Hello friends
Popping into this thread from my usual hangout at the Jack Monroe forum just to say that I see Roadside Mum still doesn't seem to have made progress with her book.
I tentatively approached her months and months ago about contributing to that project. I have personal experience of living on a low income, navigating the benefits system and living in unsuitable housing etc.
RSM is, from interactions with her and with Unbound, very clearly middle class and university educated. Any traveller heritage, if any at all, is heavily diluted by generations of intermarriage. My best guess is that she is/was a hippy chick who hit the road in the noughties for adventure or to opt out. I think, if she was a travelling eco-warrior, we'd know about it and she'd be much less likely to tweet endlessly about cars, consumer goods and holidays.
She was also very cagey about her real name and I get the impression that Britain is a pseudonym. She also refused to say where in the country she lived -- I only asked in a conversational "get to know you" kind of way -- and she made a strong allusion to being a victim of DV who was on the run from an abuser. Of course, this could be a ruse and a convenient technique to shut down any probing questions about who she really is. All in all, I didn't feel confident at the time that she knew what she was doing with the book and I thought her unwillingness to disclose her real identity to me (offline and with a confidentiality agreement) was sketchy AF.
Anyway, I ultimately decided not to contribute to her book for reasons. It looks like a dead duck and I don't really get why Unbound are still trying to flog it. They were asking for contributors just this week on the X site. So much has changed around poverty in the last year or two and my personal view is that this book is a dud. They should call it a day and refund all the donors who've forked out so far.
)
and rear vision mirror 🪞. Happy to wait. Seems drama not mine."
