barely daring to breathe or Achoo

It will be so sad if the Standar Tandoori really does get evicted by St. John's College. I am super-patronising them with obsessive purchasing of their Palak Paneer.

Ahime.

toke-a-cola?

Sometimes in life, the only way to be nice to a person, is to be completely indifferent to them. Still, do we use this too often as a justification to be indifferent to those we're sure we don't care about? What, it there is such a thing, requires us to be kind to other people, in and of itself?

cashback?

Last night, in my weariness I forgot to mention - there was an altercation last night in the Coop. I was in the self check out line. Two of the machines, call them 1 and 3 were closed and I was going to be next on 2 when the man had taken his change, receipt and groceries with him out of the store. So...just as I was about to pay the 84p for my bottle of Volvic, this swarthy man comes in off Walton Street looking like he has seen a ghost. He approaches a member of the late night skeleton crew and starts yelling at the poor woman about the noise emanating from the self service check out. You can hardly blame anyone in this situation: the swarthy man who evidently lives above the Coop's self check out section (that would be too much!) clearly is bothered at night by the computer voice of the self service check out yelling at everyone (three at once) telling them to "remove the last item from the bag, and place it on the scanner". At the same time, the Nigerian check out lady can't care much for Robot Rhonda as she takes away jobs yet creates a LOT of extra work for all the humans who work in the store. For an example of this, just think of any time I have tried to buy a croissant from the self check out till on a visa debit card and it's required the assistance of the check out human across the room punching something in, and the awkward guy who works in the back opening up the machine with his keys.

Still what struck me about the situation last night was then, not the absurdity of the self check out and the noise it made, because I could see everyone agreeing that it was unpleasant. What really shocked me was the violent nature in the swarthy man towards the check out lady when he told her the machine should be turned off at 10 pm. We don't see violence much in the world today, certainly not in grocery stores where the heartiest decent meal you could buy is a Linda McCartney line Chili Non Carne.

I'm not going to go the Coop anymore really. I was with Rebecca recently in the big Sainsburys' and was reminded of how they have a much better food section and certainly more healthy.

morning hymn

Did you know that only Alpen(tm?) Muesli has three royal warrants? That's fine and it is nice to know that one can eat on the same standards as the Queen or the Prince of Wales even at 9:30 in the morning but one thing kind of took me aback. The third royal warrant says: "BY APPOINTMENT TO HER MAJESTY H. M. QUEEN ELIZABETH, THE QUEEN MOTHER: MANUFACTURERS OF BREAKFAST CEREALS, WEETABIX LIMITED, BURTON LATIMER." (no tm). Well what's kind of creepy is that this could be read as Alpen advocating their product as sustenance suitable for corpses. With all due respect to WEETABIX LIMITED, BURTON LATIMER, but shouldn't you take the royal warrant off the product one the royal is dead? If you don't, the customer is likely to think they're food is pretty old - whether it means they've had the cereal in their kitchen since before she died, OR that it means it was a lot older than you'd like to have thought, when you bought it. The cereal is not even particularly good, so they are in danger of giving the impression that they're not marketing they're product to whomever will like it, but instead to whomever will eat. As you can imagine this leaves gaping open the possibility of diluting the royal warrant and it's significance. If you will bear with me, maybe you can understand what I mean. If royal warrants can be given by dead people, what's to stop them from being given by non-royals or indeed people who don't exist at all? As a case in point let us imagine there is in America a gourmet soup company. The director of marketing sees underperformance by a luxury mixed vegetable soup of theirs, which he believes is capable of being a lot more powerful in the soup sector and on the shelves, if only people would buy it. It may happen that one day companies such as this one would give in and label the product with a "Terry Schiavo Official Warrant" to make the product more appealing. This just deludes the customer thinking they are getting a celebrity quality product, when they are really getting the actual celebrity, blended and in a can. The problem with fame, celebrity and indeed breakfast cereal is that their only common and potentially humanising attributes let us slip so easily into a place where we prefer to exploit people the only time and place we're in a position to help them. No?

hot ice and wondrous strange snow*

Did you know that the Coop now has frozen spinach for £1.25? It is by no means on par with the frozen spinach available in France or Italy or Switzerland, but it is good. I think it comes from Spain actually. In a sense, I have been torn on what to buy when it comes to spinach these days. As I see it, there are both advantages and disadvantages to frozen over fresh spinach. For example, fresh spinach is more expensive. £1.25 at the Coop and £1.15 at Sainsbury's will buy you 500g of spinach from either Spain or Italy, whereas £1.25 at the Coop, and £1.29 at Sainsbury's will get you nearer to an entire kilogram of the frozen plant. I was never very good at math, but it is clearly the case that frozen spinach is, financially speaking, the advisable option. On the same side of the scale as this is the fact that spinach can often be a hassle to clean. Fresh spinach, and from Spain especially, needs to be thoroughly washed because it is often very dirty. Because spinach grows in sandy soil, it is the migrant workers in whatever country (except Switzerland of course) who shoulder the burden of how clean it will be at the time of packaging. In this light, the question is: what is the advantage of fresh spinach? To its credit, fresh spinach tastes better and you can make it in a salad. Of course with this comes the fact that it will not keep for the entire length of a term like it will frozen and you will need to remind yourself that it is waiting to be prepared. Faintly we hear an echo of Petrarch's words: "cosa bella mortal passa, e non dura", and cannot without a heavy heart buy frozen spinach in our concesson to the transience of earthly life. It seems too much time is spent on buying green plants in Oxford.

What I really wanted to show here is that I think we waste a lot really enjoying life in a possible and indeed feasible way, because of the obstacles of time and money. You can melt St Augur over anything and it will taste decent and peperoncino is also good, but how much more aren't we really saving when we don't go for the microwaved life? Next: Volvic and Tap Water go head to head. It just kind of sucks when transience makes it into your grocery bag.