Seems its never enough

Please don't make any Political comments.

Watched the news today, billions are being spent to help homeowners and businesses with energy costs, yet the BBC seem to be intent on proving it isn't enough. A lady interviewed, possibly a baker, said " It wont make any difference in helping my business". Fine, don't take the reduced rates then.
This is just a typical example of how it seems no matter what the context, or what the support is for, the argument that "It isn't enough" seems to trump the fact help is being given at all! It isn't just the press either, several people I have spoken too seem to take the same negative approach.

A bit of positivity and get up and go would do a lot in making everyone's lives easier, but right now I get that feeling the UK is getting too much of exactly the opposite.
Expect everything, whinge when you don't get enough of it and make very little effort to do anything positive about it.



Before I get deported, I do know this is not the way everyone thinks or acts and I am generalising.

Back in the early 70s when we had rampant inflation, three day working week and power cuts I don't remember my parents moaning and expecting someone to do something about it. We spent every weekend on the beaches at Buckhaven and East Wemyss collecting sea coal from the beach so we had something to burn to keep warm, and we weren't alone on the beaches. 

Sea coal was washed out to sea from the slag heaps of local pits then tide brought it in damp and rounded from action of water, coming from  slag  heaps was poor quality even before sea played with it, but it kept us warm and released money for buying food etc. Thought me a lot about self reliance and resilience that has served me all my life.

Sad thing is if you follow international news there are energy and inflation issues across the globe. At least we don't have madmen lobbing rockets at our houses (yet)

Sea coal still gets washed up on some of the Fife beaches as it comes from exposed seams of coal under the Firth of Forth.  They used to mine some of it further along near Charlestown/Limekilns but pumping the water out of the undersea tunnels became too difficult.

I also remember getting sent out to the fields to glean for missed tatties, neeps and so on after harvest.

I also well remember the oil crisis of the seventies, we had petrol rationing using some of the coupons still being stored from the war! And of course the three day week.

I guess how badly affected you are depends on your circumstances. I remember our mortgage interest rate going up to 17% at one time in the late seventies. 

Now all our mortgages are paid off and we have accumulated savings, a rise in interest rates for us would be most welcome. 

Expectations now seem much higher than for our generation - make do and mend seems to be a dying art.

I still cannot allow a chicken carcass to be disposed off until I've made a pot of soup with it.

Groundhog - your attitude epitomises the vile detachment from reality I once encountered in a brief role in the public sector: baby boomers who’ve never set foot in the real world who had nothing but contempt for people trying to run a business in a country where small business is being thrown to the wall.

As a small business owner myself whose finance and life have been ruined by the last few years, here’s a bit of perspective for you:

In the first year of covid, I lost a third of my income, in the second year, I lost another third and I’ve since lost the rest. The government gave me no support because I happen to trade as a limited company. After a year or so of covid, they did allow us to take out a ‘bounceback loan’. I took out a loan for around £10k, which I withdrew to pay a tax bill and credit card. Because I’d take the money out of the business, I then had to repay the £10k before my tax payment deadline or I would have created a director’s loan, which attracts a 30% fine and 30% interest. Obviously, I didn’t have the £10k or I wouldn’t have needed to borrow it in the first place. Not only did I have to do that after the first year, but I also have to do it every year, because I now start every single year down by the amount of the outstanding business loan, so I’ve had to find that £10k twice to date with a third time looming. I currently have no income, no savings, no pension, monthly outgoings of over £1,000 before food, the £10k ‘bounceback loan’, 6 credit cards maxed out and I’m about to run out of money to buy food.

I lost a career to positive sex discrimination around the time of the global financial crisis, which left me in a ton of debt, because I’d recently gone back to uni to change into that career, and now I’ve lost my business due to covid. I have no partner, no kids, no family, no friends. The most I ever speak to anybody is ordering a coffee…There is literally no point to my continued existence and, if I died in my sleep tonight of ‘sudden death syndrome’, nobody would even notice until the neighbours smelled my rotting corpse.

They say that the first generation creates wealth, the second generation curates it and the third generation wastes it…The boomer generation will go down as the most prosperous in human history. They inherited the country built by our forefathers with their bare hands and defended with their blood and have left behind a third-world dump in which masculinity is practically a criminal offence, white males are being ostracised from every tier of society and the most likely cause of death of every new born baby boy, if he makes it to his 16^th birthday, will be killing himself. The fact that the most likely cause of death of every new-born baby boy in this country, if he makes it to 16, will be killing himself is telling you that ‘positivity’ isn’t really available to a lot of people and the fact that the biggest killer of young and middle-aged men in the UK is killing themselves is a reflection of the society we live in rather than the people who live in it.

The boomer generation inherited a country with a male population massively depleted by world wars and, hence, had jobs for life, paired off with ease and could buy a house and raise a family on one income. Societal changes, QE and inflation mean none of that will ever be available again. While previous generations of men were sent into world wars and down coal mines and life was hard in a very visceral way, for today’s generations, life is harder in a more existential way. There’s no meaning to life, no sense of community, no certainties, our country, history and culture is being over-written by the day, the whole fabric of society appears to be coming apart throughout the western world and our future appears to be living in a pod, eating insects and spending our CBDCs on whatever the government tell us we’re allowed to…

And, on that note, I'm leaving the forum because I come here for a bit of distraction, information and interaction and I run into a bunch of boomers with no perspective on the fact they are the most privileged generation in human history, telling the next generations who live in the third-world hellhole they’ve left behind that we should be ‘positive’ when it’s all we can do not to kill ourselves.

Feel free to delete my account.

As the original poster, thankyou for your contribution Richard and your perspective on the real world. It is appreciated and I hope your personal situation improves soon.
This is a friendly forum and long may it remain so, if you feel you are able, please do stay and enjoy some time here.
I politely remind you though that you are likely to have no knowledge regarding the background of members here, so references that we are all "Baby boomers who have never set foot in the real world" are likely to be misplaced and best avoided.

Richard, if you have left the forum then this response will get pointless, if you do check back in however can I urge you to seek professional help as a matter of urgency.

You cannot know or understand the personal journey of any member of this forum,  just as we have not lived your life. However your sweeping assumptions about other members circumstances and views are quite insulting. This forum as you say is meant to provide companionship, information and some escape from our day to day lives, but GOM section does allow for expression of thoughts and views in a relatively safe space, I view it as the sort of discussions that take place between friends over a leisurely pint and as such things may be said with varying degrees of seriousness that would not be discussed elsewhere.

It is unfortunate that this obviously hit a raw nerve given your situation, I am sure no malice was intended, and would once again urge you to seek professional help as soon as possibly

Take care and look after yourself

Cross posted..GH replied while I was typing this, didn't see his response till I posted.