Living with and beyond cancer

 

Well, of course it has because I mean I’m living on a pension. Fortunately, we both had good jobs. We don’t, before I was ill we didn’t save for holidays, we just went on holidays, which is, not a lot of people can say that. We’d go, “Where are we going?” “Oh, we’ll go there.” We’d go to France. We’d go to Africa. But now we have to work it out a year in advance and see if [company name] have still got anything in the pot for me. And it obviously has impacted on us. Fortunately, my wife is very numbers orientated. I tend to not spend as frivolous. And it’s not, when you say impact, it’s not impacted on the fact that we need help.

 

We don’t need help at all. We’re very fortunate, very comfortably, we’re not rich, comfortably off, but when we make anything, financial decisions, we think about it for months. You know, this option, that option, we could do this, oh, we’ve got some money back from there and some dividend has been paid, oh, we’ll use that and won’t have that this month, we’ll do it that month. So it’s made a difference but impacted is a bit of a strong word.

 

That sort of thing. We’ve got another, there’s another car in the drive, in the garage, but the Corsa there, which was new on the first, second of November last year. We did have a Saxo and it was getting on in years but it never let us down, only the things that normally go wrong with cars, but never let us down, but there was this scrappage scheme.

 

 

And we thought about it and thought about it, and my wife thought about it and we did great investigations for six months before we decided, and the decision was we were offered good deals, an amazing deal at one garage. But we decided to go to a company near Liverpool. We drove all the way up there. He offered us another one and a half thousand less. I said, “We can’t, we’ve got to go”. But that’s the sort of, we spend a lot of time thinking about things.

 

You do straight away think, “Oh, I wish I’d have done such and such”. And I was on crutches, so my wife had to drive there and back, and those are the sorts of things.

 

And in the end that’s how we hopefully save money, but we did need a new, it was getting to the point where the scrappage deal would finish and we were going to struggle, we’d have struggled to buy a car.

 

And we did need another car. Well, did because my wife goes to work and I sometimes need to go somewhere else, but that’s going to change eventually. When she stops work we’ll only need one car. 

 

But that’s when I say impacted.

 

 

It shifts, yeah.

 

 

You just think a bit more about it. As I said, before when we weren’t, we were both working, didn’t give it a lot of thought.

The thing that I noticed most is that people we know move on, you know, “Oh we’ve got a new car, oh we’re buying a new house, oh we’re going on holiday here, we’re doing this”. We don’t, we can’t do that. But my partner and me we don’t have a great, if we have a social life it happens in these four walls or at a friend’s house, or maybe one night a month we might nip across to the pub. Because the pub is four or five miles away I don’t drink. Yeah, my partner can usually do a fair bit of that. But we don’t have as much of a social life as most people. 

 

Most of our money, I would think, is spent on our daughter, trying to make her life as easy and as normal as it can be. A school trip, if she doesn’t go on a school trip she’s going to feel left out, yeah? I mean you’ve got to draw the line at she’s not got her own horse or anything, you know, I mean you’ve got to draw the line there. She would want one, I mean she’s at me for a cat. But she’s always well turned out, she’s a happy child, she’s very well adjusted. I think some of her teachers are a bit shocked at times, but she’s well liked and most of our money is spent on her. You know, she needs a computer for her homework, so she’s got a good computer. I’ve done without a lot for a couple of months and managed to get a good deal on a computer. She lives in the middle of nowhere, so we got her a pushbike, yeah? And some of her friends, you can tell that there’s jealously there because, “I’ve not got one of them and I work?” You know, “How can you manage it?” I say, “Well I’m not in the pub every night pissing against the wall,” yeah? And you try to get people to understand that. But there is quite a lot of jealously that you can feel coming from other people, and there’s nothing you can do.