Rustic Rants: Thirty-six Dispatches from A Rural Poverty Truth Commission

by Jim Webster

Some irritating person once asked, ‘what if people who lived with poverty were involved in making decisions about tackling poverty?’ So somebody else set up a Poverty Truth Commission. You have two groups of commissioners, the community commissioners, who know poverty the hard way. They live it. The other group is the civic commissioners. They’re people from local authorities, government departments, the NHS etc. Ideally people who have the clout to make a difference.
And out of this mix hopefully we see changes.
And this brief book? Well it has been said that anything that doesn’t kill you leaves you with a dark sense of humour and a selection of unhealthy coping mechanisms. Has writing this been a coping mechanism? Does it display a dark sense of humour? Or is it an unwitting distillation of the thoughts and discussions of those good people who combined to form the South Lakes Poverty Truth Commission. Well if you read it, you might find out.

115 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2024

About the author

Old enough to know better and young enough not to care. I'm married with a wife and three daughters.
Since I left school I've supported myself with farming, freelance writing and some consultancy.
The consultancy dried up a bit so having time on my hands I wrote the fantasy novel 'Swords for a Dead Lady'. This is on Amazon as an e-book. It didn't hurt so I did it again, and 'Dead Man Riding East' is also available on Amazon. A third book, 'The Flames of the City,' and a fourth book, 'Learning a Hard Trade', set in the same background, are now available.
Then as a bit of a change I produced a shorter book, 'The Cartographer's Apprentice' which is something of a 'prequel' to the story of Benor Dorfingil.

The whole 'facebook/twitter/blogging' experience is something I'm not very good at. I'd far rather chat to people on forums, or better still talk over a pint or a really good cappuccino.