Blue skies & Red Jets!

So FINALLY last Friday I got a day up at Scampton garnished with blue skies and sunshine. I'd been up a few times previously this winter hoping to photograph some flying, but on the first occasion the weather didn't clear for the whole day - we spent all day sitting in the photo section office drinking tea and gossiping. Second time round wasn't much better either - a single sortie got flown, but mostly up above the clouds. More tea, more gossiping.  The third attempt was a little better but still not those glorious blue skies that look so wonderful in pics. This trip was FAR better - the forecast had looked good all week, so it was just a case of crossing fingers that it didn't change - and for once the Met Office didn't let us down!

For a change the wind was in the right direction for the jets to be using the runway nearest to us - always nice to see them taxi out...

First up we had the Synchro pair practising their "Heart" - first time they'd done it this year, and I think you'll agree it's already looking good...

                    

Then "Enid" section took to the sky for some lovely looping passes and rolls - always nice to watch, and photograph!

For the third and subsequent slots we relocated to one of our favourite spots - lovely and quiet and peaceful, well until this happens...

We had the Heart overhead again - later with Synchro being joined by Red 8 who will be "spearing" the heart this year. Masses of close passes overhead - some of which were too close even for the short end of my 100-400mm lens. The best bit though? The slightly elevated position we had chosen giving us fabulous views of the jets running in over the Lincolnshire countryside...

Always a pleasure to watch! Work-ups are going well - in the course of the last few days the team have flown their first "9-Ship" practises of the year and it's all now starting to come together. A few more weeks of getting it all together here before they head to Greece for "Exercise Springhawk" which should hopefully culminate in them being awarded the coveted "PDA" - Public Display Authority which allows them to go from performing "practises" (as they currently are) to "Displays" in front of the public in the UK and elsewhere. They then return to the UK in time for their first public displays at Torbay Airshow down in Devon at the beginning of June. Can't wait!

Robyn

Everyone Else is Taken...!

Fit in! Join in! Be like everyone else! (Or not...)

There's a huge amount of pressure to conform, to do what everyone else does, to be "normal". Most people probably don't even give any thought to "normal" - they just want to be considered it. We're not born wanting to be normal, wanting to emulate what others do in their lives - watch any group of small children playing together and yet, they'll copy, but they'll also be totally happy to say "Nah - that's not me!" if that then doesn't fit in well with what they want to do. Then we hit school, and good old peer pressure comes into play in earnest, and to be honest, it never really goes away.

Sometimes wanting to emulate others can be good - seeing a friend who's a fabulous cook, for example, and thinking "wow - I'd love to learn to cook like that!" has benefits to your everyday life. A friend who's fabulous at photography can make you push yourself to think a bit more about your own shots, and how you can improve them. Other times it can be less positive - we've all seen that person who is so anxious to please that they will mould themselves to whoever they're spending time with - not quite "Single White Female" standard, but equally creepy to watch, after a while. Suddenly they develop an interest in things that they'd previously never mentioned (but if challenged, will always manage to look astonished and claim that they'd "always" been interested in X, Y or Z!"), their tastes in music and TV change, and they will fervently agree with whatever their new role model says, regardless of their true views - determined to not risk upsetting this person who, mostly, will be a far stronger and more dominant character.  It can be a dangerously easy trap to fall into as well - at least to a degree - after all it's far easier to agree with someone than to present a contradictory view, isn't it, especially if you lack the confidence to deal with a scathing and dismissive reaction from the other person if you do suggest that you feel differently. We all like to appear agreeable after all. Ultimately though, seeing someone like that can also be quite painful to watch, not least as invariably after a time the dominant personality will nearly always get bored with their resident "yes man" and run for the hills. A true friend will like you for yourself, and will be interested in your views and opinions - they won't shout you down or ridicule you for daring to voice them.

I wrote my most recent Frugal Friday entry on the subject of choices - how we all make them, and how sometimes, people make assumptions about WHY we've made them. Either way though - we all have a right to freedom of choice in so far as it doesn't harm anyone else, and those choices should be respected by others regardless of whether we agree with them, or not. "I wouldn't have done it that way but if it suits you, then great!" is fine "Well that's just stupid, you should have done it this way..." less so. Mr EH and have chosen to live a life without debt - we're not comfortable with it, don't like feeling as though we owe anything to anyone, and when in the future we choose to take on a mortgage again, we'll deal with it in the same way we did the first one - by making sacrifices, and overpaying as much as we can until it's gone. I have chosen to take on a 0% Credit Card for my new camera and phone, bought last year - not because I hadn't saved the money for these - I had - but because that money serves me better sitting in an interest bearing savings account. I worked for it in the first place, now IT is working for ME (It's not working all that hard, granted, but it's the principle that counts, here!). The card was opened with a 22 month interest free period but will be gone long before that, and should the worst happen, they money is there to clear any outstanding balance immediately. For the past 9 years we've adopted a way of life which means that if the money is not in the bank for something we want, we simply have to wait for it until we've saved up - and that works well for us, we're happier for it by far. Sometimes our choices are to do without, do with less, or do with something different, down to cost, other times they are made for other reasons - the one thing above all that - halleluiah - our original financial choices meant, is that we are no longer ruled by cost in all things - we consider necessity, and quality of life first. I still feel that one of the most powerful things I learned in the early days of our voluntarily frugal journey was that we don't need "stuff" to make us happy - breaking the habit of buying on impulse has probably saved us as much as anything else we've done over the years.

As long as the things you're doing are safe & legal, and don't hurt others, don't let anyone judge you, or raise an eyebrow at you for doing them - if they suit you, and your way of living, then that's the key thing. If someone DOES try to make you feel as though you're strange for making the choices you have, then maybe it's time to bear in mind the old adage - "Them as matter, don't mind, and them as mind, don't matter". Old it may be but there's a lot of truth there. Be true to yourself first, and worry what others think after - or at least try to, that one is a learning curve for me as much as anyone. If someone chooses to judge you for making a choice about something, then that says more about them, than about you, and learning to be comfortable enough in your own skin to say "Each to their own, eh" and shrug off hurtful comments is a powerful thing. Be yourself - everyone else is taken!

Robyn

Frugal Friday...

Choices. We all have to make them, consciously or unconsciously. For us, living frugally was a choice - we discussed where we ideally wanted to be financially, and agreed that debt free - including mortgage, was the end goal. And from there we made choices that facilitated that. We chose to delay the work that ideally needed doing on the flat, for the first thing. Everything was "good enough" - we were without question able to live with it - but there is a lot that needs doing now that the mortgage is dealt with, and we're now making further choices about which way to tackle those.

Once the choice to alter the way we lived was made, that in turn lead to other choices. We chose to stick with fixed rate deals for our mortgage for example - we took the view that we could afford what we were paying, and it allowed us to make overpayments, and the security of knowing that wasn't going to change for a set period of time worked well. In hindsight, we would have been better to have changed provider and gone onto a SVR - the lowest our rate ever dropped in 13 years was 4.34% and our overpayments were limited by the fixed rate product - but there you go, hindsight, as they say, is a marvellous thing!  We chose that although yes, we wanted that mortgage gone, we weren't going to cut ourselves off from all that was fun in the interim - and that, for us, proved to be the correct choice. We budgeted for holidays, for some "fun" stuff - and that allowed the overpaying and the other frugal choices to be sustainable, we think. This is borne out by the significant number of folk (some of whom may be found on a frugal blog or two out there!) who chose the hardcore "cut everything" approach and have failed to meet their own targets as a result. In theory we could have been MF sooner than we were, but the experiences we would have missed in the meantime would have been a sacrifice too far.

One thing we've never sacrificed is our food choices though - I recently mentioned to a friend that we were having a variation on Jack Monroe's Carrot and Kidney bean burgers for our dinner that night - and the response was fired back "I don't care how cheap they are, I wouldn't make them - I want meat in my burgers!" - now the first level I found this interesting on was that the perception was that I must be making them because they were cheap. Well there's no getting away from it, they ARE cheap, I reckon even with the tweaks I've made to the recipe (parsnip instead of carrot due to MrEH's carrot-dodging tendancies, additional herbs and spices, that sort of thing) they still cost me no more than about 50p a batch to make. However, they also taste really nice - we simply wouldn't eat them if they didn't - for us, food and flavour go together without question. The second was the assertion that burgers had to have meat in them. Whilst we are about as far from vegetarians as you can imagine, another choice we made years ago - namely to only buy British, higher welfare standard meat, means that as a result we now eat less of it than we used to - our choice is higher quality, lower quantity, and that works well, we get a better tasting product when we do eat it, and as we've learned to pack the flavour into our meat-free meals by combining flavours and textures, using seasonal veg wherever possible, and acquiring a good collection of herbs and spices, those don't feel like a hardship for a moment. I love a nice meaty burger as much as the next person, but I'm also happy to consider alternatives, and discover tasty stuff by looking a bit further afield and stepping away from the accepted norm. Sometimes meat is almost used as a seasoning - a little finely chopped bacon in macaroni cheese for example, it's there, but it's no longer the entire point of the dish - again we get away with this because our bacon is higher welfare, dry cured and FULL of flavour - don't try this with the watery Danish stuff guys, you might as well save your money! One very well known frugal blogger told me some years ago in a public comment in her blog that I was wasting my money buying higher welfare British meat - she "couldn't afford" to do that - ironic as at the time her household had a significantly higher income than ours did, but no matter, my ethics won't let me "afford" to do otherwise. I'd certainly encourage anyone else to make the same choices we do on that front, for flavour and quality alone - but it IS a choice, and it may not be right or even possible for everyone.

Stunning colours in last weekend's "Winter Slaw"!

Another choice we made which has a bearing on the food thing now is for me to drop my working hours to part-time a few years ago. Working 4 days a week naturally brings in less money than a full 5 day week would - so the trade off for this was that I would use that extra time to drive down our household costs - and naturally this does include food shopping. I make the time to check online for the Super-6 deals from this supermarket, and the Pick of the Week offers from another, and often our meal plan is built around those. On the rare occasion I buy a specific item for a recipe - raw beetroot for the Winter Slaw I made last weekend, for example - I make sure the rest of it gets used up in another way so food waste is kept down. I rarely have time through the week to cook from recipes - envious though I am of those who do - so our weekday meals tend to be pretty quick to cook but still cooked from scratch. And yes - some of them will be meat free, through choice. This week for example - the "parsnip and kidney bean burgers" that sparked this post, served in Lebanese wraps with rocket and winter slaw; Bolognese, batch cooked at the weekend and simply reheated, served over pasta; a spicy king prawn salad (that used up the remainder of the Winter Slaw too); Liver and onions with mash & veg (SO wonderfully quick to cook, and so full of flavour!); A Thai inspired fish stew with rice; Sausages with a pile of assorted roasted veg (yes, that was where the rest of the beetroot went!); Pasta in a creamy cheese sauce with mushrooms and bacon. So roughly a pattern of meat one day, and veggie or fish the next.

It's definitely worth thinking about your choices in a bit more detail than you might otherwise - taking the time every now and again to re-evaluate, make sure that those choices are still right for you. Work out where taking a little more time might save you money that's better used elsewhere. Challenge the obvious. Ask yourself why you do things to a certain pattern, and whether there is a better way. I'd almost not thought of it before but writing this post has made me realise - making our money and our time work for us has really been key to what we've achieved so far, and as a result of that we've learned skills which we'll continue to use on in to the future.

Robyn

Words...

"It's only words"

"Words don't come easy"

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me"

Except of course we all know - or at least *should* know that last one isn't true don't we. Taught to children in a bid to show them that someone can't hurt you just by calling you names - and of course if we're referring to physical harm and damage, that may be true - but what about the effect of words on someone's mental health, self-esteem and confidence? And what effect does teaching that really have on a child - to some, does it give the impression that you can "say" what you like to someone, or about someone, as that's OK, it's just causing them physical harm that's wrong? Sometimes it certainly feels as though that's the case. You'd think by the time people progress into adulthood that they would have learned that words CAN hurt, at least, but increasingly that doesn't seem to be the case - and the internet certainly doesn't help with that - too many "keyboard warriors" who feel they can say whatever they like (Jack Monroe's recent court victory and the TwitterStorm that followed certainly proved this with a surprising number of people feeling that the result was wrong as "You can say what you like on the internet") and hang the consequences or the effects on others. And of course now if you dare to speak out, to say "No, this is wrong, that's treating someone badly, that's not nice" you get accused of being a "snowflake" - a lot of people confusing being nice, with being over-sensitive.

Sometimes though the right words can have a positive effect. In the midst of a rather "Meh" day on Saturday, two separate events reminded me of this. First a card from some lovely friends, thanking me for something. Just a tiny gesture, and absolutely "not required" but the message written inside was thoughtful, beautifully worded, and absolutely "right" in the circumstances. The second was a message via social media from someone I'd randomly met the day before, while photographing a helicopter flypast in London. We'd exchanged a few words whilst waiting - but were too far apart to actually talk properly, but once the aircraft had passed by I crossed back over the road to say hello and see how they'd got on (conditions were horrible!) - for various reasons this had made a very positive impact on the person, and they'd gone to the trouble the following day of doing some online research and had managed to find my Facebook page as a result. Another set of thoughtful and considered words, and in this case, quite brave, also, for various reasons. An average day utterly transformed by the actions of others.

"Farewell to the Lynx" - the last RN Lynx Helicopters over the Thames

The people involved in these two small kindnesses didn't need to go to the lengths they did at all - the first could have been a more simple basic "Thank you" - and in fact a thank you had already been said, so it could be argued that the card was unnecessary in any case. As it was, the beautifully crafted and considered message inside was a truly lovely gesture. In the second case, I was totally taken aback that someone would go to the time and effort involved in tracking me down in order to thank me for something which I could never have known would have had the impact on them it did. In both cases though I can only thank THEM - for taking the time, for thinking it was worth it, and for being genuinely nice. Not "Look at me, look how nice I am" gesture - more about the person making it than about the person it is made to - no shouting or showboating here, but a genuine kindness and a thoughtful use of words. There's a lot to be said for that.

Robyn