It is NOT Christmas
About 60 people were injured in Birmingham yesterday after a crowd surge at a free outdoor concert. I maintain it was God’s way of telling them that turning on the Christmas lights in the middle of November is an abomination.
Things were not much better in Reading town centre this morning. After an amusing walk into town where every street corner was punctuated by a broken umbrella, half-stuffed into a bin following yesterdays storm, we found that the lights were up in Broad Street (though not yet on) and every department store was now a gaudy shrine to commercialisation.
What is normally a sedate menswear department in Marks & Spencer is now festooned with tacky Christmas gift displays, usurping about ten racks of smart/casual wear which bridges the divide in M&S between boardroom suits and the sort of thing you’d only wear while yachting in the Lake District with your two Labradors. Those ten racks were the only thing I’d come to look at, so finding instead nothing but crowds of mindless middle-aged mums considering whether to buy their brat a robotic snake for Christmas was somewhat irritating, especially since it was only in menswear because they’d never dare to clear space in the womens’ department for this junk.
Ultimately, I tried on some jackets of a similar cut to what I wanted for size, then traipsed home and ordered online. Is it any wonder the high street is dying?
Dear Tesco: thank you for being rubbish
It’s been nearly 6 months since we stopped shopping in Tesco.
As someone who quite literally grew up shopping in Tesco, it did take something reasonably drastic to get us to stop. Sure, we’d used al the other before on occasion, but we always found ourselves back in Tesco. After the May bank holiday weekend, that all changed. I went in on Friday to do the week’s shopping at about 9.30pm. It used to be quite common (and convenient) for us to shop late at night, taking advantage of the 24hr opening. Unfortunately, this was just after our local Tesco had just installed self-service checkouts, and the store manager had taken the ludicrous decision that after 10pm, only the self-service checkouts would be open.
If you’ve used self-service, you’ll realise that while a basketful of shopping is manageable, a trolley load is not. You’ll also no doubt have silently sworn about some imbecile in front of you who probably has trouble working their front door, let alone a checkout. Now imagine the same person with a week’s worth of shopping, on their own.
Now imagine 20 of them, queuing for just four checkouts. Four checkouts that were supervised by a single employee. Checkouts that required you to ‘please wait for assistance’ for inexplicable items such as a bag of frozen sweetcorn.
Goddamn Virgin
Given my long standing hatred of Virgin Media (the masters of customer disservice formerly known as ntl), and the glitch-ridden and ultimately ill-fated Virgin Digital service, it was not without a certain amount of trepidation that Elizabeth booked our flight to Boston on Virgin Atlantic. Would the fates conspire to complete an unholy trinity of dire service? Surely Virgin’s flagship brand wouldn’t be afflicted by the same malaise?
Would it?
New website
I finally got sick enough with both LiveJournal and my old website being rubbish that I took some time and set up new web hosting, and the result is now here. Is it not nifty?
Maybe now updating isn’t an onerous chore, I’ll actually get around to posting more often.
Theory
After detailed consideration on the matter, I have concluded that the attractiveness of an unexpected visitor during the school break is directly proportional to a) the length of time since you last shaved, multiplied by b) the amount of sweat produced due to manual labour in the last 30 minutes.
