Idiot Wind

Wow.

I have a periodic habit of going to mysupermarket.com and putting in the contents of our veg box or the meat we buy in bulk and being pleasantly surprised that the meat works out about half the price of buying each joint individually and that the veg box works out invariably cheaper than buying organic produce from any supermarket, roughly comparable to the non-organic produce in Waitrose or Sainsbury's and only a pound or so more expensive (depending on what we get - tomatoes and courgettes compare more favourably than cabbage or turnips) than non-organic produce at Tesco or Asda; and frankly, even at the worst estimate, £50 a year is not much to pay (especially when you're saving well over £100 a year on meat) for the convenience of having it delivered to you and the fact that it actually tastes of something and hence probably has some nutritional value too (crazy hippy ideas about it being rather counter-intuitive to render the planet unusable while trying to eke a living from it notwithstanding).

But today is the first time I have gone and put in the contents of this week's veg box and had it come out unequivocally cheaper than Tesco non-organic stuff. It's the exact opposite of how I felt when I went into M&S the other week and bought bread for the first time in about a year. ('How much? I could buy 3kg of flour for that!')

Could it be that the cracks are beginning to show in a food system that is overly dependent on cheap, abundant oil? Might we be slowly starting to see that, really, growing things properly and not covering them in plastic and trucking them halfway around the country is, really, a far more sensible way to feed ourselves?

Or is it just that the veg box are worried that if they put their prices up in the current economic climate they'll lose customers, so they're swallowing the price increases (i.e. actually swallowing it, not just hiding it by charging more for DVDs) and narrowing their margins and eventually going to go out of business?



I refer you to the inimitable Homer Simpson at the end of Homer the Vigilante when several townspeople are stuck in a rather deep hole they've dug:

"I know, we'll dig our way out!"

A brief respite from being a sociopath

Oof, well, I have been very busy lately! This must be what it's like being a normal person instead of a sociopath!

Nik's friends decided they wanted to go punting, so accordingly we got one of those uber-cheap-group-deals on the train, went to Oxford, dispersed in the covered market to visit the particular purveyor of fine sandwiches that we each remembered with nostalgic fondness and a small collection of tame LMH alumni talked the lodge into entrusting us with the punts for an afternoon and we set off. Unfortunately we had a rather uneven distribution of people who could punt between the two boats. This resulted in the actual work of conveying us along the river falling squarely on the shoulders of my boat and we lashed the two boats together in convoy (which also made sharing of Pimm's and strawberries from the PYO easier) and made a more-or-less straight course north. After having gone quite a long way north, it started tipping it down. Guess who was the muggins who punted as fast as they could all the way back? Yep, that's right, the one with RSI in their wrists. ;-)

But I only hit two trees.

I then went to visit Holly and James. I love their flat, because it's so grown-up. They have decanters of what looks like port and sherry and apologised for the 'chaos' although it was significantly less chaotic than what passes for tidy chez moi. Living like a student is a state of mind. I had a restoring cup of tea and tried not to deposit too much punting grime on their sofa. We talked about linguistics and I had that funny feeling of missing it all and feeling like my life is rather unstimulating intellectually, but not enough to actually want to go and study anything more.

I then met up with Nik and his friends and made them all sit around and watch me eat. We went to a restaurant, dubiously named 'Gourmet Burger Kitchen' but actually quite acceptable (good chips, though 'gourmet' would be a bit of a stretch - it's rather depressing that something can be called 'gourmet' when it's really just 'decent', and that 'decent' is something worth shouting about rather than taken as read when you're paying over the odds for eating in a restaurant anyway... must not moan about our unhealthy national food culture...), and then dragged my rather full and weary and damp self back to the station and knitted on the train and fielded all sorts of peculiar questions about our crazy hippy lifestyle. ;-) Nice, interested questions though. Not, 'ugh, you freak!' questions.

Sunday was a bit distressing. I had to find a dress to wear to Wellers's wedding next weekend, because I am a singer and a misery-guts and hence virtually all my formal-wear is black and I didn't feel this would be appropriate somehow. To cut a long story short, my body shape (that's a euphimism) doesn't match up with what people who design clothes think it should be, and while I appear to have attained some kind of feminine nirvana and didn't stand in front of all the mirrors in my underwear hating myself and feeling inadequtae, externalising my rage and directing it at the (no doubt male-dominated) world of high-street fashion doesn't help me, on a purely practical level (at least while my sewing skills are rather basic), actually find clothes that fit. (Clothes that fit my breasts, I mean.) I appear to have a choice of looking like a slag in too-tight clothes that, however, fit around the arms and waist, or looking pregnant and wearing a tent. Hmph. And after trying on virtually every dress in Reading and finally finding one that flattered because of rather than despite my shape, I was exhausted and lonely and the man at the station wouldn't let me on the rail replacement bus and I burst into tears. Oops.

So far this week, I've let some guy interview me about my accent for his book (and stupidly forgot to tell him about the talking-into-the-tubes incident in first year), had a horrific bout of insomnia and been to see The Marriage of Figaro on a big screen in Trafalgar Square. Those big multinational oil companies do have their uses, y'know... It was fab. Livvy brought food and I brought my gripes about the world and some chocolate beetroot cake which doesn't really taste of beetroot and we sat around having a wine-cheese-and-opera-fest and it was soooo warm I only put my cardigan on when I got on the train home. And Sarah got promoted and is getting a BlackBerry (pl BlackBerrys, how counter-intuitive) and was power-dressing slightly. I'm now entertaining diverse and unrealistic visions of (alternately) being an opera singer, making cheese and moving to France.

And tomorrow I'm going to York and Wellers is getting married on Saturday and I get to see all my AV friends and it's all terribly exciting. =) And I still have to find a white bag that doesn't look really cheap. Arse.

But meanwhile, I have to contain my bafflement and frustration at, variously, people whose job is ultimately to produce good, readable, accurate English who cannot punctuate direct speech or tell the difference between 'its' and 'it's' or 'their' and 'there', and whoever could translate, 'C'est un coup qui etait ou* avant?' as, 'It's a coup that was or before?'



* with an accent on the 'u', can't do accents on the internet

Counteracting

I've now gone and bought a water butt.

That will either balance out the effect of buying garden furniture, or the vengeful weather pixies will be so unable to decide whether to punish us with drought or flood that it will cause a rift in the cosmos and the universe will become unstable and implode...

Oops

Well, we had a deafening thunderstorm that caused Nik's entire office building to shake and car alarms all over Wokingham to go off and it's set to pee it down all week according to the BBC.

I apologise profusely for buying garden furniture.