enough . . .

. . . is enough . . . and I feel lucky there has always been enough . . . though discussing this topic with Ros and Hannah a while back they reminded me of the time a few years ago when there was a temporary deficit and they took me in . . . yet that was fine too . . . I had to learn to ask - Ros for shelter and a loan, Judith for a larger, longer term loan . . . it was repaid as things picked up . . . I tormented Hannah with philosophy as the price for sitting beside her as she learnt to drive . . . Jennie was a delight . . . Mike good company and ready to produce great artwork for projects . . .

. . . this financial setback followed a year of working in a small social enterprise, which set out to redesign the transport system in County Durham . . . a kind friend said: you could have started somewhere easier . . . another said: ah, County Durham . . . missionary work . . . our collaborators from Newcastle University had the evidence and methodology from European research projects; we had a community transport focus, allied with real time demand responsive buses, liftshare, taxi brokerage . . . an integrated system which would improve the service and save 30% of the costs . . . the local health service supported. . . offered £120k to do cross sector cost benefit analysis, design and prototyping . . . the Council, still focused on maintaining a local high wage economy above excellent, economic services, took control . . . invited tenders . . . er, that's our intellectual property . . . don't worry, we will make sure you get it . . . well, that's illegal even to say, let alone do . . . of course their usual consultants won the tender, wrote a report . . . they set up their own demand responsive service as another layer . . . we retrenched, gave up the office, my rented cottage . . . I found a part time job to supplement the work we found . . . sympathetic friends in community transport commissioned us . . . and there was enough again, for a while . . .

. . . important to acknowledge that globally people do die daily, because there is not enough food or clean water . . . politics . . . as Gandhi said, there is enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed . . . inequality is out of control and serves neither rich nor poor in the end . . .

Teri would also probably remind me that my fecklessness was supported by her salary at times . . . though a sum when Mum died helped buy a house and the sale of an antique secretaire funded a holiday in Morrocco for the five of us . . . the antique came from Dad's aunts and uncle . . . Uncle Frank, jolly and fascinating to us children due to the absence of any fingers on one hand . . . lost in a factory accident . . . Auntie Nell, a dwarf . . . Auntie Em, rather austere, kind, spinster . . . later we found postcards from her soldier lover in WW1 . . . she had his baby, he was killed in France, she had to give up the child . . . a disgrace to a respectable family . . .

. . . on one level there is poverty thinking . . . the fear of "not enough" affecting people of all income levels . . . at times I have fallen into it . . . buying bargains that don't last . . . a year ago I went for new boots . . . I walked a lot . . . for the first time I bought good ones, have walked in them every day . . . they are serving me well on the Camino . . .

. . . over the years, I have worked in the system of contemporary slavery . . . changing jobs from time to time when things got tedious . . . and through that I find myself with enough to live on, more or less . . . well, there is around €12 a day . . . I am spending around €30 a day . . .  what could possibly go wrong . . . ?