I never wear long trousers, I have no long-sleeve shirts, I don't wear socks and my footwear consists exclusively of cheap sandals bought at Mountain Warehouse (I do have a single shirt, jacket, trousers and pair of black shoes for weddings and funerals. I've had those shoes for 35 years :-)) If you expect me to wear a tie you can go to hell. I don't have any big, thick coats and I wouldn't wear them, and I have no sweaters or cardies and I can't abide slippers. I buy two or three cheap flowery shirts per annum. But we are of this world, and everything I DO buy seems to be made in China. My very large informal garden is operated on organic lines and I grow a lot of veg. I have a considerable "wild" area, and the perimeter consists of nettles, brambles and brushwood, fantastic for wildlife. My house is four miles from town. The cycle ride thereto is very dangerous. Without a car, no-one would ever live in this house. The days of the horse and cart are long gone. There is next to no public transport here, and in any case the nearest road is a ten-minute walk away. So I'm not going to apologise for running a car. I passed the MOT two days ago and noted that in the last year I did about 6000 miles. On a (very necessary) hundred-mile round trip to the hospital on Tuesday I got 60.5 miles to the gallon.

I'm not skint and I have no debts. This house is mine. I wouldn't say that I live frugally, as I don't need to, but neither do I splash out. Since 2010, before which we hardly ever left this country, we've had about seven or eight holidays in Spain, Italy and Greece. I'm hardly what you might call a frequent flyer, but yes I've flown in planes a few times. We've had double glazing fitted all round at some expense, which keeps the house warmer and reduces our fuel consumption. We have multifuel stoves in two rooms on which we burn some smokeless fuel and quite a lot of wood (which I season) from our own garden. Dutch Elm disease is a curse but it does have that upside for us.

I do some things right and a few things wrong, but I don't appreciate being lectured to by to people who at one turn plead poverty and at another turn challenge me for doing things they don't do but which, for all I know, they might well do if they had similar (modest) resources to me. Not that anyone here fits that bill...