When my earnings went briefly into 6 figures I had to struggle hard to not let us blow it in luxuries. It’s very tempting. My reasoning was it’s easy to spend and the enjoyment is brief but it’s far more painful when the money runs out. That plus being born in ’43 austerity was a fact of life much like throw away is today. We were never short of essentials but what we had we looked after and mended. So even now if your washing machine croaks or your central heating packs in just as the weather gets cold, give me a call.
Well it seems that the population of the world will rise to 9 billion from its current 6 billion or 1 billion around a hundred years ago. Oil and more importantly water, soil and thus food are peaking and showing signs of long term decline. So mouths are going up and corn flakes are going down. There’s a tummy gap. Fine in the short term if you want to lose weight but as you pass size 10 heading for 8 you’ll be ready for a plate of chips. So we in the developed world are heading for that unenviable time of the money running out. We’re the champion boxer who lived the high life for a while and is now telling you about it while he’s giving you a shoeshine. It’s been calculated that if everyone in the world had our UK standard of living the world could only sustain 2 billion population, a third of what it is now. It seems a quite frightening state of affairs. We seem to be on the points of entering a period of post war austerity that could last for the foreseeable future. That’s where I came in, in 1943, and it wasn’t that bad. We were never short of essentials and we had more fun learning to make do and mend than you ever have watching television.
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