‘It doesn’t give you the heart to do owt, its not that you want it posh, you just want to know whether its bad for you.’

‘They put the shower in, we can’t we use it, its either too hot or too cold, so we don’t use it’

‘We have domestic violence in this house.’

Niamh speaking about an ornament on her shelf,

‘I bought it from a charity shop, I call it, my sadness. My devastation, my depression, the lot, reminds me of how I was. I bought that and came off the pills, I told doctor I’m gonna do summat, I got a job for four hours then I got more hours till I eventually got twenty hours, I never told the new job that I had depression. I keep it out now, to remind that no matter how bad things get, you can always pick yourself up, you did it once.’

‘They make out you get a job and life will change, but you just get new bills, you don’t earn more, you’re paying the new bills.’

‘I met someone from the jobcentre in the toilets (at work) and she said no one speaks to us outside of work and you were right weren’t you? You said you would take anything wouldn’t you… and look at you, you were right, here you are.’

‘Some things are better when you’re working, we’ve got food in now, Aidan gets his food, biscuits and that. Though we tend to have what Aidan wants now.’

‘The shopping was non-existent, sometimes toast and chips, he has proper meals now’

‘All I eat at work is a bag of crisps’

‘I have coughing fits, out of breath, get up at 5 to get it out of my system, have coffee and that, just to be ready to go to work’

‘Don’t get paid for sick so don’t have days off, if you hand in a self-declared sicknote but you’ve got to be off for two weeks and I can’t afford to go two weeks (and you only get statutory), I can’t afford two weeks with nothing, once I had pleurisy… I was really ill, working with it till I nearly collapsed, security made me go to hospital, I had a week off but that was with no money’

‘I’ve been suffering with a lot of chest infections, doing these tests to see if I’ve COPD or asthma’

‘Bit sad really I’ve got me daughter’s furniture’, “yeah but you bought it mum” – son

‘Everything we’ve got is secondhand’

‘I put the picture in, its ruined with the mould.’

‘I tried to change a picture once because the glass had cracked but it just ripped, it stuck to the glass of the frame and tore, its not something I could have on show now. Its a photo I can never get back… my eldest when he was a little boy…’

‘We save fire for the grandkids, its a fiver a day.’

‘My Grandad was a miner at Edlington pit. He saw his dad buried at coalface as it collapsed, when he was 17. He had to work for the whole family then.’

‘Its always so cold in here We always have to have the bathroom window open all the time, the condensation drips on you when you’re in the bathroom.’