Money

Today's update is all about money.
-----
Paul T is in the shit. His grandmother dying while living in their house means he gets tennancy, but changes in the law means the landlord can change the rent. The new rent would be 80-90% of Paul's income.

If he pays the new rent, he'll need to work more hours at his teaching job, and get another job. Which makes the exercise pointless.

If he tries but fails to pay the new rent, he gets evicted, and classified as 'Voluntarily Homeless' - having volutarily not robbed a bank - and therefore ineligible for any financial assistance.

He could take in lodgers, but it's unclear whether he has the legal right.

He could find somewhere else to live. Except he's broke, his grandmother had no money to leave, and his family are about as much help as a chocolate toothbrush.

In fact, his mother accuses him of bringing the whole situation upon himself, because he didn't set out a career plan when he was nineteen. Guess how old she was when she got pregnant with him.

So now it's a matter of claifying issue with the landlord, and finding out which friends are friendly enough and able enough to put him up (and put up with him) for a few months.

Oh, and he's pulled a major muscle in his back and is in agony.
-----
Simon M has actually sold a bottle of testosterone stuff on his ebay shop, and I've put my mad inventor children's stories up for sale.

Here's my sales pitch:

Professor Branestawm is the great British eccentric genius.

In his shed, he invents machines that travel through air, underwater, and backwards in time. He created the portable car park, the floating supermarket, an inflatable home, indestructible architecture, and a piano the does the housework.

And of course, they all go wrong. The inflatable home gets a puncture, the housework machine gets stuck into doing all the housework all the time, the time machine changes history, and most of them explode.

As the sleevenotes have it: "Who got trapped up a pear tree by an army of wild waste paper? Who gummed his housekeeper to the carpet (by mistake) with a three-foot pancake two inches thick? Whose inventive brain produced a burglar catcher, a spring cleaning machine and half a policeman? The answer, of course, is Professor Branestawm, the erratic genius of Great Pagwell..."

Norman Hunter wrote these classic short stories in the 1930s, and they've remained favourites of generations of young children ever since.

And if these turn out to be collector's items going for a song, I shall be moderately irritated.
-----
There's a giro to pay into the bank (which I'll do on the way to signing on for the next giro). And I owe mother seventy-something pounds for the scanner.
-----
Two overlapping conferences at the weekend. One on the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism, one on what the hell the Socialist Workers Party is supposed to do with itself now.

Entrance to both is free. The expensive bit is getting there - the train service is 'patchy', so it's a combination of busses, trains, maybe a coach and walking.