Poverty Trap

I read an article about 'Pensioner Poverty' and why it is unacceptable, and it most certainly is, just as all poverty is, but it will never change because the world is all about greed.
Greed fuels most things, it makes landlords charge £200 per week for a box room with no garden and a shared toilet because desperate people have nowhere else to live and councils pay it because they have no social housing to accomodate them, and this is a result of greed, as most social housing was sold to create a profit. Lovely for those who benefitted and now own a home for their families, but most people wanted to sell on their cheaply bought homes for a quick profit.
We can't blame people, wages are awful in most jobs and the only way to aspire to riches is to make a quick profit or become famous, and as most people who have a talent work hard and do not become famous, talentless people have to resort to 'celebrity' to make their living, as hard graft doesn't leave you with as much money as being photographed with a famous sportsperson as your partner, neither does it pay as well as being pretty, have you ever known a nurse to earn as much as a model?
Have you noticed how when purchasing most items, if you can pay cash up front, even for essentials, you will get a heavily discounted price, and if you are very rich/famous you sometimes get your goods for free, the people who cannot afford things always pay more, and as interest piles up on credit terms less well off people have to submit to, there is very little chance of anybody saving enough to be considered 'well off'.
Some astute people may have had property which they sold in the 80s and made enough to buy another place without a mortgage and their hard work struggling to pay the mortgage at first was rewarded, but even then gazumping helped to force prices up to an unrealistic level and this had to collapse, so then deperate people trying to sell, stuck in negative equity traps were left in more finacial dire straits, and people who had money could fly down and make more, by offering less and less, because they knew people would sell.
Powers that be demand that people doing their jobs, nurses, teachers, police and everyone really spends so much time on paperwork that they have less time to actually do the thing they want to do, become stressed, take time off through illness and then a replacement has to be found and paid for with ever dwindling funds. Then the threat of redundancy looms over the heads of anybody who is found guilty of being over 40, or having a baby, or not being the bosses favourite, and many more legitimate reasons too; people have their homes repossesed and once self confidence is gone it is very hard for some to find a job that pays a similar wage, and so the downward spiral begins again.
Pensioners and children are the least likely to be in a position to do anything about their situations and so poverty will never be eradicated. The world is designed to keep rich and poor poles apart, and until everybody in it can stop being greedy this is unlikely to change.

uncertainty

Life is really uncertain at the moment, there are so many things to consider and it is hard to know if any decision made would be the appropriate one. I need to retrain in order to get a job that pays above the minimum wage as my previous career is now well and truly over, and although people say it like it's easy, it's hard when you have no income to pay for it, so if I scrape the money together somehow, will I get work to pay it back when retraining is finished?
Friends are another strange thing. A friend told me that another 'friend' was spreading malicious gossip about me to all and sundry, yet the two in question meet up regularly? Are they both responsible? Does the one who meets me just want more gossip? My instincts used to be pretty good and I would know who to avoid, but after years of being bullied and manipulated I don't trust my instincts so I only see my family. After all, families might be horrible sometimes but at least we all look out for each other and we can predict when things will go wrong most of the time, as well as enjoying nice things together.
Partners are the most perplexing though, my husband will help anybody but his family. It isn't just me, he won't help our child, his parents, his sibling and certainly not any of his in laws, yet he will go to the ends of the Earth to help his friends, usually female, calling different countries to get information for them, and the ones he 'helps' are usually those going through a bad relationship. I try to be objective the my instincts are really screaming about this one, especially as he is there to 'help' her enjoy a day out, and he needs to destress from work too so this, to them is a good arrangement. She probably thinks we are separated, he is open about her thinking that if he is I won't think anything of it but it bothers me tht I may be wrong. It's not that I think he's having sex with her, that bothers me, but not as much as the fact that he is intimate with her, he is there for her when she is upset, he shares her happy times and doesn't expect her to pay for everything.
I think I have convinced myself of what I shoudl do about one of the situations I find myself in.

Random ramblings

My mum always says "God pays debts without money" and this evening I saw this in action on a small scale. For the past few weeks a little boy has been trying to hurt my daughter when they go out to play. He has made her stop taking her new bike outside as he makes fun of her wearing a helmet, and he keeps saying her helmet is a boy's helmet as it has cars on it (she loves cars, and wants to be a 'car fixer, a lady one, because they can be ladies or mans'). Not content with that he knocked her over with his space hopper when they were playing on those, so now she doesn't want to take that out to play either. The grown up in me tells her to ignore him and play with what she likes, knowing his mum is dealing with it, but the mum in me wants to yell at him to go away and cuddle my baby until she is happy again. He obviously picked on the wrong girl tonight though, as he upset her, she ran her scooter over his toes and made him cry. My own girl felt sorry for him and took him to his mum, how forgiving is that. I just felt that now he knows how much it hurts to be on the receiving end, perhaps he will ease up on my girl. Time will tell.

Being completely new to this blogging lark, I'm not really sure what to write, hence the title 'random ramblings'.
My daughter and I are about to go shopping for clothes, and so she can spend her birthday money. We tried yesterday in town but there was nothing really, and everything she liked was not available in her size, so she settled on a pair of plastic clog things bedecked with plastic jewels, a ballerina colouring set and a fluffy pink pony, very important things when you are 4, I suppose. We are going to try again today but is a supermarket instead of town. Nana is coming too, and hopefully we will leave laden down with pieces of sartorial elegance which are hardwearing and washable for the modern 4 year old about town.
Here's to retail therapy for any age.