They lied

There you are: living, actual, visual proof that money doesn't make the world go round (or around). In fact it just ruins everything and makes it wrong. It gets in the way and makes things wonky, heavy and uneven. Things would turn a whole helluva lot more smoothly and sweetly without the dirty bastard stuff.

We tell ourselves regularly that money doesn't matter, we can list all the many and various things that are more important to us than money: love, happiness, family, peace, friends, good health, society, community, creativity, etc, etc, etc but we can't help but be controlled by money and those who have the most of it in this world. Those who are greedy, who want the most, who make the rules, who judge others, those with the biggest houses and the biggest cars and the biggest bank balance - they make money important, they influence the powerful, they make themselves the powerful, they look down on everyone else and try to force everyone to think that they should be striving for more too in order to call themselves "successful" and "ambitious". And not only that, they make it virtually impossible for us to reject the damn stuff and live without it. We are made to feel inadequate and bad* by people who deliberately put themselves into jobs that control others.

And yet I count my best successes in life as the ones that involve little or no money coming my way: my children, my marriage, my ability to love, my Open University degree, my vegetable-growing, my writing, my photography. All things that I have done with passion and strife, with masses of effort, and fraught with imperfections and ups and downs. I don't see a big income as a success, I just see it as a big income. It means nothing to me.

The same with ambition. We are made to feel that ambition means wanting a lot. But that's just greedy. The two have almost come to mean the same thing.

And yet the most ambitious year of my life was probably 2012 when I spent a lot of money finishing my degree and organising the publishing of a book and beginning my vegetable garden. I made no money from any of those things and yet it was a highly ambitious time.

Can we get away from money?

Currently we can't. It is dominating our day/week/month/year. We have a huge tax bill to pay at the end of the month; the renewable energy company want paying for the heat pump and solar panels; we have staff holiday pay and staff tax and National Insurance payments to make; we are paying wages to someone who has already left and covering his hours at the same time, our monthly direct debits and family outgoings are more than our winter income by a hugemassivelongshot. And although we've worked really hard to reduce absolutely everything and spent hours looking at figures and household bills, it will be months - if not years - before any evidence of this will be apparent.

It got a bit out of control today. Richard and I ended up having a massive row even though we're on the same side. We really want to shout at the world, at the government, at the bank, at the people who try wetsuits on in the shop and then go and buy them cheaper on the Internet, but instead we shouted at each other.
Richard even asked someone to value the shop today. But he doesn't want to sell it.



We're all in this together, but some of us are more in it than others.

I'm stopping now because I need to eat. We haven't eaten properly all day.

*"we are made to feel inadequate and bad" is what Richard said about the bank today. So I nicked his words.