Entry #8: Broke In Britain.

About a month ago now, I picked up a book off the shelf in the travel section at the public library. We had been spending quite a lot of time at the library, wandering up and down the aisles and finding books long on our “to-read” list that we had just never gotten around to reading. This one, though, I had never heard of before, and to my surprise I found myself checking it out and flying through the pages over the next few days.

While Dave and I would have always called ourselves pretty avid readers, since being in Birmingham, you could almost call us fanatics. We have both read more books in the past two months than we did in the past year combined, which could either impress you, or make you feel very sad for us. In our defense, being in the situation that we are in with no internet, television, or steady jobs, reading is one of our main forms of entertainment. In MY defense, Dave has read far more books than I have, and he even has a written out “Reading List” that he follows quite religiously - for a book to make it onto this revered list is no small feat. As far as I can tell, the requirements are simple – the book must either have made it onto a top 100 books of all time list, or be a piece of writing from or about classical Greece or Rome. He sticks to the reading list at all times, reading each book in order as it appears, and finds it very difficult to stray and read a book other than what is next on the list. Each book completed is like another country conquered, and he savours the act of crossing the title off the list within seconds of putting the book down. Never would a book like Broke through Britain have come across Dave’s path if it weren’t for his wife, who does things a little bit differently.

Usually my approach to selecting books is quite less complicated than Dave’s – I simply pick up a book I like the looks of or that I’ve heard about from someone, and I read it. If I like it, I keep reading it, and if I don’t like it, I stop. That’s all there is to it. I usually like reading travel books, and so I was intrigued to find this book while browsing in the Birmingham Central Library during one of our numerous visits. It was one of those books that I was actually sad that there wasn’t any more when I came to the end. I was so excited about it that Dave not only put it on his reading list, but it was actually the very next book that he read! Trust me, that’s saying a lot.

The tagline reads “One Man’s Penniless Odyssey”, which really does sum it all up. It is written by a man, Peter Mortimer, back in 1997. At the age of 54, he decided that he would like to try and walk 500 miles with no food, money, or prearranged shelter. He is a writer; however he didn’t want any pre-publicity or Michael Palin-esque video cameras alongside him; he simply wanted to walk from Plymouth to Edinburgh with a pen and paper, just to see if he could. He walked with a backpack and a friend’s dog, and relied every day on the generosity of strangers to feed him and house him for the night. He had no social agenda, no cause that he was walking for, no training, and no preconceived notions about what his travels would mean…he just decided to do it and hope that it all amounted to something in the end that he could write about.

It was almost like this book was sent to me to be able to think back on as the month progressed with all its ups and downs. September was a difficult one for us. School started the Wednesday of the first week of the month; Dave didn’t get his first day of work until the third week, and I didn’t get work until a week after that. In the month of September, we worked a total of three days, had just paid rent, and were watching as our bank account became increasingly empty. We discovered through other teachers that our recruitment agency, TimePlan, guarantees their primary/junior qualified teachers six days of work every two weeks; we are not primary qualified, and so can’t get this guarantee. There was barely enough work to go around, and so while other teachers worked three days a week, we waited for the crumbs from their tables. It finally came down to the point where we needed to work a certain number of days before our next paycheck or we flat out wouldn’t be able to pay for our next month of rent, let alone any other expenses.

It’s not that we came unprepared. At times we wondered if we should regret traveling around France and Italy this summer, but we realized that we shouldn’t. There were so many things that we didn’t expect. Monthly council tax payments was one of them – like a property tax in Canada, except the tenant pays it on top of their basic rental fee, and it is a fifth of what our monthly rent is. Another one was the 150 pound administrative fee we had to pay the agency that found us our apartment, as well as our first month of rent and a deposit.

Mortimer describes how he feels every time he enters larger towns or cities on his walk; on foot where everyone else arrived by car; watching as tourists bought food and melting ice cream with ease and went about enjoying the pleasures of life that only money can afford you. He realized that he was now an outsider, bound by his penniless state, and actually started to avoid major towns by walking miles out of his way to remain in the countryside, where people were more likely to offer him a meal anyway.

Walking through Birmingham in September was a lot like this. Where we live is quite a commercial center. People who walk the downtown streets look as though they’ve just stepped off the cover of a magazine or a catwalk; all the women carry multiple bags of shopping with the words PRIMARK printed on the sides. The main downtown core is closed to cars, the sidewalks and roads full of people at any time of day, and is lined with stores and restaurants. H&M, Boots, and Pret-a-Manger line the streets in multiples. There are three large malls – the Pallasades, the Pavillion, and the biggest of all, the Bull Ring – all within walking distance, and that actually all run into each other. Across the street from us is the ultra exclusive Mailbox – with Armani and Hugo Boss. It’s a shopper’s paradise. We could barely afford to buy anything but the essential foodstuffs. We were even holding out on buying mixing bowls and oven mitts – then Dave’s parents generously made a secretive trip to the Pound Store (that’s what the dollar store is called here!) one morning and donated some things for our bare kitchen.

I am not naïve enough not to realize that our money woes were nothing like what many newly married couples have to go through. We had a roof over our heads, we ate every day, and we technically had the prospect of more full time work in the near future, which we should be thankful for at least. In those weeks, money came to us in various generous and unexpected ways, and eventually we managed to start getting more days of work between us. The turning point was when Dave went in for an interview at a school and was hired to begin teaching full time starting at the beginning of December. Then we knew that all we had to do was make it until then, and we’d be fine. Hopefully this means that we won’t have to resort to the list of money making schemes that we actually wrote down during one of our more bored and silly moments. Although becoming world champion Settlers of Catan players or pioneering “Take Home Chef: Britain” might have made for better reading.