What the hell is 'plusness'?

TSB has an advert on the telly at the moment, advertising a new bank account.  Its says their new Plus Account has 'all that lovely plusness'.  Well, thanks for giving us all the information we need there then.  Did an eight years-old come up with that one?

Trying to go plastic-free

Seeing as my local council is one which recycles only a very small selection of plastic types, I have decided to try to avoid buying the stuff in the first place.  They did tell me that it is burnt in order to produce power, but I'm not entirely happy with that, either.

As I do my food shopping mostly on my local, and excellent, market, I am able to buy all my fruit and vegetables loose, and the meat and fish wrapped in paper and then in a thin plastic bag.  It all goes into my one huge shopping bag, which I've had for about ten years now.

However, when I go to the supermarket, it's not so easy.  All the meat seems to come in plastic trays, sealed with film or shrink-wrapped in thick plastic.  Sometimes, products which come in a cardboard box will have a plastic tray inside, and I really don't see why they have to have one.  If something really needs some sort of reinforcement to protect it, can it not be done with better recyclable materials?  The Japanese art of origami can produce some amazingly strong structures.  Even just corrugated paper or cardboard is strong.  There's several companies out there who make fully recyclable cardboard packaging, so supermarket bosses should start looking at using them.  If more people chose not to buy stuff in plastic, then the supermarkets would have to take action.

So, anyway, I'm trying to reduce plastic packaging waste in my home.  Whatever I do manage to accumulate, I am putting in a bag to take to the recycling point at the supermarket.  Let's see how I get on.

Black. Just black, please.

Why is it so difficult to find a pair of black trainers?  Just black.  No colours, no stripes, no white sole, no flashing lights, no sparkly bits, just plain old black.  What is wrong with just black?  Why do women's trainers always seem to have to have pastel colours involved?  I hate pink, I don't want baby blue, I just want black.  Size 9.  Narrow.

Why are we still wasting food?

Today, on the BBC News Magazine website, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has an excellent article about the scandal of food waste in the UK.  In a time of austerity, when over a million people are relying on foodbanks and taking food out of supermarket waste bins, should we really be throwing away perfectly good food, simply because the computer thinks it doesn't look right?  I've ranted before about food waste, and there's not much point in me going over it all again, because Hugh sums it up very well indeed.

A couple of years ago, the French supermarket, Intermarché started selling 'les fruits et légumes moches' - ugly fruit and veg, 30% cheaper than the 'perfect' food.  It was a great success and people did eschew the better-looking produce in favour of the ugly produce. Why aren't our supermarkets doing this?  Why is so much wasted, not even being used for animal feed for or being composted back into the ground to help to fertilise it?  Why are we spending a fortune importing food when we're throwing away so much in our own country?  It just doesn't make sense to me.

Not all of the food waste occurs at the production end, though.  Households throw away a phenomenal amount of food, because the computer tells them what date to throw it away, instead of using their common sense, or because they bought something on a 'BOGOF' (Buy one, get one free) deal and then don't bother to eat it.  As Hugh points out in his article, people do a weekly or monthly 'big shop', buy far more than they actually need and then end up dumping a lot of it.  It's a waste of money, a waste of food, and is a complete and utter disgrace.  

It's time to start thinking, and stop wasting food.

I am not Sasquatch!

Why is it so hard to get women's shoes in a narrow size 9?  That's a 43 in EU sizes or 11.5 in US sizes.  It's not like it's enormous. I'm nearly six feet tall, which is not at all unusual, so why should it be considered unusual to have feet in proportion to my height?

I hate shopping for shoes; it's such a depressing chore.  I trail from shop to shop and get more and more angry and despondent as the day wears on. I'm fed up of being told that "women's feet only go up to a 7" (yes, I really was informed that in one shop) or finding that the size 9s are so wide that I could almost get both feet in side by side.  When I do eventually find somewhere which stocks 9s, they are usually really ugly and impractical.  Who the hell wants to wear size 9 imitation ballet shoes?  Really?  I bet it was a man who came up with that one.  I've even had it suggested that I try a size smaller.  Are you trying to cripple me?  I don't even bother browsing the shoes now.  I just find an assistant and ask if they have 9s. It saves me a lot of time.

I desperately need a new pair of hiking boots, because the ones I have are at least 15 years old and are falling to pieces. However, in every shop I visit, I am told that the largest size in women's boots is 8' and that I will have to buy a pair of men's boots instead.  Men's boots are far too wide and my feet just slide around in them.   I look on the manufacturers' websites and many of them do make 9s, but don't sell them in the UK, and I'm not prepared to buy expensive boots online without being able to try them on.   I have a similar problem with trainers. My current, completely inappropriate pair, are men's, but if I lace them tight enough to fit properly, the toe section concertinas up and looks ridiculous.  I don't want to look like I'm wearing someone else's cast-offs, I just want off-the-shelf footwear which fits.

The only boots I have which fit absolutely perfectly are my Alt Berg bike boots.  They fit perfectly because I made a 220 mile round-trip to their factory so that they could measure my feet and make the boots just for me.  They are the best pair of boots I have ever had and worth every penny.  I cannot recommend them highly enough.  Alt Berg's customer service is second to none and their products are really high quality.  However, I don't want to have to get custom-made footwear every time I need something - I don't have that sort of money.

So, a plea to footwear manufacturers: please realise that some women do have larger feet, that women who take a size 9 don't necessarily have great wide feet, don't want to wear men's shoes, and that we would like decent shoes which look like shoes and not like river barges.  Thank you.

Stop spoiling my news feeds.

Dear News Channels,

News is news.  Sport is sport.  Sport is not news.  Please stop putting sport in the news RSS feeds, it's really irritating.  If I wanted sport, I would sign up to the sport feed.  I don't want sport, I want news.

Yours ever, etc.
Disgruntled Unsubscriber.

Drive like a moron season

What is it about the autumn/winter period which turns drivers into complete morons?  Over the past few weeks, the standard of driving on our local roads has gone from 'rubbish' to 'dreadful'.  I've seen near-misses, people driving so close to the car in front that they could probably read the dashboard of that car, people jumping chicanes (and not just one car, but five in a row), people ignoring red traffic lights, blocking box junctions, and others driving at 50 in the second lane of the motorway when the first lane is completely empty.

This morning, in the space of only half a mile:

• I stopped for a lollipop man but the idiot behind me couldn't wait and tried to overtake me, before realising that there were several small children in the road, accompanied by a man dressed from head to toe in high vis clothing and carrying a bloody great big sign with the word 'STOP' written on it;
• A driver pulled out of a side road, straight across the path of a cyclist who was wearing a high vis vest and enough lights to furnish a Christmas tree.  Fortunately, the cyclist managed to stop in time and wasn't hurt, not that the driver would have known that, because he hadn't even seen him and just drove off;
• A driver pulled out of a side road by driving up and over the pavement because he couldn't wait the extra three seconds for a car on the main road which was turning right.

Drivers really do need to sort themselves out before someone gets hurt, or killed.

Next time, I'll rub your nose in it.

I am really really angry this morning.

Yesterday, we were out at a Lancashire Day event, and some idiot kept feeding our dog on tuna sandwiches.  As soon as we caught him doing it, we told him not to give the dog any food but, a short while later, caught him doing it again.  I explained that it wasn't good for the dog and that it would make him ill, and he said 'OK, sorry.'  A few minutes later, was the sound of chomping, and there he was, feeding the dog another sandwich.  After telling him again, we ended up walking away, because this guy clearly wasn't listening.

Some time later, we went back to where the entertainment was, and the idiot was nowhere in sight, so we sat down.  Within minutes, we felt a tugging on the dog's lead and, guess what?  Yes, the idiot was back, feeding him on another tuna sandwich.  At this point I got very annoyed and told the lad, yet again, that he should not feed the dog.  "But he likes it!", came the indignant reply.  Of course he bloody likes it!  He's a Labrador - a self-propelled stomach who will eat everything he can get his chops round!  That's why we tell people not to feed him.  We took the dog away again.

This morning, I came downstairs to an extremely unpleasant scene in the living room.  The multiple tuna sandwiches had taken their toll and there was one hell of a mess.  The dog was extremely upset, but it's not really his fault.

Today, I am looking for a dog vest which reads 'Do Not Feed Me', in the hope that it might have some effect, and if I find that lad again, I will rub his bloody nose in it.

My lifestyle choice is not to be ill

My local Tesco now has a whole aisle full of gluten-free, wheat-free and dairy-free products.  I should be rejoicing, but, somehow, cannot bring myself to do so.

Firstly, thank you Tesco - I'm really am pleased and impressed that there's such an amazing range of products there.  There's some fabulous stuff, and it's all really tempting.  However, it's so prohibitively expensive that I can't afford to buy most of it, so I came away with just one  bag of lentil chips, just to see what they were like.  They were lovely, incidentally, but at £1.49 a packet, I'm afraid I won't be buying any more.  I have got used to doing without, because I simply don't have that sort of disposable income for 'unnecessaries'.

The thing which really got my goat, though, was that the aisle and the associated promotion has 'Lifestyle' emblazoned all over it.

Pardon?

Are you implying that my allergy is some sort of lifestyle 'choice'?

It is a lifestyle choice that I 'choose' to eat products which won't make me very ill?  Coeliac Disease, wheat alleriges, lactose intolerance, dairy allergies, etc. are not a lifestyle 'choice' - they are sometimes life-threatening, and I find it extremely patronising to label it as a lifestyle, as though sufferers are faddy children who will grow out of it.

Perhaps this perception of it being a choice rather than a necessity is part of the reason why these products are so expensive.  Yes, I am aware that there are higher costs in producing allergen-free products, but £3 for a gluten-free loaf as opposed to 75p for a normal loaf is just ridiculous, particularly as 1 in 3 gluten-free loaves are utterly unuseable because they fall apart or have massive holes in the middle.  This photograph shows one loaf, exactly as it came out of the bag.  I'd say it was very expensive bird-food, except that when I threw it out, the birds wouldn't eat it.

I've all but given up on ready-made gluten-free products now.  It's far cheaper either to  make my own, or do without.  Usually the latter.

Orange are still rubbish

It's been a few years since I ditched Orange in disgust over their rubbish service and, tonight, I have had my poor opinion of them reinforced.

My friend has purchased an Orange SIM, which came with an inclusive £10 topup.  However, upon attempting to claim this topup, the website tells me that the SIM number is not recognised, and to ring 450 for help.  So, I rang 450, only to be told that you can't contact them without any credit.  So, in order to get the credit, I have to ring a number which you can't actually ring without having any bloody credit!

Orange are still rubbish!

Are you human?

Yes I am, and that is why I find this virtually impossible!

I understand why some websites use 'captcha' devices in order to ensure that it's a real person entering their details, and not some automated process but, seriously, how can anyone be expected to read these?

Oh, and before anyone suggests it, I've tried doing the audio versions and there are equally unintelligible.

Sunday shopping

Sunday shopping hours are an outdated, annoying pain in the posterior.

Surely, in this modern, multicultural and increasingly secular world, there is no need to restrict shop opening times to six hours?

This morning, I checked the Boots website to find their opening times. Seeing that it was listed as 10:30, I planned my morning round the 10 mile round trip to purchase one single item, which I really need to have this morning and which only Boots sell.

I arrived just after 10:30, picked up the item and went to the till, only to be told that the till doesn't open until 11:00.  Apparently they open the doors half an hour early in order to allow people to browse. Pardon? Who the hell spends half an hour browsing in a chemists? Really?

So, I decided to stay here for the half hour's wait and rant instead.

The day after Halloween is...

the day that the cheesy Christmas adverts begin.  HELLO?  It's the beginning of November!  Christmas is 7 weeks away, almost two months.  Stop your unashamed, money-grabbing commercialism and pack it in!  I'm sick of it already, this constant bombardment of sweet, sickly, mushy sentimentalism.

Christmas is great, but please can we have it at the end of December, and not now?  I think that some of the TV adverts are going to make me barf.

Thankyouverymuch.

Just give me the bill!

Why does Vodafone have to make it so damn difficult to download a PDF of the full phone bill?  I don't want the 'quick breakdown' or the 'breakdown by product' or the 'vat summary', I just what the whole bill, with the summary on the front page, followed by the breakdown and then the itemisation.  I know they do it, because I've downloaded them in the past, but every month I have to spend ages on their website faffing around trying to find out where to get it, because it's not in a logical place. 

Even when you do eventually find it (which I haven't yet, this morning) it has a laborious and tortuous way of getting to it.  Why can't there just be a single link on the first page which says 'Open your bill in PDF'?  I can do that on all the other utility sites I have to visit.  Grrrrr.   The interface on the user accounts is awful and it wastes far too much of my time.  I have better things to do than spend 20 minutes looking for something which doesn't always appear to be there.  For now, I give up.  Maybe I will try again tomorrow.

Vodafone, get your act together and simplify your website, please.

Reduced, but I still won't buy it

You know how it is when you're skint.  You go to the shop and head straight for the 'reduced' section to see if there's anything worth having.  You'll know from my previous rants that I usually find that the stuff in the 'reduced' section is the sort of stuff I wouldn't have for free, let alone at a reduced price.  I mean, what kind of person is too incompetent/lazy that they have to buy egg mayonnaise to put in sandwiches?  OK, stop.  Enough of that, I'll just go off on one again.

Anyway, I have discovered yet another major annoyance of the 'reduced' shelf.  Why do the store assistants insist on sticking the new price label right over the 'allergy information' section?  If I can't check that it hasn't got wheat or tomatoes in it, I'm definitely not going to buy it, even if it does look OK to the eye.  Stop it!  Please?

In the extremely unlikely event of any supermarket bosses reading this, please could you train your staff to be allergy aware and realise that some people do actually need to read this information, so don't cover it up.  Thankyouverymuch.

Give me back my analogue TV!

"Digital TV will be so much better than analogue", they said.  
"Don't worry about the pixellation in bad weather", they said, "the signal will be boosted once analogue is switched off."

Oh yeah?  So why is the digital signal still crap?  It's windy and raining outside (i.e. a typical British summer) and the TV picture is completely screwed.  With analogue, you'd get a bit of snow, but could carry on watching.  Now, both the sound and picture keep bugging out and make things almost impossible to watch.  They call it the 'Digital Cliff' and it's bloody annoying.  Our analogue service was switched off at the end of 2009, so when is this supposed signal boost going to take place?

Before anyone says it, no I don't need another aerial or TV.  There's nothing wrong with the ones I have.  It's just the stupid crappy digital service.   I want my analogue back.

Nothing to see here, move along

Nothing to rant about.  Current mood: very happy :)

New tent review

A couple of years ago I bought a new tent, a Khyam Sherpa:

The Sherpa is a reasonable size for a single person, despite being billed as a 3-man tent, but then they always seem to assume that people are happy to squash in like sardines and don't have any luggage.  However, I have to say that it is possibly the worst tent I have ever owned.  Despite my best efforts, and the efforts of several friends, I have never managed to get this tent to go up without some difficulty and, once erect, it has never been 'square'.  It always seemed to bulge out to one side and no amount of adjustment would put it right.  I have broken four poles on it, and the inner tent ripped on the very first use.  I am convinced that the poles are actually too long, as one needs the strength of Geoff Capes to get the blasted things into their respective holes.   Indeed, after a few pole breakages, a friend replaced the broken sections and made them an inch shorter, which did help quite a bit, but I am still very unhappy with the tent.  The doors are a stupid design, a pain to negotiate and if it's been raining, as soon as you open a door, a sheet of water pours into the porch.  It also leaks at the bedroom end.  When unzipping the bedroom door in the morning, condensation drips into the bedroom and all over your dossbag.  I keep the Sherpa in a holdall, because its original bag split the very first time I used it.

Anyway, with a new rally season upon us, I decided that I'd had enough of fighting with the Sherpa, and bought myself a new tent, a Vango Omega 350.  

The Omega's pack size is much smaller and lighter than the Sherpa and I can get the Omega into my topbox, which means that if, necessary, I could carry a pillion to a rally, although I have no plans to make a habit of that.

I used the Omega for the first time this weekend and it was superb.  It was quick and easy to erect and the lightweight alloy poles are so much better than the fibreglass ones.  Despite the smaller pack size, the tent is much bigger, being taller, wider and longer.  The pole sections are shorter than with most tents, which is why the pack size is smaller.  The tent comes with a 'bucket' groundsheet which clips into the porch so that it doesn't slide around.  If there's one thing I don't like about it though, the groundsheet clips are so strong that I couldn't get them undone again.  Three of my friends had a go at it and only one of them could undo them, and he hurt his thumbs doing so.  I intend to put some mini carabiners on instead, so that I have a fighting chance of removing them myself.

The O-shaped bedroom door is a great design.  It can be unzipped from the top or the bottom, which makes me happy; I like to unzip it from the top, but I couldn't do that in the Sherpa, because the zip only worked from the bottom.

Although it rained during the night, the inside of the tent remained as dry as a bone, both bedroom and porch.  There's lots of pockets down either side of the inner tent, big enough to hold my torch and other bits and bobs.  Other great features are the tension bands, which are designed to stop the tent bowing in high winds, the way that the bedroom door fits into a pocket to keep it out of the way when it's open and, best of all, the tent can be packed away with the inner tent still attached, making pitching quicker next time.

When it was time to put the tent down, I anticipated a battle to get it into the bag, yet it went in very easily.  Well, it did the second time I tried, once I removed my lantern from the bedroom.  Oops.

So, all in all, I love the Omega.  I hope to have many happy camping trips in it.  I should have bought a Vango in the first place; they've always had a superb reputation for quality and they are very good value for money. 

Move over!

I don't know if it was the rain that was addling people's brains on the M61 at dinnertime today, but I passed no fewer than 9 cars in close convoy in the second lane, whilst the first lane was empty for miles.  Are they scared of the first lane?  Do they think that if they use it, they will somehow be magically transported to a parallel dimension?

I actually wonder if some of this second-lane-hogging could constitute 'driving without due care and attention', because at least two of them were on mobile phones, one had his finger so far up his nose that he could probably have scratched the back of his own eye, and another was gripping the steering wheel for grim death and staring straight ahead with a grimace that could frighten the devil himself.

Dear road users...

This is a 'Give Way' sign.  What it means is 'Give Way', not 'put your foot down and drive straight at any vehicle coming the other way'. 

This is also a 'Give Way' sign. What it means is 'Give way to oncoming vehicles', just in case you can't tell from the words 'Give way to oncoming vehicles' written under the nice little picture.

Just in case you aren't aware, this is a sign 'giving an order'.  It is not a 'give way if you feel like it, but don't bother if you're in a hurry'; it is a legal requirement: Laws RTA 1988 sect 36 & TSRGD regs 10(1),16(1) & 25.  It's there to stop you crashing into people.

This also applies to drivers travelling through Chew Moor and Lostock, where driving standards seem to be particularly poor.  If your side of the road has parked cars on it and there isn't enough room for two cars to pass each other safely, don't just drive at the oncoming vehicles, giving their drivers dirty looks for having the audacity to have the right of way.  Wait ten seconds for the road to clear, and then go.

Where there's a 20mph speed limit, it's there for a reason, rather than to annoy you personally.  Obey it and stop tutting at those who do obey the law.  More so, don't overtake them in anger and then nearly run into an oncoming bus, like the idiot I saw last week.