The Frugals have gone.

Our washing machine in Australia.

 

Do people still know anyone who is frugal? History tells us that in the past it was normal to be frugal. The Frugals wore clothes till they worn out and kept the best for church or funerals. They darned socks. Does anyone still darn today? A needle with woollen thread was used till the hole went. You don’t throw stuff away because it has a hole, or because it becomes unfashionable. The frugal gene in Australia really became embedded after WW 1 followed by the great depression of the late twenties/ thirties. Generations of frugals would switch off lights not because of saving the environment or global heating but because it saved money. The best way to survive was to become a frugal.

The period during and after WW1 meant the decimation of many Australian males which left an almost doubling of young females keen to find husbands. However, to add to the misery of male shortages it was also rare for females to work, and earn an income. Females just did not work on payable jobs but slogged away at home on the scrubbing board and darning socks.  I know this because that’s what was done in my family, although we, even while still in Holland, managed to have an electric washing machine; an early Westinghouse. That was in the early fifties, when economies started to grow and blossom, making people better off. This electric monster of a washing machine with its oak steel-hooped drum was shipped over to Australia after Mum and Dad decided to migrate there. It was admired in the whole street and worked ceaselessly for many years. It was another proof of sensibility and ardent frugality.

It was perhaps the Korean war and after the Vietnam war that the frugals were starting to loose their grip on domestic frugality. The expenditure on useless consumer gadgets started to raise its ugly head. This was followed by ‘easy terms’. Everything was obtainable through easy terms. It thoroughly corrupted my Mum who foolishly bought a Sunbeam electric frying pan on ‘easy terms.’ Dad followed with buying a B/W TV for an enormous amount of money to be paid over three years. Can you believe it?

Even so, frugality somehow survived. It was the hippy movement with Hair that desperately tried to hang on sensible frugal living with the urge to resist mindless consumerism, but that was overcome by Governments and the invention of huge public hoardings, urging us to buy Instant Coffee with 43 beans or Lovable Bras that could ‘lift and separate’,  nurturing spending, and corrupting us in the belief that the endless buying of things just for the sake of buying was good enough and gave lots of Happy to the chagrined.

All this of course is what happens today. During the previous epoch of frugality, houses, kitchen and bathrooms were not seen as items to be updated. Appliances would last forever. Now, the last of the Frugals, look on in amazement, and disbelief  how the baby boomers hurl themselves into four wheel drives and build monster MacMansions. Do they really come from the same gene pool. How did this happen?

The surplus of women after WW1 meant that those that missed out snaring a hubby, started the frugal movement with many sharing meagre incomes and bitter loneliness by living together, mostly in a non-sexual way.

However, as always the pendulum swung the other way with the arrival of tens of thousands of single men enticed by gloriously coloured Australian Governmental advertisements to work the mines in Australia in the forties till the sixties. Many of those from Europe still enjoyed rock solid and well entrenched frugal genes instilled too by same wars and economic depressions. My parents,  even though Dad did not have blond or blue features nor single, did have a knack for the butter to be spread thinly and for his children to always switch off the lights leaving the room.  We worked ‘over-time’. Over-time paid ‘time and a half’, Sundays paid double. I liked working on Sundays. Mum would be most generous in her Papal dispensational discourse for us not having to go to the obligatory Sunday church and earn double instead. We saved to white knuckled bones and pooled our moneys. It was enough to get into our own home within two years. Proof of frugality that paid off.

There you have it. Since WW1 and within, at best three generations, frugality now has swung to rampant consumerism throwing all caution to the wind. To the present generation, darning socks and the Singer sewing machine, they are relics many would not know about, nor the delights of unknitting an old jumper and re-knitting the wool into a pair of slippers. All gone.

The young and good consumers complain how difficult it is to get into the housing market. Yet, they feel it a normal right not to go without what they regard as essential; the café breakfast with avocados, the overseas holiday, the latest Apple iPhone. I have yet to see a young girl on the train with threadbare jeans sewing them up or knitting.  Where are the young knitters to save for a house?

The last of the Frugals are now shuffling into retirement homes. Some brave souls you see driving around, all bald, knock kneed or grey, having hitched a caravan to the SUV, travelling around Australia, whooping it up, perhaps for their very first time.

I remain amazed.

The margins are coming for you in Paper Back.

Bartering in the USSR (Moscow)

We all knew this. The best way to learn to ride a bike is on an old one. I did on my mother’s bike more than seventy years ago. It did not have the crossbar which made hopping on easier. On my dad’s old bike I used to put one of my legs through the opening below the cross bar and managed to ride it that way. The bike would be ridden all askew at an angle because most of the body-weight was on one side of the bike. So did all of my friends. I don’t think there were even children’s bicycles available in those days. We all rode large bikes just standing up and in all sorts of manners.

I notice now that many kids drive cars to high school near where we live. There is a procession of cars with P plates driving to and from school each day. Jeez, do my grandkids expect a car in a couple of years? Even the smaller children are being driven to school at primary level as well. Huge SUVs, often coloured menacingly black queue up. The little ones, almost level with the bull-bar are scurrying to school. The mum or dad wave a bit nervously, and drive off. Many, as a matter of fashion, also combine all the manoeuvring of car and kids holding a carton beaker or cup which probably holds a coffee, obtained somewhere before, most likely perhaps pre-ordered on the mobile phone by text or other electronic messaging.

We live in a fairly small town, and where previously the foot was used as the main form of moving from a-b, now it has to be the car. If economic rationalism has at its heart a refusal to spend money on the unnecessary, who or what is now the determinant factor? Who decides? Should the customer be abolished? At the moment we must spend rather than save. Spending thousands to drive kids with legs to schools seem to be as irrational as anything.

I will just go on with my words. I am much relieved my paper back version of Almost There is also almost there. I had a heck of a time with formatting and checking the proofs. Consider yourself lucky I am still here. Boy, have I got a lot of Word files now. Next time it will be easier. The CreateSpace (Amazon) have an excellent way of helping the self-publisher with a most responsive web-site, guiding one along.

I even managed to survive the US Taxation jungle; I am now holding a “Certificate of Status of Beneficial Owner for United States Tax Withholding and Reporting (Entities).”

Almost There; ‘Fragments of a restless life.’ It sure is.

Going Dutch ( with an ageing Uncle)

With European markets spooked again, it’s the Dutch that are the culprits this time. The Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has offered his resignation when the support by Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party was withdrawn. The markets dropped over 2% and with an early election now looming, the predictions are that the winners will be the Socialist Party with a possible doubling of seats from 15 to 30. Geert Wilder’s Freedom Party is on the wane and predicted to lose some seats.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-24/dutch-pm-submits-resignation-to-queen/3967930

If elections are held in the Netherlands, possibly as early as September, the most likely scenario will be a copy of the present French election with a big increase in both the left and right vote and the traditional liberal or conservative vote ending up the losers.

What makes the recent Dutch upheavals interesting is that the austerity measures needed to bring back its deficit to a maximum of 3% of GDP is being exploited by the extreme right. Their opposition is based on the same principles that the Liberals are opposing some of the economic measures here in Australia; that economic growth is more important than bringing budget deficits down.  Economic growth above all is the mantra owned by the right.

In Australia the proposal to tax the mining industry more vigorously together with the introduction of a carbon tax on polluters is being opposed by those believers in ‘economic growth above everything else’, even if, as we all know, the continuation of polluting our earth will make the world unlivable for our grandchildren. It seems almost beyond belief that there are political ‘leaders’ who don’t belief in climate change no matter what the science is telling them.

The dogged and obstinate stance of those ‘economic growth ‘believers are what seem to be bedeviling many countries and it will be interesting to find out who will be the winners. The danger is that unless solutions are found and the people reassured that all will come good, a rise in those tens of millions of seething and restless masses could turn very nasty. We don’t have to go back all that far to see similarities cropping up that resulted in some very nasty wars.

It was perhaps never a good idea to promise lower taxes and at the same time fan material expectations of voters riding towards the horizon with more and more goodies with a never ending wealth. We now can have not one massive TV but TV’s in every room. Not just one simple modest car but multiple ones and SUV’s to boot. We expect an Iphone for the ten year olds going to private schools and our cupboards are full of tangled battery chargers and dated electronics with small buttons.

Fiscal prudence together with taxing the obscene wealthy, who are always best able to afford contributing to societies, might give the opportunity to give the restless masses seething with discontent a much needed relief and reassurance that all will come good again.

There are some who hold the view that economic growth is old hat and that governments ought to become more aware that the world is precariously close to losing out to an inevitable closing down of its support system.  Ecological balance ought to be as important as economic prudence. We can’t continue taking out more than putting back. Something has to give way. Let’s hope the seething masses will sway towards demanding its representatives to heed what the world’s ecology is telling us. Give up your squandering ways. Tighten up and balance things out. Don’t spend more that what you’ve got. Prudence even abstemiousness might give us a way out in the nick of time.

There are no other solutions that can avoid disaster.

Weaning us away from Mother’s SUV nipple

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There is no doubt that we love our car. Each Saturday we scan the newspaper for the latest models or look up Mycar.com. on the internet.  There is nothing more inviting than strolling past car-sales yards with gleaming vehicles and their yawning bonnets. Flags are fluttering festively and the canny salesman has already spotted a possible customer/client. For those that are into acronyms SUV is ‘sport utility vehicle. Of course, there is also the AWD and other acronymic variations we have bestowed on our much loved, but basically, metal box on round rotating wheels.

It is the car that, originally, made it possible to move away from normal, close-knit communal  high density living and gave us freedom to move about and away to the wide open plains of a freshly minted suburb with lovely kerb & guttering. What we also, at first enjoyed hugely, was the luxury of those slow lazy Sunday drives with mum and kids to the Blue Mountains’ Three Lovely Sisters or even Palm Beach . There weren’t as many then as there was awhile ago, the song goes. As the numbers of Sunday drivers increased it became in direct proportion of a decrease in our enjoyment of the drive. Soon, the ‘Sunday Driver’ became a diminutive term for a slack-arsed slow inexperienced driver. It was the beginning of the end for the joy of driving cars.

As the cars and their owners grew in numbers, so did the size of cars. Go to any school during drop-off and pick-ups and huge growling double storey monsters of cars (often painted an AFP like sinister black) will sidle up as close as possible to those institutional gates of little Jane or Jimmy’s school. It’s all part of a well thought out plan by the captains of industry to keep rolling over an economy. This ‘economy’ and our slavish adherence to it seems to increasingly look a bit dodgy, we now have a quality of life which is less than it used to be before the advent of the metal box. Sure, we assuage ourselves that we never had it so good. Why then, does it take an ever increasing number of us to visit the quack and chemist and end up swallowing pills, keeping raw nerves and tempers at bay? What about our ever increasing dependence on alcohol, gambling?

Have any of you ever watched mothers with children and babies getting in and out of cars, loading up the shopping or picking kids up from school? The nightmare of strapping in kids, the folding up of an obstinately arched struggling screaming baby in its car cradle- basket, the packing of saxophone or cello, those huge monstrous Mount Everest school bags. Where is your school hat-drink bottle-school bag-lunch money? Where oh where did I put my daily Mogadon?

Suave salesmen sold us the block out somewhere West and we built our brick veneer with an imposing Juliet balcony held up by presidential looking but fake columns. By car it was only one hour from work and who wouldn’t change the horror of the Redfern semi to a lovely vista of rolling hills and a blue country haze. It seemed the right thing to do.  The rolling hills are now rolling suburbs, the blue haze black smog; the hours’ drive a two hour nightmare. More and more incidents of road rage. You run the risk of getting knifed or clubbed to death by driving in the wrong lane or even just looking at another driver who might well be sky high on meth, or diazepam.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-30/experts-debate-how-to-address-housing-shortage/3801284

There is an answer to all this, and again it is the suave salesman who is leading the way out. The fringe dweller is selling out and opting for the cozy and intimate apartment with balcony and roof-top garden. A ‘back to Redfern’ movement has started in earnest. The SUV is losing out to the more frugal little Citroen, Peugeot or the very competitive diesel Holden Cruze our national flag-bearing iconic treasure. Best of all, transport on two feet or bicycle, the bus and train.

It seems the height of irresponsible planning to keep on nibbling at the outer edges of our endlessly suburbanized cities, isolating people even further and further from infrastructures and above all, each other. All those forlorn suburbs with all the concreted driveways, the double or triple garages will just be become parking places for giant SUV’s with their owners driving& parking and driving& parking, God knows where to. Probably, some de-hydrated Shopping mall and those infernally addictive food courts with the entire population of suburban fringe dwellers, and with each mouthful, growing fatter and thus a need for even larger SUV’s cars.

It’s just a hopeless way of living.