“Being thrifty makes you feel good about yourself, and you can’t put a price on that.” –India Knight
In the introduction to the book, India Knight confesses that she had her ‘fair share of bailiffs over the years’ and she was ‘served with bankruptcy papers’ but ‘it’s not that I can’t earn money, or that I don’t earn enough of it. It’s a complete inability to manage money’. The book is wroth to spend about three to four hours, and learn something about managing money or crafting or cooking.
Food, clothes, crafts, community, having fun, beauty, holidays, home, and money are the titles of the chapters in the book, and another one ‘emotional thrift’, and they are explained with examples. The author points out why there is a need to understand about money, and it is not just a ‘bourgeois issue of money management’ and a ‘financial idiocy as a sign of a rather charmingly bohemian easy-come-easy-go approach to life in general’.
HOW TO COOK A DELICIOUS VEGETABLE CURRY, with variations: India Knight writes, ‘This is a very basic, very aromatic curry sauce, to which you can add any number of vegetables. It’ll taste fine if you chuck in whatever you have lying around in your fridge and sublime if you lovingly seek out spankingly fresh veg.’ The ingredients for this sauce are: 1. Onion (chopped) 2. Vegetable oil (India Knight uses groundnut oil) 3. Ginger (peeled and grated) 4. Green chillies (deseeded and finely chopped) 5. Ground cumin 6. Ground coriander 7. Cloves 8. Cinnamon stick 8. Cardamom pods 9. Turmeric 10. Tomatoes chopped. With these ingredients one can make a sauce that can go with a variation of vegetables (singly or in combinations) such as potatoes, leaf spinach, frozen peas, paneer or homemade cheese, green beans, shallots, carrots, cauliflower, mushrooms, cabbage, courgettes, pumpkin, squash and also eggs.
About crafts, the authors mentions that crafts are hot. Crafts are cheap, crafts are the best fun and intensely satisfying. Crafts can dress you. Crafts make brilliant presents. Crafts can be sold and make you money.
TIPS ON CLOTHES:
The book gives the following tips: look after your clothes, stuff shoes or boots with crumpled-up newspaper to help them keep their shape between wears, learn to mend, always use weather-proofing spray, learn to hand-wash, get zips replaced, learn to iron really well, moth-proof your closets, use a clothes brush, shave the bobbles off any woollen items regularly, use really good deodorant, and feed your leather handbags with specialist cleaner.
“There is enormous beauty in everyday life, and it doesn’t cost any money to look at it and feel glad to be alive.” –India Knight
EMOTIONAL THRIFT:
“I believe that part of the reason so many of us feel obscurely dissatisfied in some ways is to do with our strange, deluded (and very unthrifty) expectations,” writes India Knight. What are the solutions as not to be dissatisfied or undeluded? The author suggests: appreciate what you’ve got, even the really small things. Be happy. The author notes: There is enormous beauty in everyday life, and it doesn’t cost any money to look at it and feel glad to be alive.