In the beginning

I'm in my sixties and, in common with most other women of my age, I find money gets tighter every year. So I've set myself a challenge for 2006, to live as well as I do now but on less money. That way there'll be lots more left over for fun -- and, perhaps, some sensible spending in due course. That's if I'm successful.

I've always had an interest in economy which goes back to the poverty-stricken years of my youth. When living alone in bedsitters I often found I had insufficient money for serious food so I lived on bread and marge, baked beans and cigarettes, and the kindness of boyfriends much of the time. Then I married and the children came along and, because I'd not married one of the richer men of my acquaintance, again poverty struck. So, in my thirties, I developed an interest in the patterns of living I started life in - spartan, wartime and austerity conditions and the never-ending making-do-and-mending of the grownups around me. I began to collect wartime cookery books, other domestic advice and even a few of the very rare Housewife magazines from that era. In the seventies I got a job writing economy cookery for The Camden Magazine. Sadly it got axed a couple of issues later. But now I feel the time has come for my lifelong interest in thrift to come to the fore. So watch this space.