After half term...
£30.00 for after school football club
£30.00 for school trip
£70.00 final payment for school activity week later in month (total cost £250 + spending money)
No cinema or climbing club for you this term, matey... 
and on Friday it's final payment £50.00 for scout's summer camp (total £180)... He had to miss out on trip to HMS Belfast and the various water sports options at local reservoir, poor little hard done by thing...
Not to mention the prescription swimming goggles he (really) really does need for both scout and school activity weeks and our summer hol 'cos he's like a blind fish out of water in the water and he's going to be doing some serious wet stuff on all three... And his scrips changed again, so he needs new glasses, and it actually works out almost as expensive to get his existing frames 're-glazed' as to buy new ones but he doesn't like the frames and then there's the bogof deal etc etc etc etc...
Meanwhile, I'm now living on porridge and water (oats is cheaper than bread), and having robbed Peter to pay Paul I am now robbing Percy to pay Peter back 'cos he's getting a bit antsy, and still wondering where the hell our holiday spending money is gonna come from 
And, I'm not complaining really, 'cos I know even if I'm having to juggle desperately we're still just in the black and will probably make it to Christmas without having to sell our furniture, but I do sometimes wonder what life would be like if I actually wanted a life too! And I do think, even though it makes me sound like an old man that kids get offered too much these days and the guilt/pressure on parents to fund all these brilliant ideas for trips and activity weeks and after school clubs that people keep coming up with is completely unfair on us and them.
When I were a lad I had one day at the seaside a year on the Kahnsil estate outing to Hastings. We ate samwidges and hard boiled eggs on the beach and threw pebbles at seagulls. One year I threw one straight up in the air and managed to split my own head open when it came back down on the same trajectory, but it was still the best 'holiday' I ever had because my brother got sunstroke sick and didn't want his boiled egg so I got two 
And at secondary school they did have 'activity week' but this also included the free option of 'art activities' for the likes of me, which was basically a week throwing modelling clay at 'Cat' Felix and flicking paint at Kevin Kibby when we caught him picking his nose and eating it.
Kid's today, don't know they're born, do they? Poverty was real poverty back then - not like poverty now with it's flat screen TV's and X-Boxes and Mobile phones... Mind you, if I was a kid now I'd trade all of them for a days pug-whanging up the twitten, but there are no twittens anymore and no pugholes to whang pug from even if there were...
God, I've depressed myself now, and I wasn't feeling that great to start with...
Ho bl00dy hum...
:D
