DEPRESSION TALKS

For the twisting of feelings,

the deceptive ease of use;

for the guilt I've felt

and the switchback affair,

and festering resentment in its throes of death.

For all this

and fears of uncertainty;

womankind I dismiss.

There was more to this ...

AFTERMATH

I can see us drifting apart,

I can see a fond farewell,

a bitter-sweet

on a screen in the back of my mind.

I feel sorrow deep inside

apprehensive and tense,

not wanting a conclusion

for fear of an awful truth,

not knowing what will happen,

not knowing what I want to happen.

I feel lonely,

a spectator at my own loss

as the wedge of uncertainly

drives us apart.

There was more to this ...

LONELINESS

Loneliness is isolation;

loneliness is a dark room

with smooth walls,

a cold floor

and endless expanse.

A chasm of fear

with no key,

for there are no doors in the room,

no escape 'cept upward;

pulled out by a friend.

Personal thought - Written in my youth, I had yet to realise that a single person actually helped me realise that I had locked myself in a small mental space that disallowed me from seeing a sunny world. A single new friend.

Youthful depression makes you become alone as you slowly withdraw from the "real world" and it is not easy for others to spot. Usually slow, yet insidious, the sufferer may actually assist in their descent by always feeling like "the odd one out".

You may be able to be someone's single person.

Truism (for saving money #2)

A good form of saving is the avoidance of tax.

 

Personal thought - This realisation came to me when bank interest was as low as I can remember (in 50 years) and I needed more of what I earned to stay with me. 

Tax avoidance, as opposed to tax evasion (illegal) is where I am now and I tell you this from the perspective of being a UK resident. 

The biggest dent in take-home money is taxation of all "taxable money*" that comes to yourself and whose amount exceeds a nominal poverty-level "personal allowance", dictated in law by the state. For the majority of people this tax is 20% and upward. This is money taken by the state that you should aim to keep, to help you and your dependants.

Tax avoidance is a career for many professional advisors but many other advice sources are free; to either of these you should turn for  research for your own circumstances.

For me and my partner, our monthly income is fixed and savings are not funding our retirement as they should, but we have a solution.

I found my wife's pension would never exceed her personal allowance and that, as spouses, she could transfer that part of her unused personal allowance to me, i.e. £2000 of my earnings suddenly became non-taxable, making me/us better off by the amount of tax I formerly paid when that £2000 of my income attracted taxation. (£400/year)

Our life savings were devaluing with inflation and terrible interest rates didn't help, so we moved all of those savings into 2 equally apportioned Premium Bond holdings, such that any winnings (tax-free) would either buy more Premium Bonds, or be paid to our current account. Returns were tax free and poor, but better than virtually nothing from the banks; it's like gambling with your savings without any likelihood of losing it, but it minimises exposure to tax on money we earn/win.

As bank interest rates began to rise (currently 4%) we realised our Premium Bonds were not achieving this so we thought we would move our life savings back to a bank, but being aware that only the first £1000 of bank interest is given free of tax, equating to £24000 max per person, we placed some money in an ISA (because it's returns are tax free) and now monitor and balance our life savings (in the bank or as Premium Bonds),  in order to never pay tax on any of their returns. 

We are trying to avoiding tax on our life savings as best we know.

* Taxable money is money that comes to you, by whatever route, that is deemed taxable by the state and is above that deemed to be non-taxable (tax-free).  E.G. ISA's, Bank interest below £1000/person, profit from the sale of your primary dwelling, bank loans, etc. To see what tax you might pay (in the UK) take a look here.

South Africa To Leave The Commonwealth?

Attitude not acceptable ...

With this sort of attitude South Africa must surely leave the Commonwealth, or at the very least have membership benefits suspended.

S. A. cannot have it both ways.  Sucking up to the Russian state will only alienate them from former friends and force them even further into their self-inflicted demise; a travesty of Mandela's reported aims for his "new South Africa", now ruined by inept and corrupted management surely?  

South Africans, where there was hope and wealth and international respect; all that is or has been syphoned off. Leave if you can for lawlessness is on the horizon.

Mandela's dream in ruins ...

Who are they kidding?

S.A. Cracking on ethnic lines ...

Criminals and organised crime are taking over ...

The ANC destroyed S.A. ...

Oh yes they did ...

Farewell to an uneasy S.A. ...

S.A. Intolerance

As an aside, are there many African countries that are actually prospering nation states? 

14/01/20204 - South Africa are doing some good it seems, for they have become the only country prepared to call out Israel for their way-over-the-top retribution upon the Palestinian region called Gaza. South Africa have called the Israeli on-going military action(s) as a genocide and seemed to have prepared their international court case case meticulously. More recently (June 2024) an election result seems to flag the end of the ANC's dogmatic and ultimately flawed (ineffective) leftist regime for shared, free market, government.

Tinkerbell found by the James Webb telescope

  Tinkerbell found by James Web telescope? ...

 

Here I am trivialising the (potential) contributions of the James Webb space telescope to understanding cosmology, but you cannot be anything other than amazed at the images it is capturing, even if in this case it reminded me of Peter Pan's attendee called Tinkerbell.

New discoveries by the James Webb telescope continue to amaze.....

More new images from the James Webb telescope and 19 spiral galaxies exposed.

N.B. James E. Webb was not an astronomer, but a high-ranking administrator of the early American space program, after which the telescope was named in his honour.

                      

QR Code (Possible scam)

I cannot vouch for this information as I use a 3G phone for security and privacy and am unable to scan QR codes for direct access to further online information; but the following came to me from a reliable source (David Pattenden on UK Facebook) and may be of use to some of you who regularly scan QR Codes.

"...... A nasty scam that I think would catch most people out.

The scammers obtain your details by you scanning a QR code with your phone and it sneakily starts taking payments from your bank under the name of STH-1 or QSTYRSA. The amount is always £29.99 and it will continue to take these payments until stopped. They scammers are using QR codes linked to car parking, Sky TV, Discovery+ and several others. If you upgrade to Discovery+ from a TV screen, or pay parking via your phone bank app they take your money.

Its a scam called piggybacking where the scammer hides code which obtains your card details.

Please share. ......"

I don't know how you go about elimination such malicious code from you phone, nor if this story is true, so over to you and your research. Possibly starting here ...

Where is that Emu?

A total time waster, but can you spot the Emu?

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If you like spotting things try others here.

Truism (for saving money #1)

The best form of saving is the avoidance of debt.

Personal thought - This was passed to me by dad, warning me that interest paid on a debt actually buys you nothing - you wasted that money that you worked for!

Someone who doesn't believe