After a day spent cooking for the Telegraph, I sit down to relax with my local rag and… “I have a tiny kitchen and a tiny budget, and a tiny boys mouth to feed on a daily basis. I grow herbs on my window sill (currently coriander, rosemary, parsley, thyme and mint, wedged in rusty loaf tins) where they topple […]
I took a walk down to Hartington Road this morning, to sit on the wall where he sat most days, passing the time, outside number 18. There were still cigarette butts down the back of the wall, the wall where I spent part of my summers kicking my feet and eating ice cream and listening to him laugh. I never […]
Today has seen fourteen job applications go in, painstakingly typed on this Jurassic mobile phone, for care work, shop work, factory work, minimum wage work, any kind of work, because quite simply, this doesn’t work. For reasons unbeknownst to me, this month my Housing Benefit was over £100 short. I didn’t get a letter that I know of, but I can assume that it’s still the fallout from the cockups made by the various benefit agencies when I briefly went back to work from March to May. Whatever the reason, it’s easy to work out that £670 of rent can’t be paid of £438 of Housing Benefit. So I’m a week in arrears, almost two, as by the time Thursday comes and the next £167.31 is due, there’ll still be nothing coming in. The Income Support went on keeping me afloat, briefly, as did the Child Tax Credit. Now I’m not only in arrears, but last night when I opened my fridge to find some leftover tomato pasta, an onion, and a knob of stem ginger, I gave the pasta to my boy and went to bed hungry with a pot of home made ginger tea to ease the stomach pains. This morning, small boy had one of the last Weetabix, mashed with water, with a glass of tap water to wash it down with. ‘Where’s Mummys breakfast?’ he asks, big blue eyes and two year old concern. I tell […]
Letter in the Echo newspaper, Thursday 1st March. In response to the following article: ‘Anna Waite: Druggies, Drunks and Single Mums Driving Upmarket Shops Out Of Southend.’ http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/9557798.Druggies__drunks_and_single_mums____driving_upmarket_shops_out_of_Southend___/ “Anna Waite thinks druggies and single mothers are killing trade in Southend High Street. It would be great to be married with two incomes and a nice family business, but I’m not. […]
To donate, click here: http://www.justgiving.com/jackmonroesleepeasy This Saturday night, Southend YMCA are challenging people to ‘sleep rough’ to raise sponsorship money, and awareness of youth homelessness and the issues that young people face when forced to sleep on the streets. The ‘sleep out’ is being held outdoors on Saturday 2nd March, overnight in a car park in central Southend. It costs […]
