Luckily John and I both like porridge so that was breakfast taken care of.  But the budget wouldn’t cover the extra healthy bits we usually have in it, like fruit and seeds.  We missed out on lunch (not deliberately – it just happened that way) and then had a vegetable curry for tea – with half of the cheap nans to fill us up.  The rice came from our lovely local food bank.   We cooked in the slow cooker we have as we were really worried about the cost of actually cooking if we used our oven – there’s only £10.00 each in the budget for electricity!!   But the ingredients only cost 78p for each person.

It hit me pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to have long, hot baths or put the kettle on whenever I wanted to – or have the central heating on more than 3 hours a day –  many of the care leavers have prepayment meters, so when the electricity runs out that’s it for them.