I loved it. Good friends both sides of the bar, something to do, money in the bank, or that was the theory. Without stable hours, my top-up benefit claims would be … Read more