CARPHONE WHOREHOUSE

CARPHONE WHOREHOUSE

A death row of shutters and boarding

Like on any high street in any town

When they tell you the high street is dying

Yet you’re wanting to buy a new phone

All you want is a straightforward phone

All last week you’ve been looking online

What you’re after’s a no-frills unsmart phone

You’ve researched it extensively online

But because you’re out and about you think

Oh look! Over there’s a Carphone Warehouse

That you’re certain will make life much simpler

So glad you spotted that Carphone Warehouse

Nervously you find that you’ve entered

Worried that salespeople will pounce

Then they sit you down in a bad chair

Endlessly filling in electronic forms

With a trainee who doesn’t know the system

Waiting forever for the time safe to release

With their manager bellowing all your details

Loud enough so the dead high street all hears

After all of the waiting they bring out the phone

In a bright shade of blue that’s not navy

Now they tell you colour you first asked for

Is not one that they have in stock today

You reluctantly accept the light blue one

Because by now you don’t want to give in

When you get home the ten pounds of credit

Online shops offered isn’t included within

No good turn you do will go unpunished

Life typically turns out quite perverse

Your helpful time-saving suggestion

Turns out it was basically worse

A death row of shutters and boarding

Like on any high street in any town

When they tell you the high street is dying

No wonder we’re all shopping home alone

MAWH, April 2018

ANCHOR STEAM

A few years ago, we were lucky enough to go on a tour of the Anchor Steam brewery in San Francisco and, I'll have to admit, got more than a little squiffy whilst chugging down the half dozen free samples dished out at the end of the tour, as we were reflecting upon the exciting tale of the live yeast used to brew their fine beers and porters and how it rather excitingly dates back to the old Wild west.

After coming home, we found that, for a while at least, bottles of it would be sold at a local supermarket of our acquaintance and we would pick up a couple of bottles to knock back at the weekend, whilst the familiar flavour transported us away from the everyday drudgery and back to more pleasant memories of holidays spent under bright blue skies, and sitting in one or two of the occasional bars and restaurants which nestle on the waterfront.

After a few years, however, because our supermarkets can be fickle creatures, those tasty bottles vanished from their shelves, and we were left without this option to add to our shopping cart, and we slowly got out of the habit, although we have continued to cast a hopeful eye in the direction of the "Beers of the World" whenever we have been passing, usually to no avail.

However, a few weeks ago, the Beloved was in town and found that the bar that she was in would sell bottles to customers to take away, and she bought a couple and brought them home for me, although, as they seem like such a rare and precious commodity, and not one to be wasted, they have lurked in the fridge ever since, waiting for that "special moment" to come when we could crack them open and savour that rather pleasant amber fluid.

Of course, there are various arguments to be made about living for the now, and not for a tomorrow which may never come, and if you save that bottle for a "special" occasion, you may never get to drink it, and I'm not going to argue the opposite view on any of that.

You may last another half century, or get hit by a bus tomorrow, but it's probably best to have plans in place for both.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that, when the Beloved left me alone for a couple of days recently, when I was sitting alone with my "lonely man" meal and a DVD Box Set spinning away in the player, I decided to crack open one of those "special" bottles - just the one - pour it into a glass, and drink it with my dinner.

And, you know what, it tasted mighty fine, and it was absolutely the correct thing to have done.

Cheers!

SECURITY PROTECTED

Spotting this one flummoxed me a tad when I spotted it on my jar of coffee after I'd got it home from Morrison's last weekend.

We'd really just wanted one of those "refill packs" that we normally get to top up the jar that we already had, but they didn't have any of those on sale, and so I had to bite the bullet and invest in a brand spanking new "top of the range", more than six quid a pop jar instead, not realising that I was moving into the realms of fancy goods and luxury items of the type that are coveted enough to have become eminently "nickable…"

After all, I'm used to things like electrical goods, CDs, and bottles of spirits having security tags on them, but jars of coffee…?

It must be a sign of the times we live in, I suppose… and they'll no doubt be tagging the beef and the premium range sausages next, as well as the tomatoes, just to appear to not be being vegetablist.

Meanwhile, I'm fairly sure that all you "real" coffee drinkers will be hugely disappointed in my desire to buy the instant variety, of course, but then I've got to the point where the "proper" stuff is far too strong and does horrible things to my metabolism if I down too much of it.

And then there are the headaches, of course, and I really ought not to undo the "good" that the blood pressure medications are supposed to be doing to me.

Still, I do still appreciate a half decent cup or twelve of joe each day, and, as the latest advice revealed only recently claimed, coffee might be good for you in the battle against diabetes, despite having been declared bad for you in so many other ways.

These guys know nothing…

As apparently do I, when it comes to the small matter of "proper" coffee…

I'm sure that many of you real coffeenistas would find that the brown fluids that I choose to guzzle down like there's no tomorrow would quite happily park themselves under the general heading of the "barely bloody drinkable…"

Not that I can argue with that…

Nevertheless, the various coffee-making devices that we have accumulated about the place over the years all seem to have become far too much of a faff when it comes to both brewing up and cleaning them out afterwards, so they sit about the house gathering dust and a film of grease which only serves to make them even more of a bothersome exercise to start wrangling them… unless, of course, it's a "special occasion" and, well, to be perfectly honest with you, I don't have too many of those nowadays.

Anyway, here we find ourselves, harking back to those Georgian times when the Coffee Houses were the place to go to take a cup of this exotic and luxury item, and where the great and the good of the business community would gather and eventually come up with ideas like the formation of the London Stock Exchange which is just the sort of brilliant idea that led to people not being able to afford to buy the coffee in the first place, and which means that it now needs to be "Security Protected…"

Funny olde worlde, innit…?

SUNSHINE

I was a bit early for meeting the train the other day, and so I parked up in a car park and went off to the shops for a few minutes, acquiring as I did so, more tat to cram into our tiny house for no very good reason other than I fancied having it.

The thing that I was after had become increasingly unavailable in recent months due to the company producing them going out of business, but, during one particularly distracted afternoon, I suddenly remembered spotting a copy or three in a particular shop a couple of months ago and wondered if they might still be there.

And so, having mentally committed myself, I headed there, fully expecting them to have been sold out ages ago, and that I would find myself staggering back upstairs without them feeling all bitter, twisted and disappointed, but at least with some of the allocated pennies still lurking in my own bank account.

This tiny retail adventure didn't take me quite as long as I thought, nor was it as unsuccessful as I'd persuaded myself it would be, either, as the items in question were obviously not as popular nor sought after as the tiny voice inside my head had thought, and so I headed back towards the car slightly richer and slightly poorer (if you get my drift), and sweating like a drain after the exertions of the many flights of stairs leading back to the car park.

The car was, by this time, rather like an oven inside, and I still had ten minutes or so to fill before my rendezvous, and so, when I realised that it was far, far too hot to sit inside the car on such a nice day, I noticed that the skyline around me was looking rather impressive and I was in a pretty sweet spot for pointing the teffalone at the sky and getting a few decent panoramas of rather a lovely day.

Later on, that day actually got even better, and I headed home to find that there was barely a cloud in the sky which, given that it was Derbyshire that I was heading into, seemed to be a rather unusual state of affairs and worth recording, given that it seems to occur so rarely.

Sometimes you just have to take a moment, get away from the screens, and watch the sun go down.

Already, by the morning, not ten hours later, the clouds had gathered and the skies had regained their familiar greyish hue, but for one glorious evening, the skies were as clear and as bright blue as I ever remember seeing them be.

STUFF I GOT

You could argue - quite rightly - that far, far too many of my recent posts could be clustered under the sub-genre of "stuff I've bought" and, in these cash-strapped times, blathering on about forking out cash I don't have spare for stuff I don't really need is tantamount to rubbing the nose of the entire world in it.

Sadly, of course, this is what I do... It's what my life has been reduced to...

So I apologise profusely for going on about things in a "Ooh! Look what I bought!" kind of a way, because it's tactless in the extreme and really doesn't do anything to further the life experience of any of us, no matter how much any of us going out on a little shopping spree might allegedly (if you believe all those economists and, to be frank, why would anyone do that?) boost the economy and apparently potentially lift up the lifestyles of every single one of us...

No, don't thank me yet.

Perhaps I ought to give some thought to the topic of "Retail Therapy" especially as it tends to be one of those things which a lot of people do, perhaps at a time when they can least afford to do so, and Chrimbletide is that time of the year when there's the most pressure to splurge, even when the splurger hasn't got anything to splurge with, and justify it to themselves with a pragmatic and weary "Well, it is Christmas..."

But even when it isn't, during that increasingly tiny "non-festive" window each year, the desire to make yourself feel "better" by buying yourself a little something, before feeling much worse because you couldn't really afford to buy yourself a little something, is one of the constant pressures of living in a consumerist and capitalism-led economy because the adverts are constantly persuading us that our lives are not quite perfect and would be better if only we had this, that, or the other, of the many available pointless nick-nacks in them.

Interestingly, it's often the people who've got the most stuff and are the envy of all their circle of acquaintances who turn out to be the most miserable, but I digress because it's always easier to be miserable with a few quid in the bank than when you haven't got a pot to piss in.

And yet that strange notion that buying ourselves more stuff will make us happy is one which persists and even pops up daily on various websites with the simple message "Get yourself a little something" with that strange, unsaid subtext of "...because you're worth it..."

Why shouldn't we try and buy ourselves a few precious moments of artificial happiness....? If it's the stuff we have which defines us and makes us happy, why the hell not...? After all, it's not as if it's going to turn out to be so much worthless junk that we're leaving behind ourselves after we've gone is it...?

"You can say one thing about Auntie... She had good taste in mobile phones..." [Sighs] "Just chuck it in the bin bag with all the other junk...!"

Meanwhile, another of those ghastly "non-words" (alongside the brainlessness of a moronic "here-today, gone tomorrow" pop word like "selfie") which has apparently finally sneaked its way into the O.E.D. is "showrooming" which is the process by which we go out, look at the stuff on sale in a High Street store, find out whether we like it, and then go away and buy it cheaper online.

Because that kind of thing really helps the economy when all of those local shops go out of business, doesn't it...?

You can understand why it happens though.

Only an idiot forks out all of the extra money that they can ill-afford, just to make a point of principle, and why should you spend the that extra fiver that you haven't got simply to help them out. It's easy enough to have principles when it comes down to what other people are spending their money on, but when it comes to our own, well... That's another matter entirely.

I could, of course, tell you an outright lie now and claim that all of those posts about my shopping were all leading up to something like this posting, as if I had some kind of a long-term master plan to discuss basic economics with you, but, sadly, that's not the case. I'm just a sad, gullible wretch who's trying to make some sort of sense of his own compulsions and obsessive behaviour when it comes to the pointless acquisition of stuff.

That said, the great and the good who lurk inside the Temples dedicated to Mammon such as John Lewis don't seem to have any issues with paying far over the odds for something just because they can, whilst the rest of us try to decide whether to fork out the extra for  a better class of  sausage, because, when you look around yourself in an outlet like that, you very quickly realise that it is still the wealthiest who are running the place and ensuring that they can keep that wealth at the expense of the rest of us.

After all, if you're just going to assume that anyone who claims any kind of benefit at all is the lowest common denominator and must, by assumption, be trying to cheat the rest of us, before going out and paying out enough money for that one extra ham that you didn't really need (but you want to have in "just in case") to feed another family for a week, it seems less that charitable to then refer to them as parasites over your next over-priced Latte in the coffee shop afterwards.

Such people will quibble about an over-payment of about a fiver that made someone able to eat for a couple more days and then go out and blow hundreds of pounds on the makings of a Christmas Dinner that the bloody Ritz Hotel might have considered far too lavish for its customers, and try to salve their consciences by putting an extra quid in the Sally Army collection box as if somehow that will put the entire world to rights.

'Tis the season, my friends... 'Tis the season...

EASY LIKE SUNDAY MORNING...

One of the advantages of getting into town early is that you get to see all of the places that are usually packed to the twelves with busy, busy people looking a lot more quiet and sedate than they might otherwise be, but with the advantage of daylight making them seem far less scary.

Not that just looking less scary can guarantee anything.

Anyway, I thought that it might be nice to share what that busiest shopping thoroughfare of the city of Manchester looks like whilst pretty much everything is still closed and most of the people are still coming round and facing their Sunday mornings, or battling our way through the traffic to get there and filling up those quiet streets with the hustle and bustle of thousands and thousands of busy, busy people filled with purpose and spending power...

Peaceful looking, isn't it...? Almost pleasant...

Although, if it was like that all of the time, pretty soon there wouldn't be any shops left for anyone to go to... but I suspect that that's another rant for another time. Instead we should just take a moment to enjoy the serenity of the moment and try not to think about the poor guy and his dog who were sleeping in a doorway just out of the edge of the frame.

Sorry that it's just a quick bit of nonsense today but I'm in a bit of a hurry...

1001

So...

Just when you think that you've run out of ideas and things to say, and decided to pack your blogging bags and slink away for a while, somebody suggests something that they think you might want to write about and, before you know it, there's another piece that can be written, and your keyboard fingers get twitching and you're back on the treadmill.

On our way back home from a day out in Manchester, the beloved turned to me and, quite out of the blue, said "You should start a blog about the bits and pieces of unmitigated tat you pointlessly buy whenever we go into town..."

Well, considering that she seldom shows much interest in my unliterary outpourings, this seemed almost like some kind of an endorsement, so, ignoring the obvious criticisms of my profligacy, and looking (for once) at the bigger picture, I seized upon the notion and here I find myself once again word-wrangling for no better reason than I actually have something to write about, however banal it might actually be...

Notice that I didn't write "something worth saying" because that would probably be a leap too far... After all, I am a man of not-very-well hidden shallows...

So anyway, what had happened was this:

We had gone into town early on a Sunday morning because of a hair appointment coupled with some dodgy information that the beloved could try for another "walk-in" appointment for another procedure at 10.00am when the shops supposedly opened.

We duly got up early and made our way to the station for the rather lovely and comparatively peaceful early train and arrived in Manchester at 9.30am only to discover that most of the shops (including the one which offered the "walk-in") don't actually open until 11.30am...

There was, basically, time that needed killing, and not just the time which I had already known that I would be spending trudging the streets and looking in the shops whilst the hair appointment was going on.

Happily we found a place that did breakfasts and we had a languid "second breakfast" which we allowed to land on top of the swiftly grabbed bit of toast we'd had before leaving home, before I walked the beloved to her hairdressing emporium and then I set off and walked around town waiting for the shops that I wanted to go in to actually open.

You see, I had a "mission..."

A magazine (or "comic..." depending upon your point of view about such things) which I had thought was covered by my subscription but, as it turned out, wasn't, had come and gone at some point during the last month whilst I was distracted by hospital stuff, and I wanted to track down a copy after having spectacularly failed to do so in various other outlets for a week or more. So, in that hour, I trudged backwards and forwards between my last two retail hopes, and found that both were remaining steadfastly closed until a time that at least one of them refused to display in their windows.

Between them both was a remainder bookshop which was open, and I popped in and spotted two "bargains" which I resisted in my haste to get from one shop to the other for opening time, but which I returned to when I found there was still fifteen minutes to wait in both cases.

Well, it was something to do.

And so, to cut a short story even shorter, reader, I bought the tat...

One was a normally vastly overpriced "Star Trek" book that I thought looked far more interesting than it ultimately turned out to be, but at a price that I at least considered "tolerable" rather than the "ridiculous" full price might have been.

The second was an audiobook version of "Dr No" read by Hugh Quarshie across 8 CDs and is more difficult to justify the purchase of. I had been considering getting another book from the same range but was resisting it until I saw it at a more reasonable price. Naturally, that title was not available in the shop that I had foolishly ventured into, but my mind decided that getting another one from the same series cheap would help me to decide whether the expensive ones might be actually worth bothering with.

If you see what I mean...?

"Dr No" is a strange beast. The blatant colonial racism and casual sexism of the 1950s is very difficult to listen to (and I wonder about how Hugh Quarshie felt about having to read some of it, to be honest...) but the descriptive writing is actually far better than I remember it being, and it's been blaring away in the car for a few mornings now and I'll have to admit that I am rather enjoying it, once you get beyond those strange, old-fashioned ideas.

I suppose that modern readers just have to accept that these things are "of their time" and, perhaps, be slightly amazed at how attitudes have changed in just over half a century. After all, we might squirm at one or two of the lines in Shakespeare's plays, but we don't generally go around changing them just because they're unpalatable to modern ears, do we...?

Interestingly enough, I was convinced that I'd read the paperback when I was a teenager, but listening to it now, I'm not sure that I ever actually did.

I don't half buy some rubbish, though... Especially if I think it's a "bargain..." but, in my (rather pitiful) defence, I had resigned myself to not finding my "comic" and felt like cheering myself with a smidgen of "retail therapy" which is seldom all that wise a thing to be doing, I know.

I also successfully tracked down my "comic" so that was a bit of a result, too... From a particular point of view...

KIND OF BLU-RAY

Oh dear… It seems I did a bad thing…

And the funny thing is that, even though it cost only just over six of your British pounds, and seemed to be a complete bargain at that ridiculously low price, even when I clicked that “buy now” icon, I knew that it was a bad thing and that, when it arrived, I would probably be in a great deal of trouble for wasting my money on something that, to all intents and purposes, I had already bought three times over, twice on video, and once again on DVD…

Although, to be fair, one of those times wasn’t actually me, but these kinds of things do happen when you combine your lives and your film collections…

But you see I did say that I wasn’t going to get sucked into this shiny new format, and that I really couldn’t see the point of it. After all, no matter what film it is, it’s still the same movie, whatever format that it’s released on. A bad film, with a lousy script and some awful performances in it, isn’t going to get any “better” just because it’s on Blu-Ray, (although the ones I bought are none of those...)

And I guess that it’s going to be a dead format pretty soon anyway, given that new computing devices seem to be moving away from having disk drives and the average consumer is happy enough to steam any old quality of nonsense...

But ever since I got the wretched device, for reasons I once described to you that did not involve the playing of any shiny discs whatsoever, I have kind of been intrigued as to quite how different the images viewed upon it might actually look.

I could, of course, have just rented something to find that out, but then this “bargain” popped up… and it was one of my favourites (actually, it was four of my favourites…) … and it is one of the very few films that I could honestly say with any certainty that I’d probably watch over again more than once…

I have, of course, been trying to persuade anyone who’ll listen (i.e. not very many people at all) that Blu-Ray really does seem to be a format too far, that it serves no purpose unless you have the kind of TV set of the size which could entertain an arena, and that it seems anachronistic and will probably go the way of the Betamax videotape any day now, but such is my utter hypocrisy that I have now, in a small way, been sucked into its clutches and must resist the urge to buy everything that I already own and fail to re-watch on yet another format…

To be fair, in most cases, I am finding it very easy to resist, but I have now crossed a rubicon and the marketing bots know of this chink in the armour of my fortress and they will no doubt be doing their level best to gnaw away at my shallowness and suck me in to their horrific world of exponential sales potential.

We have, after all, been here before.

Those early days of the original shiny discs when I said that I’d just get one to “see what they look like…” which turned into an obsessive surge of acquisition…

But those were wealthier days, and the novelty of all those “interesting” extras gave me more reasons to find excuses to persuade myself that such things were “essential” in some small way, but, apart from an improved picture quality that I can barely perceive, what additional improvement can this relatively new format give me that all of the shiny discs that I already have can’t…?

And so the internal battle commences…

CHEESE SHOP

Okay, here's a couple of questions (or maybe just thoughts) for you...

If, whenever we come away from a cheese shop (especially a "dangerous" one like this one...), we always end up with a fridge that smells of unwashed and sweaty feet every time you open the door, why don't cheese shops smell like that whenever you open the front door walk inside them...?

It is, of course, only "dangerous" from the point of view of our credit and debit cards because of the many cheesey delights and accessories on sale within, and not because of any inherent dangers of the products they are selling (as he listens to the sound of his left ventricle slamming shut...) but, when it comes to matters of cheese, you really do have to tread very caerphilly...

I am unreliably informed that far eastern countries are not quite so keen on cheese as we are in western civilisation, and that tourists can be quite put off by the vaguely milky smell that emanates from all of us who have a diet with a high-dairy content, and, because so much of my own diet is cheese-related in some way, I do wonder quite what they discovered during their food history that managed to serve exactly the same purpose.

After all, as it  probably took a leap of genius for someone in history to make the connection between the fluid that you could draw from an animal and decide that humans could probably drink it, and further great leaps had to be made to allow it to turn into butter, cheese, yoghurt and all the rest, most of our human food decisions have been fairly universal, despite the various communities of early humans growing up in relative isolation from each other, so why that particular idea managed to fail to make the cut in a civilisation so old that it will pretty much eat anything, is a bit of a mystery.

Meanwhile we come to another question, and this one is about tea.

After all, whilst it probably took another great leap of faith for someone to look at a pile of dried leaves and wonder what it might be like to pour boiling water on them and whether that would make a refreshing drink, most of the tea leaves that we put into our teapots and mugs come from far eastern countries and yet what we call "tea" and what some of those cultures call "tea" are sometimes completely different things.

"Worlds apart" you might say...

Not only that but compulsive tea drinkers over here can find certain types of tea that they are presented with in those places thoroughly undrinkable, so what exactly defines a cup of tea, and is there a universal answer that would satisfy everyone who thinks that they know what makes the perfect cuppa...?

Something to ponder on during your next tea break, anyway...

GUMPTION

One of the things I did see, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say saw and heard, in town recently, and something which I thought must have taken a heck of a lot of gumption, was the girl who stood all alone in St Ann’s Square in the centre of a big city on a Saturday afternoon, belting our operatic arias for the general amusement (or otherwise) of passing strangers.

Strolling around town with that slightly purposeless “I know, I’ll head to a bookshop” air you sometimes have when you’ve been abandoned in favour of a haircut, I turned into the square just as she was finishing singing one, so I only got the last couple of bars, and, to be perfectly honest with you, I’d assumed it must have been some kind of P.A. system until I spotted her standing there all alone at the base of one of the statues.

I paused for a moment, but she stood there for a moment looking slightly awkward before turning around and looking for all the world as if she’d finished for the day, given an attempt at some spontaneous street theatre her very best shot and had decided to give it all up and go off to grow Begonias or something.

Perhaps I ought to explain; “Going off to grow some Begonias” is my own default position for implying that I should perhaps be doing something else rather that whatever it might be that I’m currently doing. I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be any better at growing Begonias than I am at any of the other many things I demonstrate supreme inadequacy at doing, but it remains a handy “get out” phrase. For all I know, our budding opera star was also a prize-winning Begonia grower, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

A direct line to something almighty... presumably.

Anyway, as I barged my way through the Saturday shopping crowds towards Waterstones, and passed the very subtle advertising hoarding now almost completely concealing St Ann’s Church, she started singing another, and her voice was both beautiful and breathtaking as it cut through the gabble and the traffic noise of a busy old Saturday lunchtime.

I paused for a moment, as a tear almost formed in my eye at the sheer beauty of her voice and that moment, and I resolved to bung a quid into whatever hat or paper cup she was using to collect her cash in as I headed back in the other direction, but by the time I did that, she had gone, melted back into the crowd, and been replaced by two kids and a beatbox which didn’t have quite the same emotional resonance with me.

You could argue, of course, that if she’s going to be a professional singer one day (assuming that she isn’t already one) that standing up in front of a crowd of strangers is something that she’s going to have to get used to anyway, but I think that it would probably be far more easy to do that in the intimacy of a concert hall than in the high street where the passers-by are less likely to show restraint if they don’t like what it is you’re doing.

The cynic in me, of course, sensed a certain amount of opportunism. After all, was it not one of the “Footballing Cup of the World” tournaments that brought opera to the masses once upon a long ago by blurting out snatches of Nessun Dorma at every opportunity…?

And whilst we’re at it, have they not finally sorted out this Footballing Cup business yet and worked out who’s best at it once and for all...? Looking at it as a bit of an outsider, it seems a very indecisive business to me…

There were a heck of a lot of buskers that day. It must be a sign of the times, I suppose. A chance to use whatever skill it is you might have to amuse and entertain and (hopefully) make a few bob. After all, we all know that times are tough financially, possibly never more so for the students and the other youngsters, so if this is what they choose to do with their Saturdays, and people are prepared to give them a little something for their trouble, then why not? If nothing else, if they are planning upon having a career in the entertainment professions, then it’s probably pretty good experience for them, too.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that, even if I could sing (which I can’t…), I don’t think I’d’ve had the gumption to do something like that. Mind you, I still wonder how the singer in a band has the gumption to stand up in front of his mates and claim to be able sto sing, either… so well done to you if you’ve ever managed to do that, because you’re a far braver soul than I’m ever likely to be…

NEW KIT

I am becoming massively irritated at the modern tendency towards having to keep on getting new bits and pieces of technological guff just in order to get things which used to work perfectly well without such equipment to continue working, when things used to suit me just fine as they once were.

I have, of course (and after everything I said recently), now bitten another “new technology” bullet, and forked out for a relatively cheap blu-ray player to assist me with the viewing of TV shows via this new-fangled “remote streaming” mularkey which has been causing me such grief lately, but “thereby hangs another tale…” (which is something I might actually have said if anyone had asked, but, as was recently pointed out, “nobody notices” what I write, so I may as well lie through my teeth at you…)

Anyway, a tale does indeed hang thereby and, whilst it’s not necessarily the most exciting of tales to tell, I’m going to tell it anyway.

You see, I’ve already explained why our relationship with our online video rental company had started to crumble and that we had considered many options for solving the problem, and this was much on my mind when I “happened to” pop into a branch of one particular branch of supermarket one evening knowing full well that they sold the particular brand of disc player which I had found to be most likely to solve the worst of our problems with the brand new system.

As I grabbed the bread and the bananas and the milk which, of all our perishables, were the ones which were the most in need of urgent replenishment, I “just happened” to drift into the electrical department and had a bit of a disappointing mooch around.

I say “disappointing” because I simply couldn’t see the particular item I wanted, and I started to slink away with an air of resignation when I spotted a couple of tatty looking boxes on a high shelf around a corner at the end of an aisle marked with the very labelling that I was looking for…

After mere milliseconds of internal strife and deliberation, the least tatty looking of the boxes was in my basket and I was skipping merrily towards the checkout with the probability of being potentially a lot more skint than I planned to be suddenly an imminent likelihood, but happy in the discovery of a moment’s elation born out of the turgid soup of retail therapy.

As I got in the car a few minutes later, poorer and on the defensive, I was asked “What did you buy?” and I reeled off a list including bread, bananas, milk… and ended it with a rather lame and quietly muttered “…disc player…”

In all fairness, the roof was not hit, and my long soliloquy of justification was probably unnecessary as we made our way homewards, although eyes were beginning to roll during the remaining two and a half conscious hours left of the evening before I finally gave up and went to bed, after failing to find any way to get the link to one particular streaming company, which was, unfortunately, the main reason for buying that device, to work at all.

It didn’t help, of course, that I’d managed to choose the one night that their entire network crashed to make my purchase, so that even the website bearing the helpful hints for setting up my device was actually unavailable as I floundered around both looking and feeling like the useless idiot I usually convince myself that I am when it comes to such things.

I had a flash of inspiration (or explanation) overnight, of course….

Well, perhaps not so much a “flash” as a “slow burn” but I realised that I probably had to create an account with one company and then key in the mysterious digits presented me by the machine on one of the many screens which I had seen, although tracking the right screen down again might take some doing…

I set up the account on a decent computing device, but at that point I was far from home and didn’t have the vital digits with me (and they changed anyway next time I switched on) so, once again, everything ground to a halt as I pondered about the problem from a distance whilst I couldn’t actually do anything to solve it…

So, that evening, I got home with a spare half hour to fill, fully expecting to all be a breeze and then spent twenty minutes floundering around looking for the internet on my TV before realising that I could make the link via my computer, and indeed within moments I had the “congratulations, your device is now registered” message once I’d made the mental connections between the instructions.

Kids find this stuff so instinctive now, but I’m left feeling like a total prawn because it takes me so long to figure it all out.

Anyway, after having achieved a successful synching feeling, I then immediately had to go out, so I still didn’t know whether it actually worked or not…

But happily I can report that it did, although now I have developed a form of “range anxiety” with regards to my monthly download limits which meant trying to find out my account details from my telephone service provider.

And thereby, dear reader, hangs another tale…

LONGIFLORUMS

It must be said that the light of my life and absolute better half does have a favourite flower and, because she does have a favourite flower, I have, over the years, become something of an expert at tracking down supplies of them at significant key points in the average calendar year.

You know… Birthdays… Christmas… and, yes, I’m even shallow enough these days to be hoodwinked by society’s pressure into forking out for Valentine’s Day too…

Actually, because that favourite flower happens to be the Lily, especially if possible, the white Longiflorum Lily, Valentine’s Day can prove a little bit tricky on the whole “buying those favourite flowers” front, because people seem to have come to associate Lilies with more sombre occasions and so they tend to get tucked away at that time of year.

Sometimes I sometimes have to go searching around a bit, fighting my way through the sad and defeated-seeming crowds of bewildered-looking people who feel compelled to fork out for the cliché of the “Dozen Red Roses” or the extortionate “Valentine Bouquets” to show how much they care, and not spend an evening in their own personal purgatory, in order to find my flower of choice.

Sometimes they are simply not to be found and the compromise of the “Oriental Lily” has to be considered instead, although preferably not ones in that much maligned colour of pink which might have lost me brownie points in the old days, but which has now become more tolerated, so long as it’s only in flowers…

Still, I have managed, in my own small way, to become a minor expert in tracking down a bunch of lilies when necessary and, despite one Christmas having to dabble with a “proper” florist because of time and weather constraints, and therefore discovering that the going rate could be as much as three quid a stem, I must admit that the supermarkets do a damned fine job of supplying a decent bunch for a reasonable price, and which will last far longer than the average sad bunch of colourful blooms that you might find on the average garage forecourt.

Okay, in terms of air miles, they might not be quite such a good idea, as they seem to be mass produced in African greenhouses and flown over, but in terms of value for money, they seem to be fabulous.

I’ve bought bunches which have managed to survive a full three weeks before finally being consigned to the compost bin.

One of the supermarkets, the one with the four letter name that begins and ends with the same vowel, seems to be particularly good at consistently providing me with very impressive Longiflorum Lillies, ones which actually come into bloom rather than dropping their pods, and then  open up beautifully to an almost “Royal Horticultural Society” standard, and, because I’ve been buying them for several years now, I think that I can quite categorically state that, of all the supermarkets that now sell flowers - i.e. pretty much all of them - it does seem to me to be the ones from that particular chain which are consistently the best...

If you’re looking, that is. After all, you might still believe that buying such things from such a common and vulgar place as a supermarket shows me to be absolutely the oik that you know I think I am and, do you know what…?

You’d probably be quite right…

But, you should also know what… I don’t really care. They make us and, most importantly, the beloved very happy indeed and that, really, makes it all worthwhile…

BARGAIN HUNT

Ah! The thrill of the hunt!
Sucked in by a supermarket flyer,
Which promised many a bargain
Offered by a cheaply printed lie.

Ah! The thrill of the hunt!
Getting up at the crack of dawn
In search of a discount
That was never going to be there.

Ah! The thrill of the hunt!
Seeking out stock which was never delivered
And forlornly departing
Both empty-handed and disappointed.

Ah! The thrill of the hunt!
But there’s the wretched disclaimer
Not all products available in all stores
Or perhaps merely (*While stocks last).

Ah! The thrill of the hunt!
Feeling so foolish at
Falling for the empty promises
Of a marketing executive’s dream.

(A response to a comment last week which I thought might as well be made canonical...)

PAYING GANT ATTENTION

I was surprised to find out last weekend that my new spectacles have a name printed upon them, and, to be perfectly honest, I was more than a tad perturbed when I discovered that it wasn’t MY name but some branding exercise by someone who believes that they are perfectly within their rights to plaster their name onto my face simply because they supposedly designed the flippin’ things.

Of course it came as a bit of a shock to the person who pointed it out (to whom such things seemed to matter quite a lot) that I really didn’t give a rat’s kidney who this “Gant” person was simply because I’ve never really paid anything other than scant attention (or should that be “gant attention…?”) to that whole “designer label” nonsense anyway, and finding out that my glasses cost me far more than they ought to have done just because they are a recognised “brand” is something that irritates me far more than the discovery that they have a certain amount of kudos amongst the kind of people who do pay attention to such things.

After all, when you’re trying on glasses in an opticians, you are really designing for yourself the “look” that your face furniture is going to present to the entire world for the next couple of years and yet, because the sample frames only have plain glass lenses in them, you’re pretty much blind as a bat when you’re making that decision. Luckily, I had help on hand, and my beloved was able to design me in her own image and we were finally able to cast away those spectacles which she had apparently disliked for the past three years which were, of course, the ones I had chosen for myself last time.

I, of course, completely failed to notice the “branded” nature of our eventual choice, and instead went with the “What do you think? Do you like them? Well, I’ll have these then…” route for ordering up my facial future.

God knows what will happen if I ever decide to have plastic surgery…

But then, when it comes to the whole notion of “designer labels” well, I’ve rarely been all that impressed by them to be honest. Oh, I’ll admit that when I had to replace my television once after those “wannabe rock stars” (allegedly) made off with it, I persuaded myself that a brand name was really the only way to go as I was living under the - possibly dubious – belief that “You get what you pay for” when it comes to electronic goods.

In later years, the door falling off my “well-known brand name” fridge would finally dissuade me of that particular myth.

But when it came to clothes or luggage or accessories or food, none of this branding nonsense ever really held all that much sway with me.

It probably explains a lot.

After all, despite having occasionally been able to scrub myself up and appear to be reasonably “respectable” or “smart”, I have generally made my way through life being a bit of a “Scruffy Herbert” and have occasionally wondered (usually during those “vital” job interviews when I was failing to persuade anyone of my potential and genius…) whether I might as well have “LOSER” tattooed onto my forehead in shiny big capital letters.

But then I’ve never seen the appeal of tattoos either (or any of those other “trendy” body adornments for that matter), but that’s probably a topic to steer well clear of…

I did once work in a place where those “designer labels” seemed to be very important, at least amongst a certain sector of the workforce, (usually – although not always - the younger element), who would mercilessly mock those of us whose shoes or trousers or shirts merely came from a supermarket line, but, once they started having to stretch their own pennies as their own lives moved along, such choices seemed to come more easily to them, too.

I did once buy a Yves St Laurent suit for a wedding I was involved with after I’d been told that the soon-to-be happy couple were not hiring outfits but wanted us all in “double breasted dark suits” for the day. Later on, due to some idea that someone had about having waistcoats made, suits had to be hired anyway, so that was money well spent.

Actually it was.

One thing you can say about Yves was that he knew how to cut a “timeless classic” even if it was a timeless classic that now hangs a-mouldering in my wardrobe as moth food.

I also recently paid far too much for a CK shirt that I suspect I’ll only wear once although, (and despite what that person who pointed out the make of my spectacles might think), I didn’t even notice that name on the bag when I took it off the rack in the shop from which I bought it.

“This one’s white and the right size. It’ll do…”

“It’ll do.” Perhaps we should put that on our family coat of arms.

If we had one, that is…

But then that’s a whole other world of “branding” into which I really wouldn’t want to venture…