At lunchtime yesterday I noticed there was hoar frost on the trees, but didn’t have my camera with me. So I took it to work today and fortunately there was still frost. Not as spikey as yesterday, but still beautiful.
I’m not sure what I think about cutting child benefit from higher earners. On the one hand, if you’re earning a lot, you probably don’t need child benefit. On the other hand, £44k isn’t actually a huge amount of money, although it is a lot more than the national average, and more than I am earning. Here are some arguments I’ve heard recently in support of the cut:
Argument: Why should the taxes of the low paid pay for the benefits of the rich? Refutation: The rich pay more tax (a lot more tax), so it turns out the low paid aren’t really paying for them.
Argument: If you’re earning £44k and you can’t afford to have children, you shouldn’t have children. Refutation: With child benefit the people earning £44k could afford to. Also, why should someone earning £12k expect to get child benefit? Under that argument, if they can’t afford to have children they shouldn’t either.
Argument: Having children isn’t a right, so getting child benefit shouldn’t be universal. It should only be paid to those who really need it. Refutation: If having children is a choice (and it is), if you’re earning too little you should choose not to have children. If the low paid choose to have children and expect the government to pay for them, why shouldn’t the higher paid?
Argument: You shouldn’t buy that fancy car or nice house – then you could afford to not have the child benefit. Refutation: Even when you’re earning £12k, you’re still earning loads more than the international average. Maybe you shouldn’t have that comparatively nice house either?
Argument: It’s tough but fair. Refutation: How can it possibly be fair to give child benefit to a family earning £70k but not to one earning £44k? (I understand this was the simplest way to do things, but to claim it is fair is disingenuous).
And never mind all those arguments: if you’re earning just under £44k and then do a few hours of overtime you could end up being a couple of thousand pounds worse off. A gradual cut off would be much better. Personally I also think the gradual cut off point should be around £50k and be based on family income rather than individual income.
Also, please note that for some of these refutations I’m slightly playing devil’s advocate.
If you’re not already signed up to Quidco, I’d definitely recommend it. I’ve received over £700 of cashback over the last three years. The biggest cashback payments have been for switching gas and electricity providers. There are quite a few of these cashback sites around, but Quidco seems to be one of the better ones as far as I can tell.
The idea is that if you want to buy something from, say, play.com, instead of going straight to play.com you go to quidco.com first. If they have that site on quidco you click on their link instead, which takes you to play.com but records the fact that you went there via quidco. Then when you make a purchase from play.com, quidco gets informed and you get either a fixed amount of cashback or a percentage of your purchase back.
Each year Quidco take the first £5 of your earnings as a subscription fee, although if you don’t make £5 (which is quite unlikely) they don’t take anything.
I should also mention that if you sign up using this link and make £5, I’ll get a extra £2.50 bonus, so I do have an ulterior motive to getting you to sign up!
I posted this on Facebook last year, and I just found it again and thought I would post it on my blog for all to see…
Here’s how it works: You start with 100%. For each thing on the list you have done, take away 2%. At the end, you have a score which says how innocent you are. Then you have to email everyone you know within ten seconds, otherwise really bad things will happen to you. And you’re not allowed to break the rules. Because then you’ll probably die, or get really bad wind, or something.
- Spoken to a member of the opposite sex
- Said the word ‘sex’
- Killed someone
- Tickled someone’s feet
- Laughed at a dirty joke
- Told a dirty joke
- Eaten ice cream
- Stayed up until 10 pm
- Stayed up all night
- Taken a photograph
- Taken a photograph of a member of the opposite sex
- Been in a photograph
- Eaten After Eight Mints before Eight O’clock
- Skinned a Rabbit
- Skinned up
- Know what ‘skinned up’ means
- Driven a car
- Crashed a car
- Crashed a car into a swimming pool
- Been to France
- Eaten blue cheese
- Whipped a horse
- Whipped some cream
- Licked whipped cream off a member of the opposite sex
- Not kept the Sabbath Day holy
- Played football
- Played hockey
- Played hookey
- Played the fool
- Drunk Whiskey
- Drunk Meths
- Drunk Drain Cleaner
- Got Drunk
- Been arrested
- Been killed
- Been killed by a member of the opposite sex
- Said a naughty word
- Invented a naughty word
- Shaken someone’s hand
- Shaken someone’s martini
- Been to the cinema
- Been to the cinema with a member of the opposite sex
- Used a recording device while at the cinema
- Been told you have nice shoes
- Had sex
- Worn socks
- Carried sacks
- Thought ‘Work Sucks!’
- Hit a six
- Been a nun
- Kissed a nun
This week and next week (July 16th and 23rd) there will be no weekly barbeque.
At the weekend I went to the Godiva Festival, twice. Now, in the past I’ve been to it occasionally, and it has been anything ranging from dire to dismal. Last year, admittedly, I wasn’t able to go as I was on holiday in Canada – and I would like to have gone, as Newton Faulkner was playing. This year Badly Drawn Boy, Ash and Joshua Radin were playing, amongst others. I haven’t really heard much Badly Drawn Boy, but he’s famous, and so I thought I should see him play. Joshua Radin is pretty much unknown, but I’ve heard him a fair bit on Spotify and thought he’s definitely worth seeing live. And Ash were one of my favourite bands while I was at university, so there was no chance I was going to miss finally seeing them play live.
When I set off from home I knew I would be a little late for seeing the start of Badly Drawn Boy’s set, but what I wasn’t counting on was for them to have moved the car park entrance right round to the other side of the park, and made the diversion go on one of the slowest roads in the area. Also, once I’d got near the parking entrance there was a barrier halfway across the road with a ‘road closed’ sign up. Assuming this meant the car park was now full, I turned round to try and find somewhere else to park. Fortunately I looked in my rear view mirror and saw two cars drive around the barrier and into the entrance, so I turned back around and went into the car park. As I entered, one of the stewards asked me to put my hazard lights on. I did, but it seemed a bit of a strange idea – as if flashing orange lights on your car would make you in any way safer. I then proceeded to drive through Memorial Park, along the dusty footpaths, until I found the car parking field. It was then a long walk right over to the other side of the park to the entrance to the main stage area, where there were stewards waving hand-held metal detectors at you. They weren’t particularly good metal detectors, as I remembered just after I’d got through that I still had my penknife in my pocket.
When I got to the stage it was about twenty-five past eight, and Badly Drawn Boy was well into his set. I started to look around for people I recognised. I knew Steve was going to be there, so I texted him to ask where he was. He replied that he was just in front of the sound desk tent, which was exactly where I was, so I looked around a bit more, but I couldn’t see him. As I turned back around, Steve appeared in front of me – it turned out he’d been there all along, we just hadn’t realised it until then. Badly Drawn Boy was okay, but nothing special. I didn’t really recognise any of his songs, and most of the time it was just him with a guitar. For a couple of songs another guy came on with an electric guitar and there was a backing drum track, but there was nothing to set the world alight.
After he had finished there was a wait of about forty minutes before Ash came on stage. I wasn’t sure what to expect from them – after all, the only songs I really knew were from their 1997 album, 1977, so I didn’t know if they would just do lots of new stuff which I wouldn’t recognise. Thankfully, they did a great job of mixing their newer stuff with the old, and I also discovered that I already knew quite a bit of their newer stuff without having realised it. There was a lot of singing-along happening, including during Girl from Mars when the group of guys behind me sang the whole guitar solo too. Which was what I was tempted to do, and probably would have done if I’d been playing the CD in my car.
When leaving the park at about half past ten, the stewards again asked me to turn on my hazard lights. I asked why, and they said ‘for safety’. I told them it was okay, as I had headlights, and didn’t turn them on. The car in front did though, and it meant my eyes were constantly adjusting to the brightness as they flashed on and off, and probably made things a lot less safe for any pedestrians wandering around the cars. I’m not completely anti-Health and Safety, but I wish people would think about their health and safety rules instead of blindly implementing silly policies like that.
On Sunday Joshua Radin was playing, so Naomi, Joscelyn and I decided to go back to the festival to see him. According to the programme he was supposed to be on at six o’clock. We were a little late (we were going to stay at home because it was starting to rain, but then the skies brightened so we went out), and arrived at the car park at five past six. This time there was no barrier across the road, but when we got to the entrance the steward told us that the car park was closed. We asked why, and he said ‘the festival is finished, we have been told to close the car park’, and when we told him that Joshua Radin was supposed to be just starting to play they just repeated that the car park was closed. So we parked on a side street, walked to the park, and discovered that Joshua Radin had only been playing for ten minutes, and we were able to watch his gig for another three quarters of an hour, despite the festival apparently being finished. Anyway, despite the festival organisers’ best efforts to spoil our day, we really enjoyed watching him play. A lot of the time when you see a new band play live, all the songs sound the same and all the instruments merge into one mushy noise, but not in this case.
Anyway, in summary, the Godiva Festival this year was probably the best so far. It was helped by having fantastic weather nearly all weekend. The only complaints I have are around the stewards turning us away from the carpark on Sunday (and their silly hazard lights rule), and the huge amount of litter which was dropped all over the place. It was pretty disgusting – especially when there were so many bins available. People were just too lazy or stupid to use them. But the music was great.
