Posted in anniversaries, art, body, cars, children, commerce, cultural, cycles, denmark, design, development, diary, environment, establishment, experience, family, finland, food, language, location, media, nature, occupation, organisations, patriarchy, pedestrian, person, provision, public, sculpture, society, time, tourism, trains, transport on September 5th, 2010 No Comments »
We’ve both just returned from Copenhagen: a conference trip for me, a birthday holiday for K. Denmark is an oddity: much as Finland looks Scandinavian when you squint, Denmark looks a little Germanic when you don’t.
The capital city is wonderful in a lot of ways: it has London’s green lungs, and a brilliant public transport [...]
Posted in body, cliques, commerce, consumers, enmity, food, france, intuition, location, opinion, person, rants, society, tourism, understanding on August 1st, 2010 No Comments »
In the most recent LRB, Stephen Shapin reviews Michael Steinberger’s book about the fall of French cuisine. While Steinberger’s frankly bizarre neoliberal, uncontrollable-market afterwords can probably be discarded, the basic premise—that French cuisine is ossified and tedious—is one with which I can definitely concur.
I’ve suggested before that vegetarian food is a national cuisine’s “canary in [...]
Posted in art, climate, cliques, commerce, consumption, environment, local_independents, location, manufacture, music, near, recycling, retailers, society on April 19th, 2010 No Comments »
I very gladly took part in Record Store Day this year. Witney might not have much, but it does have one of the very few independent record shops in Oxfordshire, and a real gem at that: Rapture Entertainment. The previous time we lived out here I popped in almost every Saturday: it was a fantastic [...]
Posted in body, commerce, consumers, discomfort, drink, opinion, organisations, person, politics, rants, society on April 1st, 2010 2 Comments »
Teabags with tags are a pain in the arse. I mean, the idea seems sound—a heat-resistant paper handle to lift out a nearly boiling teabag—and probably did have a function before the invention of the spoon. These days, though, a tag is largely redundant unless you’re the sort of person who finds their experience of [...]
Posted in body, commerce, correspondence, crime, environment, far_away, food, journalism, location, media, nature, opinion, person, society on March 8th, 2010 No Comments »
Over two years ago, I called out Dorset Cereals on their use of palm oil. Moving house and other nonsense intervened, and it was only recently I was able to start chasing them again. Their packaging still had palm oil listed among the ingredients, so in the aftermath of a Panorama programme about palm oil [...]
Posted in commerce, consumers, consumption, cotswolds, environment, location, meta, past, reuse, society, time on January 31st, 2010 No Comments »
Two months ago, I said:
Witney’s branch of Cargo closed recently. Fair enough, I thought, but it did so only to reopen in a far bigger store space (where New Look used to be). I give it six months….
Now? FALCO: Witney Cargo. We walked past its whitewashed windows earlier today. Apparently it’s going to turn into [...]
Hi,
Sorry I haven’t been in touch. Let’s recapitulate on events so far. My wife K. took out home-contents insurance with UIA Insurance a couple of years ago, in the names “K. —” and “J. —”. When it came to cancel the insurance, you refused to let my wife do so, saying there was a contract [...]
Witney’s branch of Cargo closed recently. Fair enough, I thought, but it did so only to reopen in a far bigger store space (where New Look used to be). I give it six months.
Cargo’s an odd store. It’s like something between an expensive Ikea for people unnerved by how the Swedish can implement elements of [...]
I’ve been trying with little success to buy a birthday card in Witney for my Granddad. The town has three card shops of note, not including gifty-wifty craft shops which sell cards with hand-affixed twine and sticks for the cost of a takeaway. You’d expect three shops to provide between them at least one card [...]
Posted in anger, body, class_warfare, cliques, commerce, dickheads, emotions, employees, industry, loyalty, morality, opinion, organisations, person, politics, rants, services, sleep, society on October 22nd, 2009 2 Comments »
One of the tasks you have to attend to (desultorily) when you move house is changing one’s address with banks, utility companies and now the DVLA. Last night I had just finished addressing envelopes for both licence and car registration, when I heard on the radio that the postal workers’ strike would begin tomorrow viz [...]
