Comfort Blanket

"The Spend Less Handbook" - book review

"The Spend Less Handbook - 365 tips for a better quality of life while actually spending less" by Rebecca Ash, is a book of three parts. In part 1 Rebecca  outlines the moral and ecological arguments, demonstrating why we are buying more but not feeling any happier. Personally I found it a little on the preachy and strident side in a few places and that might put some people off right out of the starting blocks, but it is a solid 50 pages of facts about consumerism, and its effects on us and the planet. Part 2 is brief - 7 snappy rules to help you live better and spend less.

Part 3 comprises the 365 tips. I got the distinct impression that the author originally had perhaps 250 to 300 tips at most and then someone decided it would look more catchy to stretch these to 365, presumably hoping that most people will assume this is one of those books where you can put one thing into action every day for a year, thereby creating a  year of bite-sized savings. If you are assuming that you will be disappointed, unless you are quite happy to downsize your house one day, try squatting the next and move abroad a week later.

The author would have been better served producing 300 really good quality tips rather than trying to eke things out to 365 and ending up looking frankly silly in places. For example, tip 211 - "Flying first class is surely unnecessary unless you really, really need to", I think I was on to that one already. Or maybe, tip 348 "it may actually pay you to look for ways to earn significant amounts of money while actually working less" - and that's all you get, there is no more substance to that gem, and certainly no guidance on how to do it. That one left me more than a bit baffled. Where did she get it from? Does she really think that we are all dumbly stuck in 9 to 5 jobs when there are hundreds of other 'magic' jobs out there paying more and only expecting you to turn up for the mornings?

I find it a bit disingenuous that the back cover claims "every tip will save you between £5 and £50,000". Quite a lot of the tips are very worthy in themselves but are more about being happy with what you are and have rather than saving actual pennies and pounds. "Feeling proud of the person you are" and "Stand up straight and wear your clothes and your life with elegance and pride" may be fine enough, if a little simplistic, as statements but they won't directly save you money. Anyone who is really struggling for every penny and picks up this book will probably put it down again fairly promptly, finding those sort of sentiments glib and unhelpful. If all of your few clothes are worn thin and sagging, then being told to wear them with elegance and pride might just stick in your craw a little. This is a very middle class book, and unfortunately it sounds as though the author is utterly unaware of this.

There are plenty of perfectly sensible tips such as don't buy a brand new car because you immediately lose a lot of money due to depreciation and go to price comparison websites for mortgage deals, holidays, the best savings rates etc. However, these sensible tips are also peppered between some that are disturbingly niave and simplistic, and there is a distinct lack of balancing the pros and cons of most of the bright suggestions. This is a little dangerous - you get one short, sensible tip, and not much further on you get another tip proposing something that could potentially lose you money if you get it wrong. I felt uncomfortable that the sensible tips are giving some credence to the more complex ones. I feel an example is needed:

Rebecca is very keen on the idea of selling up and moving abroad, of finding the perfect sunset and a cheap villa and living the good life. Admittedly she does say that her thoughts are meant as inspiration and not a comprehensive guide, but at the same time it is written in a tone that implies that anyone who doesn't see this as the ideal answer must be some kind of idiot. "Sell up your expensive home in the UK and you might find you have enough money to start a new life abroad doing the work you want to do". You might also find that if you have stayed away from the UK for 2 years and then need to return in an emergency, when you get back you won't be eligible for any state aid for 6 months. You'll have to pay all your own medical bills, and you won't be given temporary housing if you have nowhere to live etc. British citizen or not you'll have to fend for yourself without any safety net. These places are cheap for a reason, because there are big catches and risks involved. It's just not so simple Rebecca!

I think the best thing you get from this book is the repeated questioning of the status quo of your life. Are you really happy doing things this way? What would happen if you did this or that instead? Frankly the rest of it is rather pedestrian at best and pie in the sky folly at worst. Personally I think India Knight's "The Thrift Book" beats this one hands down any day.

Some of my biggest failings

OK, first up, this is financial failings only, haven't got all day to confess the multitude of things I am totally rubbish at doing or not doing. Second up, I don't want you to go away with the impression that I have set up my pulpit and am preaching to you poor sinners from a position of saintly glory. One of the main reasons for setting up this blog was because I need to keep putting things right in my own wallet and I frequently let myself down in moments of weakness or a lack of concentration, so I need to keep on nudging myself back to the straight and narrow.

photo by jbcurio

You know how sometimes when you are browsing through blog after blog you can get a bit fed up with all of the people who are going on and on about their marvellous and thoroughly wholesome lives - "got up at 4am,enjoyed fabulous dawn chorus, painted masterpiece of dawn chorus, made wholesome buns for the kids to take to school, spent the day making loads of beautiful things to sell on Etsy, collected kids from school, skipped all the way home laughing and joking, ...", yadda, yadda, yadda. I far prefer the (mainly British) blogs where you get a glimpse of something a bit more lifelike - tired and grumpy kids, the cake that burnt or came out like a piece of sheet metal (if you got round to making one in the first place!), the beautiful piece of sewing that got accidentally sewn to the tablecloth wasting hours of sewing time and yards of irreplacable cloth ... They are much more my sort of thing, they remind me of home.

Anyway, wasting time rambling and moaning so lets crack on:

1. Magazines - magazines lure me in month after month. They look so enticing with their glossy covers and fabulous photographs and promises of redecorating your house on a budget. It's so easy to just pop one into the basket before the checkout (another good reason to try and do all your shopping online and avoid the temptation in the first place). It has always been a pretty obvious potential money drain but it really came home to me some while back when I was having a sort out. I was going through a pile of old magazines pulling out articles and photos that I wanted to keep. The pile was getting quite high so I quickly totted up how many there were and multiplied that by the average cost of a magazine these days (not cheap and we're not talking about "OK" or "Womans Weekly" here). It was a hefty sum and I could have bought a lot of hardback books for the same money that would have lasted longer and been of more use. Or saved the money and not spent it at all. I still fall into the temptation from time to time, but some of the time I do manage to stop myself by remembering that only 3 to 5 of these magazines equals one nice hardback book.




photo by bravenewtraveler




2. Loading up the basket - I'm referring to online baskets here. It's not an issue for the weekly grocery shop, but when I shop online for, say, craft materials I often find myself feeling that just ordering one item looks a bit mean. Someone has to pack up your parcel and send it off so I often find myself thinking I should put a few more items in to make it worth the while of the packer - ummmm, dumb I know. There's also the nagging feeling that I need to make the most of the postage or buy enough to qualify for free postage. It's still a hard one to crack.
3. Failure to check how much is already on the credit card - this is particularly slack. Sometimes if I 'need' something right then and there it's far better to not check how much is already on the card bill for this month. If I don't look it's not there right? And I know full well if I look I'll probably come to my senses and put the purchase off for another month or two at least ... and sometimes that ends up meaning I never buy it and probably never miss it.

photo by szlea

Oh, there are more but I think three is just right and not too greedy don't you? The point is, the theory is all very obvious and sensible but sometimes putting things into practice and taking a dose of your own medicine is a whole other thing. And it feels good to 'fess up. And hopefully makes you feel a bit better too. But that's no excuse for any of us to stop trying, eh?

Computer thrift ... in various guises

This post is a bit of a smorgasbord (what a satisfying word that is...) of ways to use your computer more thriftily. There's a bit of this and a bit of that.

Thrifty printing - saving ink, saving the pennies
All of those ink cartridges we get through are expensive items, so anything that can reduce the amount of ink used (especially when it's not a fancy document for public consumption) has to be good right? There are at least two good things you can do to save using ink unnecessarily:

1. Reset your printing options to use less ink. In Word you select "File", "Print", "Properties", and then the graphics tab. You can then reset the resolution to a lower level so it sprays out fewer dots to make each letter.
2. Download a new font called the ecofont:

This new font has been created by a Dutch company called Spranq, and the enlarged version above shows how it uses less ink by leaving tiny holes in each letter - these cannot be seen at normal font sizes. You can download it by following this link DOWNLOAD ECOFONT. I think it would also look pretty good with the holes visible - they look like all of those lights around a vanity mirror.

Don't lose money by being a victim
An important way to save money is to protect it in the first place and protect your computer from all the nasty viruses and hackers and general internet ne'er-do-wells who lurk in darkened doorways. There are many good ways to do this and most are far beyond my knowledge. However I can strongly recommend a company called Firetrust. They produce several really valuable products designed to keep you and your computer safe as you surf stylishly from blog to blog. I have used their products for many years and found them both reliable and a godsend.

I am going to particularly recommend their Mailwasher programme as this has served me well for over 10 years and I would not willingly be without it. In simple terms it checks your incoming emails before they are downloaded from your email service provider and highlights the naughty and the nasty. It is easy to use. It already knows where a lot of bad stuff comes from but it also has a very easy way of letting you mark emails as "good" or "spam". This way you can delete or bounce back the vulgar, the vile and the villanous. The result - you don't have to look at nasty stuff or timewasting messages. You also avoid letting in emails to your inbox that may have viruses or spying programmes secretly attached, and that will potentially save you a lot of grief and a lot of money. So, if you are fed up of your inbox filling up with ugly looking trash give it an early spring clean - it'll thank you one day, when it learns to talk.

FIRETRUST'S MAILWASHER

Shop smart
There are many ways to save money by shopping online, several of which I have referred to in previous posts. I am just going to mention a couple of new ones.


1. Internet Cashback enables you to earn varying amounts of cashback when you purchase from a range of retailers via the links from the Internet Cashback site. This includes many big names (Asda, Boots, M & S, Tesco to name but a few). This is a great idea with the following caveats:

a) Be strong, be organised - it is so easy to get drawn into buying things just because they are bargains or because we will get a nice wad of cash in return. I know its obvious, but if you don't need it in the first place don't buy it - you'll give yourself a much bigger cashback cheque that way. It is so easy to get carried away. But of course if you are buying anyway you might as well earn some cashback.

b) When I first clicked on the "cashback shops" link near the top of their page I was a bit underwhelmed - not many shops there I thought. D'uh, just me being a bit slow - these are just the "featured" shops. Click through the letters and you will see loads of familiar names.

c) Do be careful to follow their instructions. If you don't go via their links you won't get your cashback, and who'll be sorry then, hmmm?

2. Save buckets
No, no, no, - it's not the latest version of save the whale. Rest easy, buckets are not an endangered species. This is a price comparison site, like Kelko or Pricerunner. I have used it a few times and find it pretty easy and reliable. Nothing fancy just quite straightforward:

SAVEBUCKETS.CO.UK

"The thrift book - live well and spend less" - book review

 

Photo by nikkicookiebaker

I am about a third of the way through this book and have dipped in and out of many sections and already I can quite confidently recommend it to you as a great resource. A couple of weeks ago I honestly never imagined I'd open a review of this book with anything approaching those words. I'd had a look on Amazon and read the reviews which alternate between loving India Knight in every way possible and gushing with delight, to those who claim to find her patronising and more than a bit clueless about the real world.

I will freely admit I expected to tell you that this was the painfully embarassing ramblings of a rich woman who'd just realised that money does not magically sprout from your purse and was passing on this handy tidbit to the rest of us, blissfully unaware that we were already more than ten miles further down the road. Better get on and justify myself then:

India Knight writes really well. Some people may take issue with this and object to the casual language she uses (refering to things as "crap" or "twattish", for example). If you feel that to write well means only adhering firmly to all rules of grammar and syntax and spurning the use of any form of slang then you may well disagree with me and not enjoy this book. Personally I find her really easy to read and very funny. And those are two attributes that are very welcome in a book full of facts and website addresses and advice. Her book reads like you are chatting with your funniest friend.

This is in contrast to Kath Kelly's writing style (see previous post), and to be fair to her as far as I could make out Kath was not a writer and had never tried to be a writer. She ended up producing her book as the first hand account of the person who'd lived her remarkable project and that gives it it's own value. However, as I mentioned in my previous review her writing was sometimes "clunky" and a trifle awkward, to the point where it did detract a little because it was so noticeable in places. It did give it a thrifty hand made feel I suppose.

 

Photo by Allim

Many of the scoffing reviewers of India's book dismiss it by saying there is nothing here they didn't know already, or laugh at the sections on "how to knit". Come on people, didn't your mum tell you that no-one likes a know-all? Each chapter is broken down into smaller sections and there are plenty of headings and highlighted boxes, so if you find yourself reading through something that you either know all about because it happened to be your masters dissertation or something that just doesn't interest you at all it is the easiest thing in the world to skip on to a section you do want to concentrate on. No-one is insisting that you read from cover to cover. Its a dip in where you need book.

I think its quite a plus that really really basic things are in the book. If you are a dab hand at knitting or have run a swapping scheme for years you have probably forgotten all about what it felt like to not know where to start or how to do a single simple thing.

And I think it is the sheer amount of facts and references to great websites and blogs that makes this such a potentially useful book. For example, I know quite a lot about craft and have frequented the majority of the inspirational blogs, but there were still enough new ones listed in this book to keep me quite happily occupied for an afternoon.So I would challenge those dismissive all-knowing reviewers to read their expert subject section properly and in full - I'd be surprised if there wasn't something new there even for them.

Others mock India for being the spoilt little rich girl who has never really known hardship and recommends a few expensive things like organic meat. I thought I would be one of them, but there is nothing more charming than someone who is fully aware of their own limitations (and the opinions others hold of those limitations) and can both freely admit to them and gently mock themselves. She is self-aware, and also quite clear that while she wants to save money she also wants some quality, some comfort, some nice things too. And that dear friend is about balance, and is about the very thing the Comfort Blanket espouses. We want to be warm and happy, not living on a diet of twigs or spending five weeks glueing lollipop sticks together to make a coffee table and not stressing over how close bankruptcy is.

As with any book of this type, you take the things that are useful to you and leave the rest behind. You will never, ever find a 'frugality' book that is full to the brim of new and unknown tips, and miracle 3-step solutions. Every single one will contain the blindingly obvious, the things a small child could achieve and the dull plodding common sense things that are necessary and unavoidable. But within those chapters each one will have other ideas that may be obvious to others but have slipped you by, or ideas that you need to hear explained in a new way to find their resonance with you. Its easy as pie to mock and go through list after list scoffing "who on earth wouldn't know that?". Urm, well, lets face it, if everyone knew and practised these ideas we may not be in half the pickle we are in just now.

I have heard many of these things before but sometimes reading it anew prompts you to try again. Its like dieting - we all know the fundamentals, eat less of the bad things, the right amount of the good things and do some exercise ("who on earth wouldn't know that?") but from the massive sales of diet books we clearly don't object to be told that simple message over and over.

This won't be everyone's cup of tea, I accept that. If you are allergic to anyone who has money then don't pick up this book and give yourself hives. If you yearn to go live in a commune and milk bees and live on nettle soup, try another book. But I like it. I have borrowed my copy from the library but I may very well go out and buy my own copy of "The Thrift Book - Live well and spend less" by India Knight to keep for future reference.

"How I lived on a pound a day ..." book review

Before I launch into reviewing Kath Kelly's book I want to make a couple of general comments about this genre of book and the ones I have chosen to review. Feelings on eco-thrift/ frugal/ money scrimping books seem to be split mostly into two clear camps - in the green corner the devoted disciples who already live this way or who have pledged to turn their lives around and never touch a new item again, and in the red corner the cynics who criticise the writers for being kill-joys, smug middle class experimenters or mad idealists.

I have looked at quite a range of websites, blogs and books on the subject of saving money and surviving the recession. The first thing to say is that there is no magic one touch solution sitting out there that will revolutionise your finances and take all your problems away. The answers and the methods primarily require simple common sense, an amount of self control and willpower, some work and effort, and being orderly and organised and keeping track of things.

Some of the cynics who would toss these books onto the nearest landfill site seem disappointed and let down to find yet another book with the same fundamental message instead of a map to the promised land along with free first class tickets.

The second thing is that most books and blogs are written from a particular standpoint and will not cover every possible personal situation. However, most have a selection of ideas that you can take away and use or adapt to your circumstances. You just pick the things that are useful to you and leave the others be.

So, onto "How I lived a year on just a pound a day" by Kath Kelly. Kath is not a "smug middle class intellectual" carrying out a social experiment as one Amazon reviewer claimed - clearly they hadn't read the book very well or possibly at all. She starts the book living alone in a rented room and working in job that I would imagine was not that well paid. The whole adventure begins because she needs to save up to buy her brother a really good wedding present and she can't think of any other way to do it - and a deal of alcohol encourages her thinking too.

Actually alcohol is a bit of a recurring theme through this book - any poor students who want to drink for free should definitely read/buy this book as it will be a godsend to them and their student loans.

Kath's situation and outlook were very specific so unless you are single with no dependents and willing to do things like hitch hike, walk a great distance in all weathers and scour the supermarket shelves just before closing time for whatever is available, you won't be in a position to take on her formula in its entirety. However, providing you accept and understand that, and aren't so blinkered as to see that as an insurmountable barrier there are still plenty of ideas that you might harvest for your own situation.

She is never arrogant enough to suggest that everyone should live this way, although she certainly becomes more evangelical as the book progresses and the anti-consumer culture turns from a financial necessity to a way of life and a new outlook. And although she does not dwell on it, in fact just the opposite, living like this for a year was hard work. In fact that would be one of my criticisms of the book. She makes light of all the obvious physical privations she had to put up with but if you have to do this for real then a good percentage of it is pretty demanding, for example:

"Because I was living on a pound a day I didn't use any heating in my room the whole winter" (but you have to bear in mind it was a shared house so chances are she benefited from the fact that other people were using heat, and possibly slightly more each day because her room was so cold and drawing any heat to it).

A lot of things were made easier by virtue of living in a large city (Bristol) with a strong cultural life. If you live in a small, dull provincial town or the depths of the countryside you'd find it so much harder to do it her way. Her social and cultural entertainments depend on free events and the fact she can walk or cycle to them:

"Bristol had so much to offer, was so good to me. I couldn't imagine having so much fun, on so little money anywhere else in the world". Well, quite, my point exactly.

Photo by Mike Warren

She also joins Freecycle, an online way of recycling items you don't need or want any more. Living in Bristol also makes a big difference to that:

"Undoubtedly living in a big city helped. It was easy to link up with people and pick up or drop off things". But at least she concedes that, and as I mentioned earlier you can't take the whole thing and replicate it but most people should get at least a few good ideas or leads from the book so you shouldn't let that put you off.

Pretty much everything is either common sense or things that you probably could find out about fairly easily surfing the web, and there is not much that you won't either know about already or be able to work out pretty smartish if you had only a single pound coin to your name. But it is good to have so many ideas together and to hear about her real life experience living this way.

I do get the feeling that one essential thing that really helped Kath to make a success of this year is a lot of natural optimism and resilience. It could also be that she has missed out the descriptions of the really bad days when everything goes truly horribly wrong and she just hides under her blankets wailing and gnashing her teeth and dreaming of a life of luxury, or just some warmth and a big piece of pie. I know that if I wrote this book chances are a) I would simply not get very far through the year, and b) you would read frequent pathetic descriptions of me feeling miserable and cold with sore feet and a streaming cold. Darned good job I didn't write it then!

The things I didn't like or found too odd were:

Occasionally the writing is a bit clunky - "for once I got out of the building without encountering any precipitation". Come on! How often does the conversation in your house go "hello dear, you look wet" - "yes, nasty lot of precipitation out there tonight".

I found her logic or her way of justifying things a bit out of kilter in places. She shows how you can live on virtually nothing and embraces the anti-consumer mantra - you don't have to spend money to be happy or get things out of life, but seems to miss the point that someone else has to pay for a lot of these things and thus they have to remain tainted by the evils of a consumer life:

• Whenever she hitch-hikes she might travel for free but someone had to buy the car and fill it with petrol, and her added weight will have increased the amount of petrol used.
• She attends a great many free cultural events and makes the most of the wine and food on offer, but again even though she isn't paying someone else has had to.
• She meets a man near the end of her year and when they start meeting up she makes him promise not to take her out for meals saying "I really want to get through this year and be able to say I'd done it without cheating". But why is someone buying her a meal any different from someone giving her a free ride in their car? Its not really is it?

One of the strangest things in the book is the amount of dropped money she picks up from the streets. Apparently there are literally millions of pounds in loose change down the back of the nations sofas, but also glittering across the streets. Kath seems to find lost £20 notes and piles of small change with amazing regularity and amasses over £100 this way. This felt like it had an element of truth in it but I found it hard to totally accept it. I have very good eyesight and I'm good at spotting all sorts of things and often troop along staring at the pavement, and I have to say I've only once in my life found a dropped note.

Photo by Marcin Wichary

Overall I would say this isn't a perfect book, but it is generally interesting and has a lot of ideas about every area of life and how you could live for less. It possibly makes it sound a little too easy, and perhaps a few more descriptions of dire moments when she wanted to give up or had the day from hell would have made me feel more sympathetic towards her. Having said that, I have to take my hat off to her for accomplishing something I know I could not have done, probably not even for a month let alone a year. It is certainly worth borrowing from your library, even if all you do is skim the last few pages for the lists of suggestions and particularly websites.

I'm not going to score it out of 10 because I'm rubbish at that sort of thing, but I will be interested to see how it compares to India Knight's book. That will be a contrast between the ordinary person and the little rich girl.

Puddings

Photo by J.Pauley

I have reminisced in an earlier post about food nostalgia and written dreamily about my grandma's repertoire of Sunday lunch puddings, including her sublime lemon meringue pie. All these years later I can still taste the sweet fluffy meringue dissolving on my tongue to be followed by the sharp blast of the lemon. Puddings aren't really so fashionable in January when everyone is dieting and avoiding cream and chocolate as if they carried seeds of the plague. However, ever one to swim against the tide, I am going to think about the joy of puddings. If you need comfort on a cold day a warm pudding may be your best friend. Puddings don't need to be expensive or fancy or drain your bank account. They can be as simple and as frugal as you like. Take bread and butter pudding...

Bread and butter pudding - this is a fine and straight forward recipe by Griff Rhys Jones on the BBC site. And what a great way to use up some bread that might otherwise go to waste. OR you could go the other way and be disgracefully decadent and replace the bread with slices of brioche. Even if you thought you didn't like bread and butter pudding, you'll like this version. Very very rich though and not to be tackled lightly - no wolfing a small bowl and then dashing out for a jog. You may feel like you won't need to eat again for a day or two.

How about something very simple. Take a thick slice of lemon drizzle cake, heat it in a microwave for 30 seconds to 1 minute, then pour a little cream over so that it soaks into the cake - then eat.

Lets step it up a notch and go from "sitting in your jammies on the sofa" simple to "let's do a dinner party and impress the socks off them" sophisticated. I feel the need to include something from one of my all time favourite blogs, Chocolate and Zucchini. This was posted on 6th January and I have looked longingly at it far more times than strictly necessary. I haven't tried it, possibly/probably never will, but doesn't it look the bees knees? Raspberry Dacquoise ... you can tell from the photograph just how melt in the mouth delicious it would be.Even the most dedicated Weight Watchers devotee would surely be willing to give up the fight if that was placed in front of them.

Then there's the dark side of Jamie Oliver. We hear a lot these days of his campaigns to improve school dinners and get everyone cooking - and hip hooray, quite right too - but he's a dab hand at a wicked pudding or two. How about these:

King of Puddings - more meringue, but lets be really honest, you can't actually ever have too much meringue.

Lovely Lemon Curdy Pudding - ok this time more lemons. We're getting a bit of a theme of my favourite things.

Or Chocolate Fridge Cake - what's not to like, there's chocolate, there's no actual cooking, and it could be claimed to be healthy, what with all those nuts and that dark chocolate pumping up your serotonin levels like nobody's business.

Maybe, just maybe, I'll give myself a little test. Maybe I should try one new pudding each week. That way I could expand my range from chocolate, lemons and meringue to, well, 52 new puddings. Now there's a thought to get me reaching for the cookery books...

Thrifty Book Reviews

This post is more of a teaser really, but I am borrowing and buying four different books on ways to live more thriftily and I will make my way through enough of each to give reviews of them, and if appropriate, recommendations. The four books are:

• "The thrift book: Live well and spend less" by India Knight
• "The spend less handbook" by Rebecca Ash
• "How I lived on just a pound a day" by Kath Kelly
• "How to feed your whole family a healthy balanced diet.." by Gill Holcombe

Each of them has a varied selection of reviews on Amazon so it will be interesting to see how I find them. Each seems to have a balance of people who love the book and people who are deeply cynical.

I haven't forgotten about my promise to review the Efergy Energy Saving Meter back in November - I will come back to that soon.

Mindless, or not so mindless, distractions

Picture by r.j.wagner

Now lets get one thing clear right out of the starting gate - I'm not talking about drinking yourself into oblivion or anything of that ilk. This is altogether more wholesome so don't panic, I'm not diverging from the principles of the blog.

I think its very easy in the day to day all-pervading atmosphere of never-ending news (almost all bad and depressing, and as if that were not enough, repeated, analysed and predicted over and over to really emphasise the badness of it and make sure you have no chance of forgetting or escaping), it is very easy to feel as if you are drowning in the worst aspects of human nature. Anyone looking in from outer space could be forgiven for giving the human species a miss and quietly moving on to galaxies new. Who would want to know us if the non-stop news was the only truth about us? I think we need to regularly give ourselves permission to disconnect ourselves from the endless babble of the news and allow our minds to float free, to let other kinds of thoughts wash over us.

One way of doing this is to listen to some music - loud, quiet, bouncy or restful. Anything to change the soundtrack. This is all fine and dandy on its own but sometimes it also helps to keep one part of our minds active and engaged, and that way you can't drift back so easily to all the depressing stuff - it does act like a magnet sometimes. There are many good ways to achieve this. Doing a crossword or a sudoku puzzle is one approach. In this manner your mind is completely absorbed in the task of getting the solution and so cannot easily find itself taken up with the grimness beyond. Just escaping for a short while can do you the power of good. You break the pattern, you remind yourself there are other, better things out there.

Christmas time is often the time when a jigsaw puzzle is dragged out. I find these a great way of occupying my mind, and a good way to train your eye to observe and see what you can otherwise miss. I love to do puzzles of the great paintings, as this is a way to become really intimate with even the tiniest of brush strokes, and you begin to see fine inflections of colour that otherwise pass you by.

Knitting is another variant, providing you can get relatively proficient. You are either concentrating very hard to keep up with an intricate pattern - and the intrusion of any other thought would turn it into a random splodge of wool - or you can switch off to the repetitive rhythm of knit and purl rows. I have a lovely little book which is basically a sort of Zen and the art of knitting which promotes exactly this and it paints a seductive picture of knitting in a zen like state, mind clear and blissful ... and lo, at the end you have a useful dishcloth. Two birds with ... two knitting needles. 

So, instead of thinking that jigsaw puzzles are a childish waste of time, or feeling guilty about picking up the crossword, throw yourself into it knowing that you are giving your mind a well earned rest and allowing it to not think at all for a while. You owe it that much. And you will do yourself a power of good, refresh a tired brain and come back to whatever you need to achieve with some renewed vigour and enthusiasm.