Live Below the Line – The Midnight Dare Game

The last thing I ate before the start of this challenge on Tuesday evening, and the first thing I ate after the challenge this morning, was chocolate cake, so that’s rather fitting! Yes it looks like I made it: after five days of living below the line, turns out I didn’t die, but I’m not doing that again in a hurry!

What have I learned? A great deal about the difficulties faced by people living on less than a pound a day, a little budgeting, the importance of washing up after myself (something my dad is very glad of!), and a bit of cooking. Having said that I don’t think I remembered to look at the clock when I started boiling my rice even once, so a lot of guess-work was required but luckily it turned out alright!

My last day below the line was a little different, in order to use up the final pennies of my budget, I bought myself eight haribo frogs and a 16p tin of spaghetti bolognaise. A lot of people turn their noses up at such cheap processed food, and it’s true that they may not have much nutritional value, I certainly wouldn’t want to live off them full-time, but to be honest it was the tastiest meal I’ve eaten all week and after all, this is the sort of thing people donate to food banks, shouldn’t we at least be prepared to try it for ourselves?

After a triumphant last rice meal, I headed to bed only to get distracted by something that people living in real poverty probably wouldn’t have access to – Facebook! And so it was that at around half past midnight, after realising I still had two eggs left in the fridge, my friends dared me to go downstairs and make boiled eggs in the middle of the night. My dog, who sleeps in the kitchen and whom I accidentally woke up in the process, was not impressed!

So my challenge is now over but you can still donate to help out a local night shelter, because as I’ve said around 1.2 billion people around the world have to live on less than I have not just for five days but everyday!

Live Below the Line – Out and About

Today due to various commitments and an inability to say no, I found myself locked in a coffee-room over lunch time, with my penultimate banana, a Tupperware box of rice and no idea where to find a saucepan. After fifteen minutes of rummaging through all the cupboards, I was beginning to lose any hope of having lunch at all!

I did find one eventually, hidden behind some dishwasher trays, and was then faced with the challenge of operating an oven I’ve never used before with no supervision. After a worrying moment of realising the extractor fan wasn’t switched on and I could be steam cooking myself to death, I managed it in the end.

Leaving the house this morning, I rather felt like I was packed for a weekend away rather than a few errands a mile from my house. Origami paper, two uncooked meals, a change of clothes and a towel for just one day seems a lot but it made me think about how few possessions people who live below the line have to get by with. I mean when you see homeless people they don’t often seem to have much with them, do they? Considering they must have all their worldly possessions – there isn’t much ownership in a few blankets and perhaps some cardboard boxes! No origami to keep them occupied, nothing to cook meals on, no change of clothes if they get dirty, and no towel if it’s wet.

On the plus side some people agreed to sponsor me today (which, by the way, you can do by going to my justgiving page), although I did have to sit and watch them eat tea and scones before they signed my form, which was more than a little difficult!

Another difficulty arose after tea when I discovered that my little brother had made a chocolate cake to share and I couldn’t have any. That in itself was temptation enough but what was worse was when I was loading my family’s plates into the dishwasher, there was still chocolate icing on them. Just a tiny smear of chocolate, surely it can’t do any harm? After all I wouldn’t be getting any energy from it really, I just wanted to taste chocolate – but that’s the thing isn’t it – there’s no casual taste testing when you live below the line. So I made my brother lick up the remainder of the icing because I simply couldn’t stand to see it washed away!

On the other hand due to a miscalculation earlier in the week, I found I could have an extra 50g of rice this evening, and I can tell you it made all the difference – for the first time I feel genuinely full – it’s a feeling I’ve missed!

Live Below the Line – Unsustainable

I’m over half way through! Not only that but today I genuinely enjoyed my porridge! To be honest there isn’t much more to write about today; after very nearly caving and buying bread yesterday evening, it’s the first time I’ve enjoyed every meal.

Whilst I am beginning to get the hang of this now, I’m realising more and more that this isn’t a sustainable life style – I’m hungry nearly half the time and despite the fact that I’m having four small meals a day, I’m not getting the recommended number of calories, let alone fibre, vitamins or minerals. I think this is what we often forget about poverty – even if people have enough food to survive, the food they’re getting is often by no means healthy, or indeed pleasant!

I’m pretty sure I’m still running partly on the stored energy from before I started this challenge so it baffles me how people can survive on this long-term, I’m sure it would make you ill! And it does.

Live Below the Line – Sabotage

So because water porridge was so grim yesterday, I decided to push the boat out a little this morning and try just mixing raw oats with the yoghurt I bought. I have to say it wasn’t quite as bad as with water, but it was still pretty awful so I decided to mix it up with a chopped banana.

Seven bananas I started the week with, seven. I ate one yesterday and yet now there were just five. Now, either the reduced food is affecting my mental arithmetic or something fishy is going on here. I left my bag of bananas next to the family ones in the fruit bowl, but I did write my name on the bag and told everyone not to eat my food. I considered just taking one of the other bananas and adding it to my own but then I thought, if you really do live below the line, and someone steals your food, they’re going to eat it before you can steal it back, aren’t they?

So now I’m one banana down, and I still don’t have a real solution to this porridge problem, it’s not looking good! Clearly, I should have taken this as a sign to just crawl back into bed and try again at life tomorrow.

Lunch can only get better though, right? I boiled some water for a boiled egg, put the egg on a spoon to lower into the pan, and dropped it on the floor.

I looked at the smashed egg on the kitchen tiles and a slightly delayed “oh no” escaped my mouth. I couldn’t believe it, I don’t think I’ve ever accidentally smashed an egg in my life and now when it mattered most I had lost a banana and an egg on the same day!

So once I had gotten over this shock I was then faced with the problem of how do you clean up a smashed egg? I mean you don’t want to be mopping the whole thing up with kitchen roll! My dad’s only advice was “Well start off with a spoon”. And of course this is fine for scooping up the yolk but then you’re really just scraping at the floor with egg white sliding around all over the place, so it ended up mostly down to the paper towels anyway.

What have I learned from this debacle? Well in future I’m going to be more careful when handling eggs and I’ve now written my name in biro on each individual banana – I just hope tomorrow’s valuable lesson isn’t about the dangers of ink poisoning!

Live Below the Line – A Little Bit Grim

So I’ve been reliably informed by my brother that I’m going to die – I really hope this isn’t the case! Basically for the next five days I will be ‘living below the line’, buying all the food and drink that I consume for just £1 a day. And I’m starting to wonder why I agreed to doing this!

I joke of course – I agreed to this in order to raise awareness and hopefully funds for the 1.2 billion people around the world who live on less than £1 a day. There is an excellent further explanation as to the reasons behind taking up this kind of challenge by my friend the abmyster, and the only thing I want to add is that whilst we will only be buying food, we’re still getting our accommodation, travel, clothing, heating and everything else we could possibly want paid for. We’re also drinking tap water which comes beautifully costlessly flowing out of our kitchens, whilst so many people around the world have to walk for miles just to drink water full of diseases that will likely kill them. So of course it’s going to be hard, but we are by no means experiencing a fraction of the difficulties faced by these 1.2 billion people!

I’m hoping to give quick updates everyday, so please feel free to happily ignore my posts for the rest of the week if you’re not interested! But, essentially my plan was to get a kilogram of rice, and 500g of porridge oats, and then I would have all the necessary carbohydrates for the week for around £1. At this point everything else is a luxury really! To keep my brother happy, I’m trying to get something from all the basic food groups – some unfortunately battery farmed eggs for protein, some natural yoghurt, some sardines to have with my rice, and a kilogram of carrots because at 49p from Aldi, how can I possibly not? Something tells me I’m going to get a little tired of carrots by Sunday!

With day one over, I have to say I think the porridge was a mistake! I normally make porridge with milk and golden syrup; I thought it would at least be bearable with just water.

Oh how naïve I was. (Is there a pattern forming here?)

The only word I can use to describe water porridge is grim, and I think that’s a trend that will only continue as a week of eating exactly the same thing goes on. ‘Grim’ I would imagine can also be used aptly to describe the food of these 1.2 billion people who have to do this everyday.

The Goodness of the End

On the 27th of June, I finally started to fill out my details on the front of my exam paper for the 14th and last time. This happened so automatically by this point that, honestly, I could have been writing out my name and candidate number but it could have been ancient Arabic, I have no idea!

One thing that did break this monotony was a physics paper which we had to make an amendment to before starting. A ripple of even more intense quiet spread across the sports hall as we all pricked our ears to hear of this mistake we had to correct.

“Now all of you turn to page 23, question 14.”

You could cut the tension with a spoon seriously, never have we been allowed to open the exam paper before the start time – I could see people out of the corner of my eye sneakily looking at questions on previous pages as they flicked through to the right place, I’m just no way near rebellious enough for that!

“The second line currently reads N equals N subscript O, as in the letter, multiplied by E to the power of minus lambda T,” The invigilator said in his ridiculously posh accent, “However it should read N equals N subscript zero, as in the number, multiplied by E to the power of minus lambda T.”

There was a communal release of breath as we all stifled sniggers. “It’s not a big change, I know, but apparently an important one.” For sure!

But there you go, it’s over now.

This of course comes with the return of older siblings and friends from university. Now obviously I get to see people I haven’t in a long time and while that’s all well and good, in my family the return of my older brother is somewhat nervously anticipated. Basically he doubles our weekly food bill, but that’s not all. When a cake is made in my household, it’s a very serious affair! What people never seem to understand about my living with three hungry brothers is that it’s communism in the extreme – we have to have exactly the same size slice of cake. Of course this is impossible so we take it in turns to be allowed the honour of choosing first which piece is biggest. The thing is, none of us are sad enough to draw up a rota and so instead when such a confectionary item has been prepared, my mum will shout “CAKE ANYONE” and there will be a magnificent stampede down the stairs as we all race to the cupboard to get a plate and then fight for the first place in the ‘cake queue’. The first of these squabbles when my older brother is home is often a little fierce. This time it resulted in the smashing of two plates, and a rather hoarse voice for me from laughing so much!

My brothers never fail to make me laugh. The youngest one posted a Facebook status on Monday complaining about how all three of his older siblings have now finished exams but he still has to get up at seven in the morning for school, failing to mention that we all got up before seven that morning anyway – maybe that’s why he only got four likes 😛

I get what he means though, there is something very wonderful about knowing that you’re finished, it’s over for another year, and in some cases you’ll never have to study a certain subject again – after my last exam I was so elated that I ran around college running a last errand giggling to myself and grinning from ear to ear. I also sent a Facebook message to my friend which simply said “woo” but with 103 ‘o’s on the end. I asked if that was a little too much, his reply was “no facebook message woo can express the goodness of the end” True dat!