challenge alice Day 18: Live below the poverty line – £1 a day
- Breakfast: porridge + office milk
- Lunch: warburton thins x3 + rocket, watercress, spinach + “Brussels pate”
- Dinner: Sausages + mash +spinach rocket watercress
- ‘Treat’: reduced doughnuts
We have a ‘cake bake Friday’ every month in our office, where people bake an array of cakes and pastry tidbits to sell to us at a reasonable flourly rate, all in aid of charity.
Before you can smell the trolley, you can hear the wheels and subsequent stampede. Beth’s blue tape is nothing medical but is rumoured to be the result of a shortage of brownies one month and the crowd control tactics she had to employ. They’re one wildebeest short this month at least.
The challenge has been covered by my local paper, The Daily Echo, and the cost of eating a balanced meal is clearly something which resonates with a lot of people. I never thought I’d make it as a page three girl so on a personal note I am delighted!
I’m doing a charity collection at work and asking my colleagues to write postit notes of support/motivation to keep me on track and better armed to resist those tantalising cake trolleys.
The note above from my friend Laura has to be my favourite so far. It reads “nothing tastes as bad as skint feels” and is a slight twist on the famous Kate Moss quote. Although she is winding me up I actually think it sums up how I feel about my challenge in general.
Whilst I have experimented with some less than satisfying meals – some of them bland, beige and others just minging, I am incredibly lucky that at the end of the month I can return to the relative normality of shopping without these constraints. However there are many out there for whom this challenge is something they must face each day and I can only really just begin to imagine what that might be like.
Friday night and a few of us have gone over to visit my friend Karen. Feeling like a stingy houseguest for not bringing a contribution I spot some reduced doughnuts for 35p and come bearing gifts to share!
Karen’s husband has kindly prepared us a Mexican feast and in readiness I have purchased a sausage and mash (reduced to 40p) en route and borrow their microwave. My ‘ker-ping!’ meal doesn’t look too bad with the green iron but it doesn’t smell half as zesty as the mini fiesta before me.
A good ol’ catch up, a game of ‘Who Wants To Be a Millionaire’ (where I successfully foiled a plot by my virtual phone a friend, the calculating ‘Jean’ to lead me to the wrong answer) and a few rounds of ‘Heads Up’ involving serious caterwauling during the music round and Karen’s own take on that well known MC Hammer song – ‘Don’t touch it!’….
*sigh…*
Tonight goes to show it’s not what’s on the table that really matters, it’s who’s around it.
challenge alice 