Well, I got bored of reading the recipe, and decided I could go forth and forge something edible. So I chopped up a couple of large potatoes and began to fry them (keeping them moving so they wouldn’t stick, as I was informed to do). Once they were all brown and nice, I threw in some sliced mushrooms, mushrooms being the kind of cheap ingredient you should always have to hand, and then two eggs.

Oh, I also poured in what was left of my Basics Herb Mix following the copious amounts I used to make the pasta sauce edible. Finally, I threw in some cheese for extra flavour. Then I was worried there mightn’t be enough food in the pan, so I fried some bread as an extra.

Well, for a recipe I’d never tried before, it worked well. It actually looked pretty appetising, and, since it had both protein and carbohydrates, was a fairly well-balanced meal. Admittedly, it could have used some bacon or some ham or something just to add a little more flavour, maybe even onions or something, but it was still tasty, and it was what I would call ‘good food’, which is a term I have a little difficultly qualifying. By it, I mean food that you can shovel down and it fills you up, like stew or curry or egg-fried rice or fish-shop chips; food that doesn’t assault you with flavour or require fiddly manipulation like steak or peas, but just warms you from the inside and leaves you feeling full.

So I’m thinking, I’m going at add this ‘Spanish Scrambled Eggs’ to my roster of meals, particularly as it’s also pretty cheap. Let’s see… about 30p for the two eggs, 10p worth of mushrooms and maybe 15p of cheese, and about another 15p worth of potatoes, this might even be the cheapest meal yet, and possibly the tastiest this week. If only my luncheon had been as successful: that consisted of Basics 45p Baked Beans and Sausages. They didn’t taste too bad while I was eating them, but afterwards they leave your teeth feeling sort of coated, while you just feel dirty.

The curry I had just tasted of generic mild curry, with a better flavour than the sauce’s 7 pence price tag would have suggested. As for the chicken, which was again of the budget variety that didn’t taste any different from any other packaged chicken breast once it was cut up and cooked. I also threw in a Basics Naan bread, which made it basically like a proper curry only cheaper.

Apart from that there’s not a lot I can say about the curry: I can’t berate
it like the pasta sauce, and neither can I commend it on any outstanding qualities, except the price: I’m reckoning that the curry I made is about three portions, so that works out at about £1.07 per portion.

That breaks down as:

7p for the sauce

£2.39 for the chicken

59p for the Naan breads

about 30p worth of rice

So anyone needing to save money on food, a cheap curry is a fairly viable proposition.

It’s beginning to look like I’m going to be eating this curry at least twice more this week and not a lot else: it’s possibly a little harder than I imagined to live on £10 for a week, since the curry and the pasta were my two main planned meals, and all I seem left with is an amount of pasta, potatoes, rice, cheese and eggs, which will most likely lead to some rather bland meals without supplement.

I have been helped along however since my housemate came back from work at the Co-op on Monday with a bag of about fifteen or twenty packets of out-of-date ‘Rainbow Cookies’. Looking at the amount of E-numbers in them, I can see why they didn’t sell, but, hey, they’re free, so we’re all eating them.

Still, I loaded up my basket with white-and-orange labels, finding particular amusement in the 7 pence jar of ‘curry sauce’ and the 45 pence tin of baked beans and ‘sausages’. Meanwhile, Luke filled his basket with items from the Taste the Difference Range, abstaining from any packaging that sported less than ten adjectives below its name, as if as a counterpoint to my thrifty food procuration.

My single extravagance was the £2.39 packet of chicken pieces for the curry sauce, the 52 pence biscuit selection naturally being a necessity. Consequently, my food-supply for the next seven days will consist of the following:

The cost of all this was £8.01. With the £1 I docked for using some stuff I already have, that leaves me with 99 pence until next Sunday. Now I would consider myself quite frugal in my shopping, but my usual weekly shop at Sainsbury’s is almost twice that, and then I often ‘top-up’ during the week with one or two things from Tesco.

Still, I don’t think this little experiment should pose much of a challenge to me, unless all the food is truly, inedibly awful. And I must confess, I’m already quite used to the 10p noodles, a fan even: they taste fine, they take two minutes to prepare and they’re cheap carbohydrates. Providing the novelty doesn’t wear off, this semi-self-enforced poverty for a week should be a breeze, which is fortunate because I did order a new computer yesterday as well, my grandmother having graciously offered to front the money for it.

I’ll be sure to keep you all posted on what are sure to be the riveting developments in this saga of low-cost survival, omitting for the benefit of conciseness the meals, such as the chicken curry, that span multiple days.

I’m sure I’ll be fine for money, if it gets dire I can always go back home for a few weeks and eat all the food there until September and the next installment of my student loan (which, thinking about it, I should probably sort out), and I’m still optimistic of getting a job, ideally making money blogging but otherwise in a shop somewhere.

But still, I thought, why not see what it’s like living on £10 for a week? After all, isn’t that what bloggers do: pointless personal, subjective experiments that they can then go type up to the internet masses with the assumption that anyone would care to read about them. I hear that Steve Pavlina makes a tidy sum that way.

So, though it’s been done before, probably in a less ironically irreverent way, I shall attempt, and blog about, living for a single week on ten pounds sterling, which mightn’t be too hard, or might be really restrictive.

There are rules of course to this ‘experiment’: Although I’m going to not spend more than £10 for seven days, I am allowed to use some things I already have: not the half-bottle of Jack Daniel’s in my room, nor the frozen BBQ chicken pizza in my freezer, nor the bag of deliciously addictive chocolate raisins I keep, but the small piece of cheese and the orange juice that I don’t want to waste, the tea I have in my cupboard and the toiletries in the bathroom. Also, the potatoes and the rice and the pasta I have, since these things are cheap anyway and it would be senseless to buy more.

However, for the ‘privilege’ of using these pre-acquired items, I am removing a pound from my stock, bringing me down to £9 for everything else I need.

So, the ‘experiment’ begins.

I suppose obsession and enthusiasm make people interesting, and perhaps tell us something of the doggedness of human nature. Perhaps people just like to see people with focus to their lives, regardless of what, or how absurd, that focus is. Do we all feel lacking in focus at times? All the time? I certainly do, quite often. I try to focus my life on writing, but that’s not always possible. I only put Grizzly Man on because I didn’t feel in the right frame of mind to write, and I didn’t want to spend hours forcing words or staring at blank pages.

A good friend of mine told me she felt jealous sometimes of people who had focus or hobbies or know what they want to do. She cited my writing as an example, that she felt she doesn’t really have anything like that. I worry though, as I suppose, or hope, all creative people do, about whether I really am good, or as good as I want to be, which is very good, or if I just want to be so much that I convince myself I am. Especially now, it feels more of concern, because as I go forwards I stake more of myself on writing, as I spend years at university paying to learn how to become a better writing, working towards leaving with a degree in writing and nothing but.

I’ve been trying to write a novel lately, and reached forty-thousand words, before coursework deadlines got in the way. That was what I was going to write earlier, but barely felt enthused to get into. I’m worried about losing the story, because stories are elusive. I have it all planned out, but it’s the feeling that can be lost. Writing a novel is hard, no one will tell you otherwise, except perhaps those few who have their own formula down perfectly, and churn them out in the same mould every few months. The hardest thing I find is consistency; keeping that same writing style and feeling up over multiple sessions over an extended period of time. Raymond Carver said that was why he liked short stories because “they can be written and read in one sitting.”

I’m concerned too that focusing on becoming a writer isn’t really a focus at all. After all, what’s the point of being the most eloquent, lyrical wordsmith if you have nothing to say? It occurred to me earlier that writing may in fact be a means to an end, and what that end is I am unsure. Do I want to entertain? Do I want to make people feel good? Do I want to further human knowledge and experience? I think really I just want to leave my mark on the world, to be remembered, though if that’s true, I’m really not sure what the benefit of immortality is after I’m dead.

Timmy Treadwell, the subject of Grizzly Man, left his mark on the world, albeit filtered through the eyes of Werner Herzog, the film’s writer and narrator. He didn’t come across as a particularly, well, not ‘likeable’, person. He’s no hero-figure, he’s no David Attenborough. He was annoying sometimes, and naive, and sentimental. He interfered with his subjects, which did create some incredibly intimate footage, but is not in keeping with the codes of documentary-making. He was poserish, but not in a Bear Grylls I’m-so-great way, more like a child given a video-camera to play with, starring in their own action movie. There was definitely something of a child in his fascination with the world around him, that inspires a warmth towards him that would otherwise have been deterred by his strangeness, his anger, his sentimentalism and his misanthropy.

Yesterday another friend of mine casually mentioned that he had written two-hundred-and-forty pages of script over the past two or three months, totalling at between sixty- to seventy-thousand words, quite apart from whether it’s any good or not, that’s a riduculous amount. I’m not sure exactly how this makes me feel, but it’s negative. Definitely some jealousy in there. It’s okay that people older than me, and people I’ve never met can do this, but he’s one of my peers, like me in a number of ways. Of course, people I have met who are older than me, by however much, who have acheived more than me, make me jealous as well. Not acheived in a physical sense, I mean, acheived in doing great work and gaining respect for it. I think that’s something I want: respect, to be thought of highly by my peers and, especially, by people who have never met me or meet me only briefly. It’s a kind of hubris, and I know many, many people want the same and never acheive it, but I’d hate to be one of them.

I used to fairly regularly write a personal blog. I replaced that with this site, and decided to transfer my energies from keeping an online journal to writing new prose fiction and articles for The Aspiring Writer. The latter faded away fairly quickly, though I’m fairly pleased with maintaining the former with at least some degree of regularity, even if it is irregular regularity. But I kind of miss that personal blog as a place to vent and voice opinions, without worrying about focus. So, in a way, this a return to that, one which I may or may not keep up, as the mood takes me. And I suppose a few people will read this, only a few.

Does anyone else feel that, and particularly with the internet, it’s more important to shout than to be heard? I write for myself, mostly: I try to write the stories I want to read, and I quite often succeed at that, but I still crave the praise of others, the affirmation of my abilities. I like to be heard, but I like to shout more, on the internet at least, where everyone has to shout to be heard. I don’t raise my voice much in real life.

I read an article recently from the Guardian, about some analyst saying how screen-based communications are diminishing real social interactions because it’s easier and safer to type rather than to speak because there’s less fear of rejection and replies can be planned out rather than requiring spontaneity. Well that’s a whole big issue, too big for this entry and my opinion alone, but I agree with that, based on myself. I far prefer writing and typing as a means of correspondance than face-to-face interaction because I do feel so much more eloquent and considered, being able to plan every single word, and delete as appropriate. It’s easier, at least, even if slightly less rewarding. I like emails and chat-logs and letters and blogposts too because they’re less ephemeral than spoken words: they’re a mark on the world, virtual or not.

On the other hand, and though I consider myself something of a misanthrope, if not to the extent of Timmy Treadwell, there’s a thrill to real-life conversation, sometimes, that you just can’t get in anything written, not just IM conversations and email exchanges, but in fictional dialogue as well. It reminds you, by which I mean me, of what real life is about, of how it can make you feel. I don’t know whether I really am a ‘writer’ or not, but I certainly spend more time in a haze of fictional worlds, sometimes mine, often other people’s, than I do in the real world, and I think it’s good for me to get out into the parts of the real world that don’t depress me from time to time.

Sometimes I suppose that’s all I’m really looking for, through experience and through writing: the real world, meaning. I imagine that’s all anyone’s looking for. If that was the end, representing a ‘real’, true version of the world through the means of writing, would that satisfy me? The impression that Grizzly Man, that his friends and that his footage, gave of Timmy Treadwell was that he was happy to die eaten by a bear, doing what he felt was important, becoming a part of nature.