Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Bargains galore
When visiting the butcher yesterday on a cutlet mission, it happened that he had just finished boning a pork loin joint - that is to say a length of pork chops which had not been chopped. Not something that I would ever do, as I think they roast rather well entire. That being as it may be, there was the bone, with quite a lot of meat left between the ribs. Thinking that pork makes good soup, it was mine for a pound. Boiled to the point where the bone had disintegrated into vertebrae, ribs and small round bits of gristle. Maybe the discs that slip in backs. Strained the stock and recovered the well boiled meat, maybe a quarter of a pound of it, from the detritus. Then used the stock to make red lentil soup in the usual way, adding the well boiled meat towards the end. All very nourishing, but I am not altogether sure that using proper stock in this way actually improved the flavour of the soup. Have to try again to be sure, one way or another.
After lunch, off to the library to investigate taxonomy to find that they are unloading another batch of their books, some of them more or less new. I got a nice Everyman edition of Rousseau's confessions and a biography of Dickens' first half by Hibbert. 70p for the two of them. Got my money's worth out of the Dickens already, someone whom I knew virtually nothing about. So I now know that his father did a spell in a debtors' prison. That and the convicts tramping about in the Chatham of his early boyhood gave him a life interest in prisons which he toured in the same way that I tour churches. Plus, of course, the convict in Great Expectations and the prison in Little Dorrit. Indeed, it is claimed that prisons or prisoners get into most of his books. All this for an author with whom I do not get on very well!
Then last week, the railway ticket buying adventure. Go to national rail web site and find that I can travel from Epsom, via two stations in Dorking and Reading, to Exeter for £30 or so. Bargain I think. Sure I have paid a lot more than that in the past. Maybe more than double. Rush off to Epsom station to buy a ticket. This turns out to be very complicated. The lady behind the window takes a long time persuading her machine that the thing can be done. But it can. I get three ticket shaped things and two bits of computer printout for my money. One of the ticket shaped things says that the tickets are only valid with a reservation and one of the bits of computer printout says that I do not have a reservation. Just to be sure, and being retired and having the time, I go back to the station to check that all is OK. Differant person behind the glass. He peers at the the materiel for some time and then announces that all is OK and why am I bothering him. The tickets are the reservations. I look forward to a heated discussion with a ticket collector.
In the meantime, I am on a train to London yesterday and hear an advertisement (hear I think. Perhaps the irritating talking on-train computer has started doing advertisements as well as announcements?) about how on some Saturday soon I can go anywhere for a tenner. Maybe I didn't get such a bargain. Go back to web site, and ask about Paddington to Exeter St Davids to find that I could go first class on a Saturday in August. With a two hour journey. For under £30. Whereas I am paying more than that to go cattle class with a near four hour journey. Although to be fair, to the two hour journey I do have to add the Epsom to Paddington leg, say an hour. And also to be fair, I can pay getting on for £100 for an open single. Presumably the sort of money I would pay if I simply turned up at the station and bought a ticket to go.
Which all goes to show that fare structures have got far too complicated. Bring back the days when there was just one fare and you did not have to go riffling through great heaps of options in order to be sure that you were not being done. When you trusted British Rail to do the decent thing, whatever faults they may have had in other respects. Something one can clearly not do with their successors.
# posted by Jim @ 11:17 AM 
