Now We Are Four

The Miss Thrifty Blog celebrates its fourth birthday today. I know! I’m as surprised as you are. I feel so lucky to have so many lovely readers – this seems like as good a time as any to thank you for being one of them.

It’s funny looking back to 9 July 2008, when I published the first proper post.  It was a bullish manifesto, and the credit crunch had just started to bite. Ah, remember those heady days? Have we really been languishing in the economic doldrums for that long? From the looks of things I was already annoyed:

Today the UK’s biggest housebuilder has announced that it is cutting a fifth of its workforce. Our Beloved Leader, Gordon Brown, has told us to cut fuel costs by learning “eco-driving techniques”. (This seems a bit rich, coming from a man whose fuel bill must create a carbon footprint the size of Madagascar. Mind you, yesterday he told us to stop wasting food – shortly before tucking into an eight-course banquet at the G8 Summit.)   London’s stocks plummeted into a bear market. The British Chambers of Commerce warned that the country is at serious risk of recession. And the bad news continues to pile up.

According to that inaugural post, I was also hacked off at all the well-to-do lovelies who were writing fluffy pieces in the well-to-do newspapers about buying fewer designer labels and sharing organic vegetable boxes with neighbours. Don’t those features seem somewhat… historical now? These days, it’s all about extreme couponing  and sending Liz Jones to work in Poundland.

Oh yes, plenty has changed since 2008. Not least of which are our attitudes to being thrifty and saving money. This blog launched at a time in my life when I was skint and paying off debt, but few of my friends and family members were in the slightest bit interested in hearing about all the old school, frugal tips and tricks that I was discovering along the way. Being thrifty wasn’t “cool”. There was a stigma attached to it. The Miss Thrifty Blog launched anonymously. I was shy.

Fast forward four years and almost one million page views later (half of them in the last year alone), and much is different. That stigma has long gone, I’m out and proud and, as if to prove the point that being thrifty is bloody great, last autumn the blog was named Lifestyle Blog of the Year at the glitzy Cosmopolitan Blog Awards 2011. The dazed look sums it up:

What’s next? Lawks, I’ve no idea. Although I did plan out the next few posts today – and only stopped when I ran out of notepaper. Something tells me that this fifth year is going to be a busy one too…

In the meantime, here are some of the all-time most popular posts to date:

How to clean a REALLY dirty oven

This is the industrial-strength rendition of my Hassle-free oven cleaning post. Trust me: the inside of your oven door could look like it was painted with Cuprinol, several times over, and this would still make it look like new.

Make Do And Mend: Vogue for the credit crunch bunch

With our financial indexes plummeting, our markets in turmoil and our elected representatives banging heads with one another, this seems as good a time as any to dust off Make Do And Mend and revisit some of our forebears’ handiest household hints.

Why “extreme couponing” ISN’T taking off in the UK
Last week I was contacted by a Sunday Times reporter who was writing a story about how American-style extreme couponing was taking off in the UK. I explained the reasons why, um, it wasn’t. (Worst. Interviewee. Ever.)

Fake Wedding Cake: Hmmm!

Apparently these wedding cakes are taking off in the USA – especially with the economy on its downward swoop. These towering confections are as mouthwatering as they are ornate. But here’s the rub: they aren’t real!

Rail travel: how to get a free upgrade to first class

Have you ever browsed the National Rail Conditions of Carriage? No, of course you haven’t – why would you? Well, you can find them here, and I recommend that you turn your attention to Section 1G, Part 39…

Here’s to a happy, thrifty 2012/13.

Image credit: State Library of New South Wales.