What makes you poor?

I perused with interest the article in The Echo on child poverty in the city but wondered what criteria are used to determine ‘poverty’?

Is it, I wonder, the sight of all those poor women wearing torn jeans?

It must be really terrible having shelled out money that you haven’t got (more on that later) for a new pair of jeans only to find that they’ve got huge rips in them. Even worse must be realising that you are too timid to take them back for a refund!

In years gone by, rather than be seen out walking in clothes that showed how poor you were, those rips would have been darned by mother.

Is there such poverty now that a needle and thread is financially out of the reach of most households?

Or maybe the findings are based on the number of women around Ford Estate in particular who can’t afford outdoor clothes at all and are reduced to going to the local shop, mobile phone in hand, in their pyjamas.

Or maybe ‘poverty’ is based on the increasing number of youths having to walk around with their trousers half way down their backsides because they can’t afford a belt to hold them up.

In years gone by they’d have used string.

But the point I’m trying to make is this: nowadays, if a young mother is down to her last £20, her children hungry and her mobile phone running low of funds she’d choose to put the money on her phone first (that’s always assuming it isn’t on a hugely expensive contract).

The food for the kids can always be got from a foodbank.

In my day no self-respecting mother would have been seen dead going to the equivalent of a food bank. I was brought up in a household where my father was the only ‘breadwinner’.

He worked as a bus conductor. In the late fifties/early sixties he earned something like £8 per week, the equivalent of £125 now (the average weekly wage in January of this year was £530 and most households now have two earners).

Out of that he had my mother, himself and two children to feed and clothe, rent (no whingeing about being unable to afford to buy a house) and utility bills to pay.

I seem to recall that we were always well fed (he made sure we were by going hungry himself, I recall him taking sugar and bread to work for his meal) and turned out. Any holes in our clothes were repaired immediately.

Barnes, where I live, is listed as one of the ‘poorest’ in the city. Come off it! Name withheld