IT’S spring! The daffodils are out and I feel a new beginning and sense of optimism, of being given yet another chance.

Another chance of what? Well, I’m never quite sure, but I just know it’s there and it’s up to me to take it.

What about the Budget, then?

Funny, but they don’t seem as important or as dramatic as they did in those far off days when my dad went ballistic because the price of his packet of Woodbines had gone up a penny.

Mind you, he was a chain smoker and bought them, or rather my mother bought them, in cartons of 200 — we always had plenty of fag cards!

In a morning he would stand at the bottom of the stairs, coughing, while gripping the newel post with one hand, a fag in the other, still denying that they were in anyway connected, but he lived to his late seventies, apparently fit and healthy.

Smoking, when I was in my teens, was seen as sophisticated, cool, elegant even.

All the film stars smoked.

I was no good at it, but it didn’t stop me posing with them!

I never ever bought any though, as they were too expensive for me, but people ‘dashed the ash’, handing round their packets of ciggies with gay abandon.

You can always stop smoking if the cost becomes too onerous, though I know it is tough.

The price of petrol today is the most disastrous of all, for it affects everything as the extra cost is passed on, so we, ‘joe soap muggings’ yet again have to bear the brunt of this huge increase.

To fill up a ordinary family car is now touching £100. It’s unbelievable and for folk who live in the country, or nowhere near a bus route, it’s a huge problem.

Being in a cooking mood, I thought I’d follow one of my mum’s recipes and went to the supermarket for the ingredients.

I asked an assistant ‘Please could you tell me where I can find pearl barley?’ ‘Sorry’ she said ‘but I don’t think she works here.’