Sunday, January 13, 2008
Emetics (2)
Driven onto blog by double costume drama. Can't manage two of the things in one sitting. Been pondering why we like the things so much: according to the DT the English (if not the British) are keener on them than others. Maybe it is that the great swathe of middle England can just about remember what villages used to be like on a good day having forgotten what they are like on a bad day. In France they still have the things so don't want or need to fantasize about them. Is the preference for such things correlated with sex, age, race, religion, orientation or any of the other variables of that sort? Are immigrants from, say, Ghana fascinated by rural fantasies about England? Would they like rural fantasies about Ghana?
But to return to emetics, I learn, also from the DT, that Mr Oliver is being paid £1.2m by Mr Sainsbury to promote their wares. So I wonder how many people like myself there are who will make a small extra effort to avoid Mr S for a few weeks? It is not just that I do not like Mr O very much; it also irritates that Mr S finds it necessary to pay a celebrity to endorse their products in this way. If they were any good they would not need endorsement. Well - up to a point. But whether they do or not, I would be much less irritated by endorsement which less obviously poured money into the pocket of a named individual. Silly, but A B C promotions would not get me going at all.
Can report that the Christmas jigsaw has been finished for a couple of days now. Final score was one peice duplicated, one peice missing, and one peice extra. The extra peice might reflect a mistake somewhere but it did not fit the available hole, despite being very close shapewise. Wrong shade. I wonder how mistakes of this sort come to be made? If the jigsaw was stamped out of a picture in one go, with a bit of care, sweeping up the peices into a plastic bag ought to work every time. And it seems unlikely that you would make a 1,000 copies of one peice then move onto a 1,000 copies of the second peice - although with a computer driving the printing and the cutting I suppose it would be possible. Whole process most diverting so I do not suppose I will be bothered to write off to the maker to demand my missing peice.
Odd Filofax dream the other day. The fad for the things being well past its peak, it is not quite as easy to get them as it was - although things are very much better than they were in the dark days of the seventies and eighties. So I have a dream about being desperate for a certain sort of Filofax paper and someone had told me that there was a shop in Green Lanes (in Harringey) that would do me. A shop on the Eastern side of the road maybe half way between what used to be the Earl of Salisbury and what used to be the dog track. So I go into the shop, which turns out to be some sort of Turkish cake shop and bakery, staffed by pastel dressed middle aged ladies - all of whom are rather bewildered by my request. I then see that the back of the shop, screened off from the front is selling all kinds of oddments, so I push my way in there to have a better look. No Filofax so wake up. The only link I can come up with is the pub we went into in Clacton, the right hand wall of which was taken up with what looked like assorted raffle prizes. So this is another one that I am not going to get to the bottom of.
Amused by a peice in one of our free newspapers about the case of an unexplained cluster of fox deaths. It seems that four or five foxes have been found dead in a fairly small area (maybe as small as one garden) and there is much concern about how they might have met their end. There is even talk of tails - I forget whether it was tails without foxes or foxes without tails. Either way there is dark talk of cruelty to animals by the local police and of the RSPCA crash cart being sent in from their Guildford HQ. I stick to the line that foxes are vermin, most of them are fairly mangy and not very pretty, and that all those concerned ought to have something better to do. (And that is not getting into the charectars who see fit to rescue feral dogs from Greece and drive them here to be handed over to dog free dog lovers for some hundreds of pounds a pop. I understand that the Greeks think we might be eating them or using them for lipstick (dogs being the proper source for the fat in posh lipstick). How wrong they are).
But to return to emetics, I learn, also from the DT, that Mr Oliver is being paid £1.2m by Mr Sainsbury to promote their wares. So I wonder how many people like myself there are who will make a small extra effort to avoid Mr S for a few weeks? It is not just that I do not like Mr O very much; it also irritates that Mr S finds it necessary to pay a celebrity to endorse their products in this way. If they were any good they would not need endorsement. Well - up to a point. But whether they do or not, I would be much less irritated by endorsement which less obviously poured money into the pocket of a named individual. Silly, but A B C promotions would not get me going at all.
Can report that the Christmas jigsaw has been finished for a couple of days now. Final score was one peice duplicated, one peice missing, and one peice extra. The extra peice might reflect a mistake somewhere but it did not fit the available hole, despite being very close shapewise. Wrong shade. I wonder how mistakes of this sort come to be made? If the jigsaw was stamped out of a picture in one go, with a bit of care, sweeping up the peices into a plastic bag ought to work every time. And it seems unlikely that you would make a 1,000 copies of one peice then move onto a 1,000 copies of the second peice - although with a computer driving the printing and the cutting I suppose it would be possible. Whole process most diverting so I do not suppose I will be bothered to write off to the maker to demand my missing peice.
Odd Filofax dream the other day. The fad for the things being well past its peak, it is not quite as easy to get them as it was - although things are very much better than they were in the dark days of the seventies and eighties. So I have a dream about being desperate for a certain sort of Filofax paper and someone had told me that there was a shop in Green Lanes (in Harringey) that would do me. A shop on the Eastern side of the road maybe half way between what used to be the Earl of Salisbury and what used to be the dog track. So I go into the shop, which turns out to be some sort of Turkish cake shop and bakery, staffed by pastel dressed middle aged ladies - all of whom are rather bewildered by my request. I then see that the back of the shop, screened off from the front is selling all kinds of oddments, so I push my way in there to have a better look. No Filofax so wake up. The only link I can come up with is the pub we went into in Clacton, the right hand wall of which was taken up with what looked like assorted raffle prizes. So this is another one that I am not going to get to the bottom of.
Amused by a peice in one of our free newspapers about the case of an unexplained cluster of fox deaths. It seems that four or five foxes have been found dead in a fairly small area (maybe as small as one garden) and there is much concern about how they might have met their end. There is even talk of tails - I forget whether it was tails without foxes or foxes without tails. Either way there is dark talk of cruelty to animals by the local police and of the RSPCA crash cart being sent in from their Guildford HQ. I stick to the line that foxes are vermin, most of them are fairly mangy and not very pretty, and that all those concerned ought to have something better to do. (And that is not getting into the charectars who see fit to rescue feral dogs from Greece and drive them here to be handed over to dog free dog lovers for some hundreds of pounds a pop. I understand that the Greeks think we might be eating them or using them for lipstick (dogs being the proper source for the fat in posh lipstick). How wrong they are).
# posted by Jim @ 11:45 AM 
