Ooooerrr OTHER stuff, what's that you ask, well, it's the other stuff that is abit hard to pigeon hole ho ho, you know, still good serious'ish stuff, but err....well just read it and you'll see what I mean.

Before you get too excited though, it's not serious as in death, destruction and plagues of locusts taking over Bracknell (though if anything like that does come up it might well appear here, but possibly more likely in my food section...dipped in chocolate), no it's as serious as I get, as in NOT MUCH....stuff like money, business, my take on those things, things that I usually fall asleep to but possibly (and I'm daydreaming here) make me 'sound like' I should wear glasses and a mortar board, ps 'sound like' does not mean 'is like' sadly.

It's stuff that when someone else mentions it, they get all serious and and suddenly no-one's laughing any more (except me because I still haven't learned when it's inappropriate to laugh) and then everybody thinks can someone get up and tell a joke (or is that just me) or something...you get the idea, so here goes with the bor....I mean 'serious' stuff.

I should be interested in shares because it makes money, and I spend my life needing money but in reality apparently I'm subconsiously scared of making money, that is 'BIG' money.

I tried the 'can you be rich in reality' check, where you're supposed to walk around for as long as possible, weeks or even months if you can, carrying a large amount of cash, say £500 in your pocket... so here goes my test...I think I had a few pounds left over from my weekly shop, that in itself is unheard of so don't berate the poor, anyway the idea is that you're supposed to come to feel comfortable about it, only then can you 'really' handle making big bucks (and more importantly keeping it).

I however was very uncomfortable, pained even, I had to put it somewhere safe quick, a bank a bank, whereforeart thou oh bank These days we wouldn't say a bank was the safest bet but at the time that was my only option, the other option, 'the mattress' scared me even more, think of the feng shui of loads of money under you as you sleep, you'd end up dreaming about it, possibly chewing on it and it would probably ultimately cause the demise of your health (think where it's been) and all your relationships as you became obsessed by it.

Anyway, needless to say but I said it anyway, I didn't like it AT ALL, I never got comfortable and as soon as I could possibly put it back, I thrust it, like a dirty leaking nappy, at my local banking assistant, luckily she was a mother of money and happily put it in the banks non-recyclable vault (yes I know, wishful thinking).

You know, even as my husband takes out my weekly shop from the cashpoint and happily waves it in the air shouting 'look at my wodge' as he walks towards me, I virtally ambush him and hide the money ramshackle in my bag or under my arm incase some broke AWOL SAS paratrooper wannabe (wearing a hoody as a cover-up to make him look deceptively like a teenager) is hiding somewhere nearby ready to pounce somewhere between the three metres that separates me and the cashpoint. That's three metres of potential life-changing hell for me.

So you may have assumed by now and you wouldn't be wrong that I'm not made out to be 'happily loaded' in the bank of Tamsin's pocket.

Having said that, if I were actually rich for some unfathomable reason, I do believe I would stay rich, if only because I'd have to pretend it wasn't there, No no no, I'm not rich, who me?, never! I mean imagine all the SAS ambushers who would stalk me if I carried around a load of dosh! It worries me just to think of the poor things getting the chill waiting for me to make a false move (naa, only kidding, bang them up the whole lot of them and throw away the chalk).

So as I wouldn't want to and couldn't actually physically handle the money, especially if it were stuck in the bank, a place that's like some ethereal twi-light zone for me where time and existance simply 'aren't', it would just sit there and accumulate and hopefully I could forget about it.

Honestly, I'd be good at keeping it...just no big risking taker me. And I have to make an additional nudge in the ribs here but I don't spend money like my husband thinks I do. I only recently went overdrawn for the first time in ...well ever since I met my husband, when the stoopid government decided not to give me any more working tax credits, that was useful, in the most stoopid law ever created that means that if a couple both earn up to £43K, so that's up to £86K, they will still get tax credits, but if one of a couple earns a penny over £43K and the other half doesn't work at all, they have a combined salary of just over £43K and they get no tax credit, how is that fair.

And though I would say that £43K is no small amount, in the neck of woods where we live, £43K is small fry, it will barely support a mortgage yet alone living expenses and bills and so you could be effectively living on the bread-line (perhaps slight exaggeration here but you know what I mean) and get no relief!

Who thought up this stoopd law, it's obviously anti family, anti parents looking after their own children and utterly preposterous!

Now what they should have just said is, if your joint income is over say £60K (to split the difference) you loose working tax credit and below that you qualify. I hereby declare....read the above...Mr Chancellor...and stick that in your dirty brown briefcase.

And my other qualification for being good with money is that I have joined most of my friends in becoming what we deem ourselves as (cue fanfare trumpet) "bargain finder extraordinaires".

Here's how it goes...I buy all my childrens clothes from a local business two mums set up, where mothers give their childrens second hand designer clothes (other makes don't sell) to this company, the company they sell it to other mums like me for a few pennies at their house sales and the mums who donate the goods get 50% of the profits, a great way to make a bit of pocket money out of your kids clothes and a great way to move your scruffy kids holey clothes to the holey clothes horse in the sky and make them look decent enough to fit in with all the fortunate kids with their Abercrombie, Jack Wills "or else" wardrobes.

Other kids clothes I get are donated by generous friends, all of which I pass on to younger children of other friends of mine when they've finished with it, how eco friendly are we!!!?. (that sounds so smug I just need to slap myself).

And on the rare occasion that I need to update my wardrobe, I even buy my own clothes from e-bay or from second hand designer sales, all at a fraction of the cost. Some 'value' grocery products where the quality doesn't differ enough to notice mean I'm very happy to announced (to my husband mainly) that I do appear to maintain the weekly food budget which is so tight it can't breath and has to include 'please get him out of' nappies, toilet paper, toiletries and cleaning stuff etc. And, yes I haven't finished yet, here's where I really saved this year, and we were 'really' scared before we tried it, incase we found ourselves wearing red coats shouting 'happy campers' at everybody, but here goes, we went on a 'Sun' £9.50 holiday, which was actually, bit shock, rather good!

It turned out to be a caravan on the cornish coast, it was bright, clean, newly refurbished, huge for our needs and even though as it always does, it rained for most of the time we were there, we simply got wet and had loads of fun posh-camping, superduper bring on the pooper scooper I say! PS I would have probably never had a the gal to describe a caravan holiday as great as my whole childhood was spent looking on in disdain if a caravan reared it's ugly nose in our tents direction, if it wasn't for the fact that I recently discovered that all these well to do people around my part of the world, that is everybody I know, are going on these really expensive camp abroad thingamygigs, eurocamp or something like that, anyway, there I was thinking they were camping but with great facilities in summer-all-year-long campsites, when I was informed that what they were doing was actually not camping but staying in caravans.....Ha! I thought they were slumming in the only way middle-class people know how, with lots of pain, dampness and earwigs, when in fact they were all hiding behind white heated facades, probably with all the knobs on, wooden porches and palm trees in ceramic-plastic pots too, you traitors....oh well I've joined you now, anyway what good are all those ugly caravans if 80% of civilisation don't use them and it's eco right? I mean if they're refurbished old ones and not new ones, right? right.. Please someone design a colourful nice looking caravan that's not called something that sounds fast and upper-class like "Lancelot Swift 2000", when it's clearly not, before we all turn into happy campers.

Anyway, I recommend all these plus of course 'freegle' and your local 'yahoo parent' web-site for free things and events as well as local hospice sales for secondhand furniture which are authentically old look a million times better (once given a paint-job) than some MDF crap you get from your local supermarket.

That's one thing I really advocate, I'm sick and tired of all this modern cheap furniture that falls apart after a year of normal use and have hence gone to great efforts to slowly get rid of our bits of rubbish and replace them with solid wooden pieces that I can easily turn into something useable. Goodbye Ikea, Tesco, Asda and Argos furniture (PS I still use these stores for food by the way and ikea is great for accessories and meatballs), hello car boot and charity furniture sales! PS I don't do DIY as a rule, only as a desperate measure as I'm always in too much of a hurry to do a good job, so painting and banging in a few nails are my max!

If I won the lottery, and I'd have to buy a ticket to do that which is my first problem, holding a lottery ticket for a week, another no no in my book, knowing the potential value of this gold chocolate factory ticket is just painful.

Anyway, if I won the lottery I've already told my husband that he'd have to have all the money, then he could then take all the blame for mis-spending it, not giving enough to charity and not giving it out to everybody I know etc as I'd hate all that responsibility and resulting hatred that would undoubtably ensue, he can just give me pocket money every now and then, or when I need something, he can pay for it, but I definitely, DEFINITELY don't want to have the money myself...it's the road to loneliness and unhappiness!

I believe people have an innate feeling of worthiness and if you're simply given a load of money that you haven't earned in any small way, that you find it difficult subconsciously to accept the money and therefore flitter it away, unless of course you feel a great deal of injustice that you've never been given what you're trully worth in life and that you're worth a great deal more than the average Joe and a few million quid might make things even, in which case, you may well look after it well. I love that older couple who won, who just put aside a small amount for them and their family and then gave the rest away over the years to well chosen charities, not the ones that pounce the second you win, but ones they had really thought about and wanted to surprise, now that's nice, I like that and that would probably be what I'd want to do....but might have some difficulty actually doing at the same time...but then again, if my husband has the money, he can sort that out and I can deal with not feeling guilty that I hadn't emulated them exactly and been angelic, pants, I'm obviously doomed to a life in hell in the afterlife as I don't automatically want to give all my lottery win away to charity...just thinking about whether you would do that or not surely makes you a greedy money-hugging monster, damn, I'm doomed! Do you hear, DOOOOOMMMMED!!! (luckily I feel this applies to most people...back me up here).

So back to the share dealing issue, one of my best friends in the world is an amazing self-made millionaire entrepreneur and he has made a life for him and his beautiful wife and child by telling other people, not unlike myself, maybe abit more 'with it' in the area of money though, but certainly as unprepared, how to make money in the city i.e. in shares.

He runs seminars where he gives you a pack, gives you lots of chocolate (that's where my interest improves) and most importantly explains in the best possible comic manner, how to do it, that is 'make money' and then you're off, making millions...but the big issue of course is not that you have to pay for the seminar, because it is invaluable and really will teach you everything you need to know how to start share dealing and doing it effectively, but it's the little really annoying fact that the first money you spend will need to be money that you don't mind loosing, infact every penny you put into shares has to be put there with the view that ...and this is no easy thing to say.....that "you can afford to lose it"...aaaghghgh, that just sounds so scarey to me, that's a big catch, a HUGE catch for someone like me, possibly because I'm so poor, but even if I did have £10 to rub together with my other empty hand, I really would mind loosing it, I mean, that would buy our family food for a day and then there's no way of restocking the £10 if I lost it in share dealing...

So basically it's a gamble and you have to have a gamblers mind to share deal effectively, successfully, and equally to become an entrepreneur (or a criminal mind but that's another subject), which is why you haven't heard of me before, because it probably cost money...or you have to have been given some surprise money by a relative you don't particularly like and whom you would hate your pure as driven snow hands to touch incase the evil in the money crossed to the other side. Neither of these things will ever happen to me unless someone out there reads this and in an evil rage leaves all their worldly cash to me, doh!

Having said all the above, my friends books on 'easy trading' are super duper brilliant, he is brilliant and if he can't encourage you to have a dabble, nobody else can, I'm a lost cause of course and my friend knows this but as he's such a good friend, he's still my friend despite my obvious flaws and what more can you ask of true friendship.

For all of you who actually want to get rich, his name is Robbie Burns and his series of books 'The Naked Trader' and blog http://www.nakedtrader.co.uk.htm are available on the internet, from all good book shops and amazon and his newest book will be launched on September 30th 2011. He's also been a newspaper columnist for amongst others 'The Sunday Times'.

Go Go GO Robbie, I am happy to bask behind the prickly bush that's behind the outside loo that's behind the mansion of your GLORY!

I recently read that we apparently only know about 10% of what we need to know about how food affects us, our health and everything in between so I thought to myself, what have I got to lose by informing you of all my thoughts and findings on the matter.

Everybody has a theory about certain foods, intolerances, allergies, cancer causing foods, superfoods etc etc and that's where the problem lies, everyone has a theory and everyone's theories are different. OK, not all are different, but they're as different as we people are different and varied, so the options are endless.

We are all so different with so many different permeations, we are made up of different genes, we live in different climates, we have different blood groups, we have different lifestyles, we eat different food so the possibilities are endless.

Having said all that, with the advent of advanced communication the world is becoming more and more like one big salad or should I say bubble and squeak, but we're starting to do things similarly to people on the other side of the planet, eating similar foods, exercising in a similar manner, living more and more similar lives and as this progresses further and further into the future, we should be able to get to the bottom of more and more nutritional question marks.

Can food cure conditions, can food improve conditions, what things combined with what things work to improve our situation, what doesn't work and are outside influences greater or lesser depending on what we eat, the questions are endless.

As for me, well as I've got older, I've started to notice things I never noticed before, suddenly my body is not the pot of flowing never-ending porridge that it was before, now it drips out little by little and I have to fathom why there are the spaces, the gaps, when things don't work, also I have what I reckon is a more frequently occuring dilemma of our current times, the fact that whenever I go to the doctor with some weird symptom, they have no idea what it is, they test me, they prod me, they look at me and then they say something like "I dunno, just see how it goes and if it continues make another appointment" Duh!

I have spoken to many friends and I get the feeling this is a standard procedure in surgeries throughout the land, perhaps because it takes the allotted 5 minutes to say it very VERY slowly and then there's no time of course to actually figure out what it could be, or possibly, the little symptoms one suffers so much of the time are just a symptom of our hypercondriacal world. Because in most cases, whatever it was just vanishes a few days later and I'm back to where I was, porridge flowing over again, problem forgotten.

Now I must make it clear here that I'm not a hypochondriac, I know because I know one and I'm not saying who it is, a hypochondriac in my opinion is someone who thinks everything that occurs to them is due to the fact that they secretly must have cancer/diabeties/a heart problem etc etc and then they go and have all sorts of tests to check for these things even though they have no obvious symptoms.

OK I admit, I sometimes think these things but the difference is, I don't do anything about it, I just think it, it could be this or that but if I'm still here tomorrow it means I'm probably ok. Perhaps I'm just a lazy hypochondriac? No, I'm not, I can't be, I'm way too positive to be a hypochondriac, pessimists make great hypochondriacs and as I've said previously I'm an optimistic pessimist, I may have cancer but I'm alive hey! PS I don't have cancer by the way, that was just for illustrative purposes, oh help, now I've said it, will it come true, what if I have cancer and I don't know it yet and then I have to go back to this page and change it again, what if by some sad twist of fate, I think it and then it happens.......no I'm definitely not a hypochondriac right?...just nod.

Plus I have worked out it's not worth going to the doctors unless you're literally dyeing so I generally don't go anymore unless it's for the kids or unless I want to simply order something for some problem that I know what it is and I know the sollution but due to red tape you have to make an appointment to get what you want.

And ever since my sister who is a nurse told me that basically doctors don't have a clue, they rely on a couple of well known facts, that (1) most patients know what's wrong with them and most of them even know what medicine they require and (2) most nurses know more than they do as they are constantly going on courses to update their knowledge and as they are the dogsbody of all places medicinal so do all the 'actual' work...so doctors are covered from both sides really.

I say, if you have a problem that you can't fathom, check with the nurse first and if you don't like the nurse, make an appointment with your GP and he can ask the nurse for you. Maybe GP stands for GoosePerry!

Onto Tamsin's Nutrition.

Sugar - don't eat it. I could write pages and pages as to why but it's so long and boring, but basically most of the worlds health problems would be cured if we stopped eating processed sugar. Sugar is secreted through our skin, it takes about 3 months for your skin to show the signs of something you have eaten (unless it's an allergy in which case it's pretty instantaeous) and if you eat overly sugary foods and that includes carbs because they produce sugar in our body, then you may suffer from itchy, dry, eczma, hives, rosecea etc etc skin. And those are just the surface problems. Our skins are maps to our insides, if you have any problem on your skin, then you are also statistically likely to have some more important problem way below...one of the main ones, being sugar, need I mention diabeties? You get the picture.