Cooked a couple of meals over my days off that turned out ok. High spot was probably the M&S £10 Meal Deal offer. A main course, side dish, dessert and a bottle of wine for a tenner. If you price it up you are effectively getting the wine free, so saving about £7. They have a new line in the 'Cook' range of Cod with a crumb topping and a sundried tomato sauce, which was very good. The duck breasts with plum sauce has lovely breasts [ouch!] but the sayce is waaaaaay to sweet and spoind the duck if spread over it. I served it with three times cooked chips and some green stuff [for visual effect]. M&S are doing a range of desserts that are shaped like a half base-ball [ie half a globe] with a sort of twirl effect radiating out from the top. There are three varieties, a white one, a red one and a pale choclate colored one and they retail at £4. There are two servings in each box, only one of which is visinle through the perspex 'window' of the box. I've bought them twice and on both occasions the soft sugar covering of the unseen pudding has been broken and in a mess when I opened the box; not something you want at £4 a tick. I checked all the boxes in the store the following day and they were all like it, so warning - don't buy 'em for your special Christmas meal unless you intend to serve it in a bucket. Quick shop story. A few months ago I was sorry to hear that George, one of our customers had been diagnosed with cancer and been given 'a year to live. I don't know him well - he's a footie supporter and chats with some of the other staff about the game - but still I was sad when Brenda [another customer] came up to me and said, "George died over the Weekend". I comiserated and said I would let my workmates who knew him better know. This I did over the next few days as I saw them. "Wow!", said Bruan, the young lad whp probably knew him best, "I knew he was sick but that was fast!" It therefor came as something of a shock when filling the milk shelves by the front door, I looked up to see George walking through it to but his paper as normal. Mouth open I stared at him [from a distance] and later, I pulled Brenda up when she too, came in. "Brenda - george is still alive - He was in this morning! Well to cut a story short, of course it had been a different customer who I'd no idea was called George who had died, and luckily I was able to put my workmates right before any damage was done, but it was close - one had bought a condolence card but just hadn't got round to sending it!

Today while stacking the shelves with the chilled items from the days delivery I was given cause to muse upon the marketing strategies employed by the various producers of the provender we eat. The particular item that caused me to step back for a moment was a brand of sausages [currently on special offer, £2 for 6] that go under the name of 'Porky Whites'. Now four or five years ago a brand appeared on the supermarket shelves under the name 'The Black Farmer's Sausage', the packaging of which showed a sillhouetted figure [wearing a stetson if I recall correctly] standing against an orange-red sunset. The inuendo of the branding would have been obvious to all but the most nieve of individuals and no doubt caused some smiles [and indeed sales] as people encountered the make for the first time. Now I may be absolutely on the wrong track here, but I can't help but think that the subsequent later appearence of the 'Porky Whites' variety is not a coincidental to the earlier brand. 'Porky whites' sausages also feature a photograph on their packaging, but this time we see a 1930's style olde worlde picture, conjouring an image of a time when all was right with the world [as if!] and all butchers were known by the sobriquet 'Porky'. Again I may be on the wrong end of the bat here, but I can't help feeling that if the house-wives choice between the two would be 'The Black Farmers' [and why not, they're bigger] then Nigel Farrage's would be 'Porky Whites'. This all could be just wild speculation on my part; there might be no connection between the two brandings whatsoever and indeed the inuendo of the first example to appear may be all just my [questionable] imagination working in overdrive. What do you think?

Last night I did one of the things I like best; I went down to M&S and bought some stuff, took it home and did a three course meal for E. [my wife] and me to sit down at like we have our own restaurant at home. Seriously. We have really good quality plates and cutlery, crystal glasses and the full works in order to re-create the 'feel' of eating out - but instead you're at home. This a) saves you a shed load of money and b) means you can get as pissed as a stick without i) making a tit of yourself at a posh reataurant and ii) having to spring for a taxi home [unless you're the kind who screw's convention and just drives home anyway in which case ignore ii; hey - I'm not in the judgement game]. I bought M&S 'Gravad-Lax' which is drop dead gorgeous and has a dill-sauce sachet included that avoids that bitter after-taste you get with some brands. The downside is there is only enough actual salmon for about one decent mouthfull per person and for this you have to bung £6 - so it's actually gram for gram probably dearer than beluga caviar but there you have it, who said being a gourmand was cheap! [Quick diversion; who can tell me the difference between a gourmand, a gourmet and a gastronome because there is one. I'll leave this one hanging as a hook to draw you back in here again, and reveal all at some later point when I have actually remembered [or re-checked] what the answer is.] Anyway next we had a roast pheasant [nearly typed roast peasant there - I'll save that one for closer to Christmas] with stuffing, roast pots and a little trio of veg. M&S do this small bag of trimmed carrots, broccoli and mangé-tout that you just bung into a microwave bag and all and two minutes later you've got all your veg done. It's reaaly nice veg, crisp and well flavoured and it comes in at 80 pence a bag which is enough for two. [Quick lesson; for those who do those 'great big fuck-off roasts' you must be mad. A roast should be small enough to fit in as part of a three course meal and so simple to get onto the plate you could do it while simultaneously watching 'Debbie does Dallas' if you wanted to. Screw all of that standing around over boiling pans!] Anyway, the whole pheasant we bought from Marks was good flavoured, but I think it would have benefitted from a bit more 'hanging' - like for about a year! It was so tough I had to ask E. to pre-chew mine [not really] and that was the best bits. The tougher parts [legs and thighs] are currenly forming the major part of a PhD thesis on 'natures toughest matereals' which I will bring to you in due course. Actually I gave a piece to one of our cats who this morning is still chewing away like he's John Travolta in 'Grease' - I'll probably have to pay to have it surgically removed at some point in the near future! But aside from that the meal was actually ok. Dessert was a Bon Mamma rum-baba, as near to the real french thing as you are ever going to get [served with a Sainsbury's own brand pudding wine which was actually ok ay £4 a half bottle - much better [and more of it] than the M&S sweet muscat at £3 for which you only get 2 glasses. Cheese would have been an M&S 'Cornish Cruncher' which is out in front the best cheddar you can get anywhere, including the 'speciality' high end brands, but alas I was stuffed to the gills by this point and it was all I could do to retire to the front room and finnish of the three bottles of wine we had opened. Why do I do it? [Wine info; 'The Ridge' Sauvingnon Blanc 2012, 6/10 Tesco's; A Rioja of no note and an Argentinian Malbec that was drier than the Rioja. Don't worry - when I find something worth directing you to, you will get all the details.]

a new beginning.

For whatever reason, my blog site seems to be messing around with me today and not letting me 'compose in the normal manner. Ok - I can deal with it; I'm a big boy now. Anyhows - I've decided to change the way this blog is going to work. From now on, rather than being about the crap I think, it's going to be about the crap I experience. So let me tell you a bit about myself and the sort of stuff I do. I work in a seven-eleven store as a 'supervisor' of sorts. I've done some other stuff in my life [but thats no matter and It's really just my way of letting you know 'I'm Better than thet - honestly!' - but of course I'm really not]. My chief loves in my life [after me that is] are my wife and family, the occasional bouts of travel I get up to and the more regular meals that I either cook at home [I specialise in getting stuff from the supermarkets etc and making it better] or out in restaurants. From now on I'm going to tell you about this stuff. Not probably daily, but hopefully often enough to make things fun and interesting for you to want to keep up with. There'll be lots of spelling errors and gramatical bollocks, and shed loads of swearing and politically incorrect stupp. That's just the way I am. So please, drop in every once in a while and say hello. Hell - it might be fun ;)

So Mrs Thatcher is dead. One of the things she is being credited with acheiving is 'breaking the Unions' (ie divesting them of the power they had held to influence how working people were paid and the conditions of their work).  This may indeed be true - but is this the good thing it is presented as being. Most of us seem to forget that without the Unions we would for the most part still be labouring in squalid conditions for a pitance and at the complete mercy of employers who could use or discard us as their wont dictated. The rights, such as they are, that we now enjoy were not freely given; they were fought tooth and nail for by the very Unions whose demise we celebrate. There is a greater division now between rich and poor than there has been for the last thirty years and, we are told, it is getting greater by the day. I do not believe that this can be conceived as being good for a country. It seems to me that a state where the wealth of a nation is held by fewer and fewer individuals rather than being enjoyed by the people as a whole cannot be a healthy one. Surely under such conditions discontent and agitation can be the only end result. Yes the Unions did things wrong. Yes they got out of hand. But they also did things right, they also had their place in the improvement of the common mans lot and lets remember that had their power not been so badly damaged by their confrontation with Mrs Thatcher, it is possible that the increasing gap between rich and poor, haves and have nots, that we spoke of above might not be increasing quite so fast.

Another of her acheivements I have heard touted in the last day or two is that she made us all realise that any of us could make it; it didn't matter who we were we all had a chance of getting to the top. Lets look at that. There are something over one hundred ministers of state in the UK, be they of the Government or of the Opposition. Of this group currently fourteen were educated in state schools, the rest in the public school system. The higher up the pecking order of these fee paying schools you go, the more you will see their ex-pupils represented. In a recent survey of the top 2000 influential people in the UK, 80% were found to have been to public schools and the top universities. Radio 4 aired a biographical program on the current health minister Jeremy Hunt where another MP who had been a chum of his at Chaterhouse, a prestigious UK public school remenisced "as we left on the final day the last thing Jeremy said to me was 'See you at Westminster'."  The moral of these stories if there is one, is, if you are educated in the comprehensive (state) school education system in the UK then you might make it to the top, you might........but the chances are against it.

Last week the Sun (I think - one of the crap redtops at least) ran a side headline on the front page 'Adele [a singer of medium talent] earns £41,000 a day. Below this was a follow up line 'Here's how she would look holding the money!' together with a picture of the singers head grafted on to a body holding a double armfull of bundles of banknotes. What I ask. was the purpose of this crude story. Were we supposed to feel jealous that in these days when we at the bottom end of the labour market earn less than half in a year what this girl earns a day, someone could be doing so well. Were we supposed to applaud her in her good fortune and say she deserved every penny. Were we supposed to take to the streets and put every rich money grabbing bastard up against the wall. What, I ask again was the point of this story. The incident was not of course isolated. Last year we learned of Tara Ecclestone (the playgirl daughter of a motor racing magnate) spending £1 million on a marble bath with gold taps ("Well - I spend alot of time in the bath was her rather plaintiff excuse for this ludicrous extravigence) but again I failed to see what we were supossed to make of the matter. Do the papers really want to see the downtrodden masses rise up and take vengence ala russian revolution style on these bloated plutocrats - is that what it's all about. They spoon feed the masses crap about the lives of the celebrities thereby generating the opium of publicity that fuels these ridiculous fools - and then publish these stories with a sort of slimy "Look at what they've got that you haven't" feel to them. Get real Papers - stop playing silly games. Get real people - stop supporting papers that provide no more than brain numbing pap at the expense of the news you need to know.

I've just made a sandwich for my lunch at work. Nothing to get exited about there you say, but wait on! I threw the first three pieces of bread I took from the bag away - they were so flimsy as a result of all of the fibre and nutritional goodness being washed out of them, so full of air pockets and holes, that they fell apart in my hand on the way from the wrapper to the work-surface. Luckily I managed to get the next two onto a flat surface before they disintigrated and then glue them into slome semblance of stable rigidity with a thick layer of butter. The cheese my wife had bought (from Poundland so I shouldn't complain too much), on cutting felt decidedly rubbery for what was desribed as extea mature cheddar. I tasted a bit and wished I hadn't. A more tasteless elastic mass I have never before put into my mouth exept as a child when I used to eat my pencil-top erasers in class out of boredom with the lessons (another subject I must adress at some point!). No, I tell a lie - the erasers tasted better. This 'thing' was so far removed from anything recognisable as cheese that it could have stolen first prize in an 'animal, vegetable, mineral' competition any day of the week. I progressed to the tomato - not a good colour, not a nice red that would fire the loins of any self-respecting bull eyeing the jacket of a tourist in a west-country feild, but a wishy orange streaked yellow red, a neither here nor there red, a not really red at all red. I sliced of a ...slice. No seeds and juice - just that mushy bit that normally sits in the central section. Slice again - more mush. Slice mush. Slice mush. I breathed a bit through my nose and turned the remnant through 90 degrees. Slice mush. Eye twitch. Slice seeds! Slice seeds! At last I had hit pay-dirt and I wasn't giving up now untill the mine ran dry. Four slices in - just enough to barely cover the cheese lying like a pvc cover on my air pocket peppered bread (a culinary version of the memory foam matress) - the mine ran dry. Still it was enough. More out of a sense of cynical prescience than out of any genuine expectation I popped the last piece of tomato into my mouth. Yep - tasteless as shit. A mushy-pap pulpy mess of tastless pith and skin. Not the remotest resmblance to what a real tomato tastes like; not even in the same universe as the tomato's of my youth, those dark red sweet and juicy globes that were heaven to eat all alone with a squirt of salad cream or a shot of salt and viniger.

Somehow I had to inject some flavor into this thing that was to serve as my main sustenence in the eight hours ahead. To date the entire list of the ingedients of my sandwhich had been without exeption as devoid of anything even approaching flavor as the packaging they were wrapped in. The sweet lamb of flavor had been mercilessly hung on the foul gibbet of shelf-life, drawn on the bloody alter of processing, quatered on the smug decking of healthy eating. Anything remotely nutrtious or flavorsome had been ruthlessly extracted, mercilessly driven out, spirited away on the chariot of modern 'food science'. "The bastards! The complete bastards!", I said to myself. Little wonder that more children proportionately are being admitted to hospital with malnutrition now than were done so fifty years ago. The processing of food and the modification (genetic or otherwise) carried out to increase shelf life and thus profitability have slaughtered the nutritional value of our food. And the food industry is proud, I say proud of this! Adverts like 'Why sell them meat when you can sell them water' abound in the meat trade journals. Bakers joke that the current aim is to make as much water stand up on it's own as possible. Nutritional value is washed out of grain and used to feed pigs and we are fed the remaining husk ground up for bread and cereals. Long-life fruit is sold on the supermarket shelves as if to our advantage. 'Ripen at home peaches' that simply never ripen at all but wither dirctly from the hard unripened state they are sold in. Meat with no fat, cereal with no salt, food with no taste.

I looked disconsolately into the cuboard. Taste, taste, how to get it. Ahh - there we have it. Mustard and pickle. A good teaspoon of each and things were looking better. Against all the rules of hygene I licked the spoon clean and the resulting blast of umami made my eyes roll back in my head. There - thats what I want. I don't want to live for ever. I don't want to look like a twenty year old at eighty. I don't even mind paying a bit more for my food. Just please, please, please stop fucking around with my grub. I want to tast my food!

When I am sixteen I can join the army and be shot at for a living. I can decide I am homosexual (or indeed heterosexual) and persue a relationship to the limits of it's ...er....limits. I can have a baby, get married, leave school, get a full time job, pay taxes and go to jail. But I can't buy a cigarette, I can't buy a drink and I can't cast a vote. Who makes up these rules?

Now I am fifty I can drink, smoke (and vote) myself to death. I can buy 2 kg of chocolate a day and eat untill I'm fifty f*****g stone - but I can't buy a breakfast cereal with enough salt in it so I can actually taste the mushy-pap crap. Who I ask again, makes up these stupid f*****g rules!

"Formerly when religion was strong and science was weak, men mistook magic for medicine. Now when science is strong and religion weak men mistake medicine for magic."

So goes the quote from Thomas Szasz in his 1973 work 'Science and Scientism'. That we still place an almost unreserved trust in the medical proffession and it's ability to heal our ills goes without saying but the following two anecdotes should serve to illustrate it's limitations and bring what can and can't be expected of it back into perspective. Some ten years ago my father in law started having pains in his abdomen. he went to the doctor who diagnosed irritable bowel syndrome and prescribed a peppermint based preparation that had no effect whatsoever. For 18 or so months Ted returned intermittently to the GP with the same complaint which, while he could live with, was making his life uncomfortable. After this period had elapsed the GP referred Ted, in his 70's, to a consultant. The wait for the consultants appointment was some 6 months, by which time the trouble was getting more problematic and he was clearly loosing weight. The consultant recognised that something was amis and within two weeks Ted was attending his local hospital for scans etc to determine the nature of the problem, Sure enough the expected diagnosis of cancer of the large intestine was made and a short while later we took Ted in to have a colostomy opperation.

As we waited in the waiting room for Ted to be admitted we were given some information to read about his forthcoming opperation. Sucess (if it can be called such) was, we were informed entierly dependant on early diagnosis. The leaflet gave a range of 'five fear survival rates' based on the speed of the diagnosis being made after the condition had developed. If diagnosed in six months, survival rates after five years were good. After 1 year, a little less so. After two years (Ted's diagnosis time) the chances of being alive in five years time were pretty bleak. Given our situation I breathed hard but did not make the observation that had Teds GP reffered him at the outset then we would have been in a much better situation and it remained to be seen how much that delay was going to cost him!

The colostomy was performed and for the next 18 months or so Ted muddled along, not unwell but not well either. After this period of time he was again feeling pretty rotten and was refered again to see his consultant who carried out a colonoscopy examination and gave him the all clear. Ted began to loose weight and suffer from collapses and following a particularly nasty one of these was readmitted to hospital. A CAT scan was carried out and again the all clear was given. Ted was sent home after being given a 'talking to' by the nurse. "You have to eat." she told him. "No wonder you are falling over all the time!"

Ted returned home and tried to follow the advice but he was feeling sick all the time and couldn't keep his food down anyway. He was as thin as a stick and it was obvious he was dying. Two days after returning home he collapsed, was readmitted to hospital and an exploratory opperation carried out. When we saw the egyptian doctor who had performed this he was grave. "I'm afraid your father is dying." he said to my wife (not too great a shock as I had already told her this some weeks before), "He has no functional bowel left due to the spread of the cancer and will pass away soon." Within three days he was dead. This a man who had been given an all clear by his consultant, an all clear by a CAT scan and sent home with the instructions to 'feed himself up' all within two weeks of being dead.

My second anecdote is a sad story concerning the father of a girl I work with. The man, in his fifties, was suffering chest pains, arm pains, pains in his jaw etc (ie all the normal indicators of heart problems) and attended his GP. He was referred to a consultant and a thorough examination was carried out. He was subjected to exercise stress on the treadmill, blood samples for heart function taken, ECG's and scans perforned. Given a clean bill of health the man was sent back to work. On the strength of this even the man's family started to doubt that his symptoms were 'for real' (this was one of the hardest things of all to deal with said the girl). He returned to work and then one evening a short while later died of a massive coronary heart attack. The doctors somewhat weakly said that 'other vessels in his heart must have been taking up some of the work-load and thus disguising his symptoms'. Cold comfort to the mans family I'm afraid.

My point in recounting these sad tales is important. Medicine is not magic. Make no mistake there is far, far more that doctors do not know about what goes on inside us than what they do. But here is the thing you have to remember - doctors are trying their best. They are doing what they have been taught - and are often fooled themselves by their own press. They have allowed this image of themselves as infalable beings to be built up in the public mind and have done nothing to stop it. They have flown high on borrowed wings and it is no suprise that often do they take a fall. And one final thing; medicine may when all is said and done be pretty weak - but it's the best we've got!

WTF is it with people and their kids. Last night in the shop we had a woman with a three(ish) year old boy on the shop floor and she let him run riot around the shop to the point where it was all I could do to stop myself telling her to f*** off out of it. He took the baskets we use for people to put their shopping in, scattered them all over the shop, used them as a sled to ride around the shop, put them on his feet and did every thing but go for a crap in them. He knocked stuff of shelves ran around the shop screaming and shouted in rage if anyone so much as atttempted to restrain him. The woman for her part felt that all that was needed was to shout at his screaming voice (where ever it happened to be coming from) while she atempted to make the difficult decision as to whether to buy a pound of Galaxy chocolate, or a pound of Cadbury's. At no point did she see the need to heave her 24 stone bulk to whatever part of the shop he was destroying and actually restrain him by hand. When I attempted to take a basket from him that he was driving into the shelf displays she looked at me as though I was trying to cut his throat in an act of ritual slaughter. In the end the situation resolved itself when he left the shop under his own steam and I politely said to her "Is your child alright going out into the road on his own." At that point she developed the speed of a racing greyhound and dissapeared to be seen no more - hopefully for good.

This phenomena is not unusual. The idea that everybody else must be as indulgent with a child as it's besotted parents seems to be the order of the day and undoubtedly some parents even revel in the chaos their children are causing in public places. What they fail to realise is that shop enviroments can be dangerous. There is large amounts of heavy stock being shifted from place to place and a small child does not fare well with three hundred weight of stock on its head. And this is not the all of it. How many weak innefectual people have I seen come into that shop bawling and screaming at their poor cowed children just because they are the only thing on the planet that has to, or will, take it from them. They come to the till to spend £30 on scratch-cards, booze and fags and then rage when the child picks up a twenty pence chewee bar. They shout to the world "Look at me - I've got kids. I'm the one in controll here, and being a mother is sooo stressfull!" Never mind that the only work they ever did was to lie on their backs with their legs in the air for ten minutes and we've all been paying the bill for it ever since. The idea that a child has to be physically restrained untill it is old enough to understand verbal commands eg by 'reins' or holding it's hand, seems to be lost in the lazy vacuousness of modern parenting. 'Discipline' has become a dirty word and we have and continue to produce children who have no idea of what it means to exercise self-restraint on their own lives - and one day (if it is not already) society will pay the price for this.

In Tesco's ( I did a short stint working there as a shelf-stacker) I always remember a woman coming down the isle calling out "Byron! Byron! Behave yourself Byron!" I thought to myself that she clearly had no idea of whom she had named her wayward son after and would no doubt reap full 'Byronic' returns as the years went by. And snacking, What is that all about. Is that what used to be called 'eating between meals' and deeply frowned upon in my parents day. Again in Tesco's I remember hearing a 20 stone women turning to her porcine children and saying "Right - we've got the meals sorted out, now what do you want for snacking on." Tempted as I was to suggest a bag of lemons I kept a judicial silence. Day in and day out I witness obese parents feeding their children on nothing but a diet of coke, pizzas, pot noodles and pringles. And I'm talking barely more than infants. It is no suprise whatsoever to me that cases of 'malnutrition' in children recorded in hospitals are at a higher level than at any other time in the last eighty years. These parents cannot feed themselves let alone make the right dietary choices for their kids. What is going on in a house when someone has to come out at 10.45 pm to buy a tin of baby food. Is that, "Oh shit - I forgot to buy any food for the baby at all - better go get a tin" or something like that? Is that not frightening?

Haircuts and tatto's are another thing. Why do parents eem to need to make their children become little clones of them selves. Dad, shaven head and 'Engerland!' t-shirt; ditto ten year old son. They stand glaring beligerantly over the till side by side for all the world like those stupid 'nodding dogs' you see in the back of car windows. It seems to be the parents greatest desire to instill their own sense of anti-social irresponsibility into the child at the earliest possible instant. The latest craze is to have a v shaped block of hair extending from the nape of the neck up over the crown. It is all I can do to stop myself from saying "Excuse me mate - I think you've got a fanny crawling up the back of your head." Match magazine - a kids football magazine regularly comes with a fake 'tattoo sleve' for your kid to pull up over his arm to make him look lihe Vinnie Jones or Wayne Rooney. Why don't they throw in a couple of 50 yo hookers and a schoolgirl to 'roast' as well. Please learn parents - your kids will become anti-social parasites in their own good time without your encouragement, so let it be. In the meantime if I never clap eyes on one of the blighters again - it will be too soon!

Last Thursday I made a visit to my local library. I had been on a website and had come across the opening paragraph of Herman Melville's classic novel 'Moby Dick'. Inspired by the prose of that small sample I decided to read the book in full and thus my afore mentioned visit.
I first searched for the book on the computer terminal in the hallway - well that is I would have had not the screen informed me that the search contained terms that were outside the library's 'acceptable use policy' - must have been the word dick I guess - so I proceeded to the desk where two women were buisily engaged, one with a magazine and the other with a mobile phone into which she was texting something of no-doubt national import. After a brief wait while it registered that someone was at the desk one of the women asked if she could help me. " I'd like a copy of 'Moby Dick' please" I said.
The woman tapped away at a keyboard, looked puzzled, tapped some more, clicked with a mouse a few times and then finally looked pleased. Turning to her workmate she said "Have you had trouble logging in today?" to which her friend replied in the affirmative. "Now, what was it you were after?" she said, returning to me, the complex problem of logging in having been resolved. "Dick", I replied (no I didn't - I just thought it was funny.) With some irritation now beginning to creep in I was perhaps a little sharper in my reply than normal. "Moby Dick". "Ah yes", she said and once more we began the tapping game. "How would Large Print be?", "Fine", "It's out on long loan - due back in October."
I breathed out through my nose and said slowly "Have you anything to hand; a small print version, even an audio one would be ok." She looked again. "It's not much in demand", she said apologetically, "I think you're out of luck". "Never mind - I'll just have to cast my net a little wider." She winked at me in a conspiratorial manner "Be carefull what you catch".  I was tempted to reply "Well, it won't be Moby Dick will it!", but refrained. My library is pretty centrally positioned so I thought I'd run over to a nearby large bookstore and buy one of those cheap 'Wordsworth' editions for a couple of quid that bookshops sell of out of copyright classics. On the way out of the library I noted that there were three copies of Katie Price's (aka ex page 3 model Jordan) latest ghost written novel (everything else about her is fake from her marriages to her t*t's - why should her novel be any different) with which I could console myself if I chose. Ariving at Waterstone's I went to the section where the cheap classics were normally kept only to discover that they were no longer stocking these cut-price ranges. I could still purchase the book in a glossy Penguin edition for £8.99 or a hardback copy for £17.99.  I turned away thwarted at the last. I would have to make do with what I could dig up at home. Perhaps Frank Frazetta's "Death-Dealer: Prisoner of the Horned Helmet" would be worth another read. Give me culture, but.........no - 'but' nothing! Give me culture full stop - I'm certainly not going to bloody well pay for it!

I fear for the Olympic opening ceremony. If last Mondays 'Queens Jubilee Concert' was anything to go by we are in for the most excruciating few hours of national shame ever to be foisted onto a people by it's govenors. Dig your hole now is my advice - the ground may need a bit of help swallowing all of us at once.

What went wrong you may ask. Well, aside from the questionable wisdom of making an 86 yo woman sit through three hours of ancient rock and pop music out in the cold it's difficult to know where to start. The presenters is as good a place as  I suppose. To put (supposedly) cutting edge comedians in as link artists between the acts was folly in the extreme. They could not perform their normal material that (supposedly) makes them funny because it is pepered with F words and obscenity and they could not make the palsied matereal they were given (or allowed) anything other than embarrasing to watch. They were emasculated to a one by the setting and should not have touched it with a barge pole. The spectacle of Rolf Harris trying to get the crowd to sing 'Two Little Boys' as a time filler will ever be seared into my shuddering memory - but ten out of ten to the old trooper for having a go; a true proffesional even if he does have a pencant for over schmaltzy sentiment. Peter Kay gave sighns of being alive, but only just and similarly Lenny Henry.

But for me the main problem was the artists them selves. We were treated to a fistfull of aged performers battleing to belt out thier oldie hit songs in the way they did forty years ago and failing miserably. They croaked the high notes; they avoided them altogether if they coud, thereby ruining the songs; they swivelled thier arthritic hips with barely concealed groans of pain as they pretended to be young again for a day. There was not the one of them that you didn't want to sit down with a mug of coco and put a blanket across thier knees. Elton John, Paul McArtney, Cliff Richard - do your self respect a favour and never - never - set foot on a stage again. Notable exeptions here were Tom Jones who sounded as good as ever and (amazingly) Grace Jones whose hip swivelling skills would have put a Bankok ladyboy on the catwalk to shame. Stevie Wonder could just about pass muster and JLS did what they do tolerably but Gary Barlow and Cheryl Coles almost complete abcence of talent when away from the tweaked world of the recording studio was clear for all to see.

Now the point is this. All this was ok to us and even bought a lump to our throats because we know these people. These are our institutions, our history. It will not however cut it with the rest of the world. What we can forgive in the rose tinted wash of our sentimentality on our Queens day, will not do for the rest of the world. I read aghast that Sir Paul McArtney is to close the opening ceremony of the Olympics. (Noooo!!..........echoing away down into the pit of pre-disaster anticipation) No - this will not do. China gives the world 50,000 people choreographed to almost automaton levels of synchronicity and complexity with men with jet packs flying all over the arena and we offer up Paul McArtney. Please guys - please! Do not do this to us! We do ceremony better than any country in the world (exept perhaps the yanks) - let us do what we are good at. Or perhaps even better - do nothing at all. I mean it. Do nothing - scale it back to zilch rather than stage a fiasco of past it rock stars and ill prepared kids and comedians for the world to laugh at. We deserve better. 

A Sunday or two ago I was 'building' the mornings papers (ie adding the inserts etc wich is done by the retailer, not the publisher) when a particular feature in the Sunday Times review caught my attention. Eminent historian Niall Ferguson was giving his view on the likely outcome of the current crisis in the Eurozone which he saw as follows. The euro he said will survive as a currency and Europe will become a Federation of states with Germany at it's head. The UK will leave Europe and will not be part of this Federation.

I turned to my work mate, a 20 yo lad who I like very much and said "You probably don't realise it but you come from a very tough nation of people. Few of your (or even my) generation would realise this - and it might be burried pretty deep at present - but when the chips are down the British are a pretty hard lot. Even though we do not think so, the rest of the world do. You come from a warrior people and it is in your blood.
Do you realise that had it not been for your grandfather and his father, this country and the rest of Europe would to this day be living under the tyrany of a Nazi jackboot on its neck."

The boy looked up. "Surely it was the Americans who won the war for us - or at least had something to do with it" he said. "Rubbish", I replied. "The Americans certainly supplied the men and equipment that brought about the final defeat of Hitler's armies, but if it hadn't been for the British, who for two years stood alone against the might of Germany, refusing to surender as the rest of Europe had done, then there would have been no final war in Europe in which the axis forces were defeated. The Americans would have co-existed just as easily with a Europe under the controll of Germany as they do now with us. It was only because at the time of Pearl Harbour, Britain was still holding out against Germany that a second battle in the European theatre was held at all. Had we surrendered as the rest of Europe did two years earlier, Germany would have been left alone to run Europe and America would have gone to war in the Pacific with Japan with no further involvement in Europe."

I held up the paper with Niall Fergusons predictions about Germany running a federal Europe in it. "At the end of the day this was all they ever wanted in the first place. They may have lost the wars but they sure as hell won the peace. Shame two hundred million people died in the peocess."

I am going to tell you a story. Last week a girl came for interview for a job in the store where I work. It's a ten employyee 7-11 store with a manager, and is part of a bigger, but still local group of buisinesses. She was interviewed by the HR manager and our shop manager who both liked her. The job was a 30+ hr shop assistant role carrying payment at the national minnimum wage rate - about £6.10 per hour.

The HR manager contacted the shop owner who is involved in the overall buisiness group management and said that she and our shop manager were happy that the girl was a good candidate and requested permission to offer her the position. He was happy with their decision but requested for the girls CV to be faxed over for him to check out before an offer was made. Ten minutes later he was back on the phone saying yes - this girl would be ok, but he noted that she had previousely done an 'apprentiship' (ie worked for 6 months for half pay - £3 per hour) in another retail establishment. "Offer her the position, but only as an apprentiship." he instructed. My manager and the HR manager were dumbstruck. The girl had come for a full time fully paid interview, had all but got the job, but the moment the owner saw that she could be coerced into taking the position at half pay the goal posts changed and so did the deal.

So we have a situation here where once again the employer demonstrates insufficient integrity to be given responsibility for an employee's hiring, where a girls having already been used once as cheap labour is used as reason to coerce her into doing the same a second time - remember, if she turns the offer down she will loose her benefits anyway - and if she won't take the job on half pay, the offer wil be withdrawn. She is effectively locked into a spiral of employment abuse that will continue untill she finds an employer with the integrity to offer her proper employment at the proper rate of pay. She has demonstrated her worth time over time by turning up for work at half pay, yet there is no interest in protecting her from the kind of abuse outlined above. She's on benefits - she's fair game. Shame on us - shame on all of us for letting it happen.

And this brings me to my next point - why do we let it happen. Why am I for instance, not writing to my local paper, harangueing my MP, shouting from the roof-tops about this abuse. The answer is fear. I'm afraid if I make a song and dance then it will get back to my employers and I will be for the chop. Say my MP agree's with the 'work experience' scheme's that make such abuse possible. It ain't rocket science to get back from an e mail adress to an individual if you've got the clout of an MP so fear stays my hand. But make no mistake - this type of thing is going on up and down the country by the tens of thousands in small buisiness setups not affected by the kind of bad publicity that drove Tesco's and many other big concerns to come out of the scheme's. And so here I shout, annonymously, at the top of my voice "Somebody - Anybody -do something!" You see if people like me don't care enough to write blogs like this, and people like you don't care enough to take the trouble to read them - then how does true information about what is really happening at the bottom end of the employment ladder ever reach those in a position of power to do something about it.

The 'Beecroft Report' delivered to the government last week reccomends making it easier for employers to fire 'coasting' workers as part of a package of measures desighned to stimulate growth in the economy. I suppose I get what they mean by 'coasting workers'; people who do just enough to stay above the line where they could be disciplined for not doing their work, but don't put their backs into the job as perhaps their co-workers do. Safe from dissmissal these people free-load on the efforts of their work mates to carry them through the day. Well - OK, fair enough, but this is a thing every one of us has come up against in the work-place, and has had to deal with - the big problem is that once you try to deal with it by making it easier to fire such people, then all people become easier to fire thereby. It's not rocket science to work out that this grey area of 'how diligent is a worker' could be easily abused by unscrupulous employers as a means to unload almost any staff member who, for whatever reason, they no longer wanted on the books.

The other thing that has to be asked is "Why is the worker in question doing this?" Might it be in fact that he or she has justifiable grievences - perhaps they are one of the unfortunates who has been co-opted onto a job against their will at half the national minnimun wage rate under the pretence of recieving an apprentiship training. (Since when did shelf-stacking in a supermarket become a 'skill' that required an extended period of training at half wages?). Perhaps they are old and cannot physically do the work anymore but are locked into the job by dependance on the income it provides and unable to find alternative work due to lack of skills etc and ageism in the job market. There are many reasons other than just indolence that may account for such behaviour - and yet all would fall before the swingeing cut of such legislation.

And yet in fact I am not wholly against such freedom of the employer to hire and fire at will, because in the long run it tends to have effects that are not wholly against the workers interest. If you can be fired easily - you can be hired easily too. As long as it opperates in conjunction with a rigorously enforced minnimum wage policy set at a level that provides a livable wage from any 40 hour job, then this is fine. Employers will always be more prepared to hire if they know they can easily reign back if the need arises or if they get 'the wrong man', and this would stimulate the jobs market big time. I always remember two elderly men of my aquaintence who independantly reported to me that in their 'time' (the 60's and 70's) they could if they chose, quit the job they were in in the morning and be re-employed again by the end of the day just by going down to the job center and choosing a job of their liking. This in an era well before 'tribunals' and 'employment laws' set to safeguard the 'rights of workers', and life is a lot easier to bear if the freedom to change employer at speed if necessary is maximised. Under these circumstances it is in the employers self-interest to take good care of  workers who pull their weight or they run the risk of loosing them to other firms. Thus each employer finishes up with the employee's he deserves which sounds ok to me.

This is bullshit! It's May 17th, it's pissing it down with rain outside and it has been almost continuously for the last two months, yet the water companies tell us there is a water shortage so we must all conserve water and expect higher prices in the near future. Twenty odd years ago we were told,as the nations nationalised industries were sold off one by one, that privatisation was in the best interest of the country and that the newly privitised utilities would be more efficiently run and result in better, cheaper services for the customer. So the nations silver was sold off piece by piece untill there was nothing left exept the cheshire cat smiles of the ministers who oversaw the sales as they duly, one by one, took up their lucrative directorships on the boards of the companies they had created. Twenty years later here we are being bled dry (the only dry thing in the UK at present) by those companies as they cream off the maximum take they can squeeze from our already stressed budgets. Where now the 'watchdogs' that were going to look after our interests. Where now the philanthropic industrialists whose had only the consumers interest at heart.

Lets be frank. There is a water shortage now for one reason only - lack of investment. In their pursuit of profit over development the privitised water companies have paid out in fat saleries and bonuses and dividends to  investors that which should have been reinvested in infrastructural improvements to meet the water needs of a growing domestic populace and national industry. Those who have milked our utilities for thier own bennefit have little or no care about meeting these needs - it doesn't effect them where they plan to be going, it's all about me, me, me.

The same story is true if to a lesser extent to our other formerly nationalised industries. British Gas looses no oppertunity to hike up the prices for the smallest reason yet never passes price reductions back to the customer unless the public spotlight falls on it. Btitish Telecom's first act on privitisation was to go around to every phone booth in the country and to block up the 5p payment slots thus raising the price of a call-box call 100% in one fell swoop - and it has pursued a policy of avericious price rises ever since. The rail network was divided into such a mish-mash of crossed and interlinked companies that no-one could be sure of who was responsible for what in this most important of the need for safety based industries. The electricity companies have been sold off to french and russian buyers such that the vast profits generated do not even stay within the confines of our own country and now with nothing left to sell our current government is turning it's greedy eye's to the one thing left from which it may be able to wring a nice little post-government earner for it's boys - the Post Office. Anyone in any doubt that the future of the Post Office is in private hands should take a good look at the 'softening up' process that has been ongoing via tha national media for the last few years (I include the last Labour government in this as well - they were really Tories with red ties when you look at their record). "One in Three letters Delivered Late", "10% of packages Lost by PO" etc, etc. scream the headlines every few weeks or so. "Post-men demand massive salery rises" we are told as the uncompromising communist union leaders are paraded before ranks of tattoed PO cap wearing hoodlums on the national news programs. In reality the idea that  a scource of vast potential wealth may be passing them by without being tapped is one that the Torie mentality cannot stomoch and they'll be beggared if they don't have a good go at getting their grubby mitts on to it.

There was a time when it was understood that certain things were too important to be left in the hands of the market to oversee, whose sole motive was that of profit. Thus the idea of a 'mixed economy' of public and private ownership was born where the basic utilities, water, electricity, gas, tele-communications, rail-travel etc were held in public hands to be run on a best-interest for all basis, and the other industries, perhaps less fundamental to peoples well-being, were left in the hands of the market to generate profit from. And the system worked well. It was not without flaws but in the main it functioned well and provided for peoples needs in a way that did not push them to the edge of penury. Now all this is gone. The market rules and we find ourselves under the shadow of a master who cares little for our well-being or future prosperity or indeed meeting the needs of future generations that will need to avail themselves of these services. Well I have a radical idea. Take them all back. Begin a program of re-nationalisation of the key utilities without delay. Pay such compensation as is deemed appropriate to individual shareholders who have found it appropriate to profit on the backs of the people who have born the cost of dividend payments in the form of both reduced services and raised prices. It's a rule that you can't go back in life - but some rules are made to be broken and this is one of them!

The famed american economist J K Galbraith once said that "Meetings are indispensible for those who would do no work" and I'm beginning to see where he was coming from. We have a new Area Manager at work (in fact the first area manager we have ever had) and true to the above dictum he has started his period of employment with a flurry of meetings. There have been meetings to introduce him to the shop managers, meetings to introduce him to the suppliers, he has had meetings with the staff within the shops to introduce himself and to introduce his ideas. Today he has a meeting with the wholesalers, the results of which he will report back to the bosses in a meeting tomorrow. The only fly in the ointment is that at some point - maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point he will have to do some actual work.

Now this may come as a shock to him, but you see in order for the buisiness to make any money there has to be stuff on the shelves. And this stuff has to be put there. And when those unmitigated bastards called customers take it off either to pinch it, dump it somewhere else in the shop or, least likely, to buy it - it has to be put back again. This you see is called work. If we by any miricle actually make any profit at the end of the day, this is where it comes from. The man - no doubt a very nice guy - has got the idea into his head that we need 'a corporate image'. He stood at the front end of our shop (in a meeting with our manager) and told him that "I want to be able to stand at the top of every isle and see an unbroken wall of stock, neatly placed with no gaps, no spaces and uniform to the planogram on the wholesalers website. Well if he carries out his plan as it stands he may well get that wish coming true sooner than he realises because we won't have any customers left to disrupt his 'unbroken wall of stock'. You see inorder to get people to come into a shop to part with their hard earned, you have to do two things. You have to give people what they want and you have to give thwm what they can afford. It's no good replacing items that do not conform to the planogram if these are your good sellers with high profit margins - the more so if the items you are replacing them with are both less desirable to the customer and more expensive. Our man does not seem to have grasped that the wholesalers in creating their planogram of what items should be where on the shelves, are looking after their own interests. These are the items that make them the most money, not us. These are the things they want us to buy in  order to give them the maximum profit.

Our man says he wants 'an extra 50p in every basket going out of the shop. Easily done, but not much use if in so doing you halve the number of  baskets going out a day! To run a corner store is a balancing act, a juggling act where thousands of lines are tweaked and adjusted untill a point is reached where every meter of shelf space generates the maximum profit it can for the buisiness. Products that fill up space without moving are jetisoned, new ones are added that give better profit margins over a given time period and the whole thing is orchestrated with a gentle hand so as not to set the whole edifice tumbling. To do what this man suggests in all the stores is to completely misjudge the nature of corner shops, where more so than anywhere the needs of a particular 'type' of clientel must be catered for depending on the location. Standardisation will only result in loss of profit here because i) the requirements of different communities differ and lines cannot be adjusted to accomodate this and ii) the sepparation of wholesaler and retailer (as opposed to say Tesco where one company carries out both rolls) means that what bennefits one does not neccesarily bennefit the other. In constructing their 'standard model' the wholesaler is bound to place their own best interest above that of the retailer.

We are to keep baking bread and hot bakery products untill late in the evening - wastage levels are not our concern. OK - I'll do what I'm told but perhaps someone should remind our man that there is a reason why every fish and chip shop in the country closes at three o clock - because they don't sell any fish and chips after then! In a hot bakery situation you do not have every product available until the time the shop closes - you'll be throwing away most if not all of the profit for the days trading. A point comes in every day where instead of the customer buying what they want to buy instead they have to buy what you want them to buy. To get this right is not easy, but over time you get a 'feel' for what is needed on a given day and you do that amount. You tweak it as the day goes on, baking a little more here, a little less there and with a bit of luck you end the day with good sales and not too much waste. If you get it wrong and run out of stuff too early then bake a bit of quick stuff (not too much) then call it a day. If you are too late to bake ie you've missed the window, then console yourself with the feeling that every thing you have sold today is for profit. There is nothing worse than bagging up 25 items for reduction at the end of the day. You might as well not have bothered. The one thing you cannot do in this type of area is run to a standard daily model - the net result will be ruin. If you can't judge how the numbers should be altered to account for given circumstances on a given day then leave well alone because the people who do the job on a daily basis can!

There is not one of us who could not go into any shop and start pulling it to peices. "This isn't done, that is wrong" etc. There is no skill in this. The skill lies in finding out why something is wrong and then dealing with that. Example. Our man came into the shop one Saturday at 1pm and found only one pasty in the warmer. He brought this up a dozen times in 'a meeting' with the staff, but not once did he ask "Why?" Lets look at the possibilities.

i) The staff on duty were crap.
ii) The staff on duty were ok but do not organize their time correctly
iii) The staff were overwhelmed by the workload on this the busiest morning of the week and were thus unable to find time to fill the oven and restock the warmer (nb serving customers is the first priority in the shop and must take precedence over all other activities.)
iv) The bakery sale pattern for the morning had been slow leading to a decision not to cook until some sighn of purchasing activity was seen in the customers. When it came this was very high resulting in the rapid and near complete emptying of the warmer.and thus the staff were 'caught short'
v) The top shelf products were not selling leading to the decision to hold back on pasty cooking untill some of the exess had been cleared.
vi) The shop had run out of pasties.

In the case of iii, iv and v above the situation, rather than pointing to the failings of the staff, on the contrary point to their diligence in pursuing the activities as required by their breif and in giving thought to their work rather than just automatically perfoming duties with no thought for the shops best interest. Item vi is beyond their controll and item ii refers to a failing which any one of us could be guilty at times. So in only one of the six possible causes for their being no pasties in the warmer were the staff in any way at fault. To fail to adress the 'why' of any situation arising in the shop is to fail to adress that situation at all.

To come into the shop and criticise is of no importance to us who perform the work (there - that nasty word again) on a daily basis and can justifiably be ignored. To come in and ask "How does this shop perform, with the given amount of labour allowed, in carrying out the work that has to be done", this is a relavent question. Anyone can criticise anything - to see the true situation as the above question illuminates, this is where the skill comes in. To say for example that there is two people working at what needs to be done at all times is fallacious; one of those people is tied to a till at virtually all times. "Ah yes but that person can be doing other things while at the till between customers". Nonsense. To assume this is to assume there to be large blocks of time between customers where significant amounts of alternative work can be done and this is, more often than not, just not the case. The true picture is of very short increments of time between customers where little of value other than a bit of soft drink facing or cigarette filling can be achieved. In the face of this to expect large tasks of long duration (eg cleaning shelves etc) to be done is to expect the impossible and is rightly ignored by those on the 'front line' who actually do the work. Similarly, there is no point in telling me that I should be doing this or I should be doing that all the time. Look on the cctv. I'm working from the start of my shift untill the end and doing what I think is important in the order I think it needs to be done. If I'm getting it wrong, fine - tell me so; but have the good grace to tell me not just what I should be doing, but also what other thing it is that I should not be doing while I am doing what you say should be done, because I can't magic up time from the ether to perform all these tasks.

Well thats about it. I'm gyessing that you get the idea that I might not be 100% enthralled with the idea of paying a man 25k to tell us to do what any one of us could have spun up if we were interested in running the shop as though it was a 'painting by numbers' game (a game incidentally performed only by rank amatures who don't know the first thing about what they are doing). But time will tell. If this guy pulls it off I'll be the first to applaud it and eat my own words - but in the meantime can I give just one small warning of a pitfall to beware of. Just because you have an idea it doesn't necessarily follow that it's a good one!

Well here we are again. The Sunday Times has once again decided that we have to have our faces pushed into the fact that while the bulk of us struggle and fight to stay afloat in the face of inflation, rising unemployment and swinging austerity cuts, there is a small slice of the populace who are still managing to rake it in. Each year this Murdoch owned bastion of integrity gives us the lowdown on who is getting what at the top end of the table. We learn for example that in the last year the assets of the top 1000 richest people have swolen by 4.7% to a record £414 billion - I wonder if you started from the poorest and worked up how many people you would need to reach the same figure. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that so many of the people who are up there are so..........undeserving. How can you fail to judge a society as wanting that places higher value on the likes of Katie Price over say a man who makes a significant step forward in the fight against cancer, on Victoria Beckham over say our best classical composer. But in fairness this is the way it is and there ain much point in bitching about it. When it comes to the masses unfortunately the lowest common denominator will always win out - thats why East Enders is more popular than East of Eden and the bucks will always follow where the numbers go. I don't really care about the footballers and the cheap celebs who will generate more income in one year than a lifetime of hard work will provide for the rest of us - I just don't want my face shoved in it. I don't want to know that Tamara Ecclestone has spent £1 million on a marble bath with gold taps (her reason, the rather plaintif and even endearing "Well - I spend a lot of time in the bath don't I"). What purpose did the Mail on Sunday think it was serving when it published the story. What did it want us to do - rise up and lynch her from the nearest lampost, burn her in effigy in the streets. Why does the Financial Times publish a monthly supplement showcasing luxury goods and call it 'How To Spend It'. Does it not cross their minds that at this particular stage it might be more politic to demonstrate a little more reserve when it comes to ostentatious (and some would say vulgar) displays of wealth.

In the face of this type of coverage of this type of society, is it any wonder that it is nearly impossible to motivate our young people to place any effort into securing a future for themselves through hard work and dilligence. Every day it is demonstrated to them that this is not the way forward. The philosophy of 'Get rich - get famous, by good means if you can but by any means if you can't' is hammered into them via the press and media such that for them the only means to sucess is via reality TV, sport, becoming a popstar or if all else fails scratch cards and the Lottery. And the worst thing of all is that they may well be right! 21 year old Adele has been performing for two years and has earned £20 million. She has a modicum of talent and it has brought her in two years what it would take an average wage earner eighty or a minimum wage earner two hundred to equal. For most of us a lifetime of hard work will bring us a retirement of 'getting by', a future of dwindling opportunity and increasing hardship. Is it any wonder that the lure of 'fame and easy money' holds such sway when reality and game shows throw up new winners on a daily basis for public consumption and as models for them to emulate.

And so can I make this plea. If you're one of the fortunate ones who life has smiled on in the wealth stakes, well done - more power to your elbow. But do me a favour - keep a little bit schtum about it in deference to the rest of us who didn't quite hit the jackpot. As Jagger would have said "If you meet me show some courtesy, show some dignity, show some taste!"

Ther are two groups of people who like Mrs Thatcher. The first and smaller of the two, are those people who did well out of her. The second and much larger group are those who do not understand what she did to this country (the UK, just in case....).

Make no mistake Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Regan changed the western world between them to such a degree that by the time they were ousted from power the countrys they had run were changed beyond all recognition. They introduced the 'Greed is Good' philosophy to the financial world and as a direct result some quater of a century later, here we stand amid the wreckage of the post 'credit crunch', 'toxic asset' ridden, 'sub-prime mortgaged collapsed, Euro-zone crisis inflicted, soverighn-debt riddled world economy of today. They managed to bring about this debacle in a number of ways but by far the most important was by THE DEREGULATION OF THE FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY.

What does this mean. Well since the collapse of the world economy in 2008 one of the main things you have heard economists/commentators et al shouting about is how the financial sector was allowed to perform in a totally unregulated fashion  such that it was able to bring about a global financial crisis that very nearly brought the entire western economy to it's knees. This was the result of the deregulation or lifting of the regulatory apparatus that was in place when Regan and Thatcher came to power in thier respective countries. I'm not an economist and no doubt I'll get a few things wrong in the following account but the bulk of what I say will be correct. Thatcher and Regan were both laissez-faire politicians. The term in the original french actually means 'let them do', but in essence can be thought of as 'let it be' or 'leave it alone'. The belief they shared was that the market, if left to it's own devices, would generate the maximum wealth possible without government interference.

A quick history lesson on how things were in the 1970's and how they have changed from our world of today. Back then, all of the various financial services one might use in a lifetime were run sepparately and by specialist companies whose expertise was in that field alone. So for example, if I wanted to but some additional pension cover I went to a Pension Company, Insurance I bought from an Insurance company, for a loan I went to a Bank or an HP Company and to buy my home I went to a Building Society. These sectors opperated sepparately and independantly of each other and this was enshrined in law by a number of regulatory acts that pertained to the industry as a whole. Both Thatcher and Regan felt that the presence of such a regulatory system was stymying the productivity of the industry which, if deregulated, could become a scource of great  income and wealth to both the USA and Great Britain. Deregulation would allow for much greater competition between different service providers thus improving the service overall to the customer; it would free up invested money in banks which currently had to be loaned out in certain very specific (and safe) ways, to be used as venture capital and to be invested in the stocks, bonds and housing markets. It would allow the creation of evermore strange and varied financial 'instruments' in which greater and greater wealth could be generated - and in effect the sky was the limit. So it seemed and so indded it was. We saw the rise of the YUPPIE (the young upwardly mobile proffesional) with thier crass and extravagvent displays of consumption and we all wanted a slice of the action. And yes it worked. For a few heady years the country boomed. The City of London generated wealth for the country at a vast rate and ostentatious displays of wealth became commonplace and acceptable.

But underneath all was not well. Prior to deregulation people had invested their savings in banks and building societies and this was in turn loaned judiciously by these organisations in ways that were beneficial to our society. Cheap and long term buisness loans were available from your local bank if you could persuede the almost God like figure of the manager that you were a good long term (but most importantly safe) bet. So money invested locally helped fund development of buisness locally. If you wanted a house then you saved a deposit, went to a building society and demonstrated that you were in secure employment and could afford the repayments over a long period (commonly 25 years). This had to be ratified by your employer or otherwise responsible person if you were self-employed. But the purpose of the building society was to provide cheap long term loans for first time buyers. Housing was too important it was considered to be viewed as a tool for enrichment by means of investment in property, and thus building society mortgages were limited to one per couple. Sur you could buy a second house if you wanted one - but you had to go to a bank for the money to do so and would pay proportionately more by doing so. Now these things were restrictive - but they provided a high degree of social cohesion in so being. Housing and work - the two staple needs of life (beyond food etc) - were nurtured within the boundries of this remit. But while the prospertity generated was safe and long term it wasn't exiting and it wasn't quick. Deregulation changed all of that. All of a sudden you could buy your council house, you could get as many motgages as you could stack up like a house of cards, you could buy shares in the sold off family silver ov the previousely nationalised utility companies ans you could buy endless cheap imported goods with the newly minted array of credit cards and endless flow of cheap credit flowing into the economy. To put it in context, when Thatcher came to power in the UK there were 3 credit cards available - the Acces, The Visa and the Barkelycard. By the time she left there were over a thousand. And people took them up with a vim and vigour that seemed to imply there was no tomorrow, there would be no time when the piper had to be paid. Greed really was, it seemed, good

The good times lasted uninterupted for a while and perhaps the first indication that there was a problem was in the overheating of the economy and fast rising house prices of the early 90's. Demand for housing (as expected) was massively outstriping supply as the newly available means of aquiring second and third propoertys took hold and it was forcing prices to unsustauiable highs as people scrambled to get onto and further up the ladder. Sure enough - there was a house price crash. It was bad but not the end of the world. Some people got into 'negative equity' situations as thier house value fell to well below what they had paid for it - but all they really had to do was stay put for a while until house prices rallied as they surely would, and all would be well.

But again there were rumblings of disquiet. Shareholders in the banks and newly formed investment banking sector were demanding high return for thier invested capital and were no longer happy to accept the long term steady income that pre-deregulation buisness had provided. They wanted fast profit and they wanted it now. With no requirement for the risky investment sectors and safe buisness loan sections of the financial services industries to be kept sepparate anymore, it became feasable for banks and investment companies to mingle their buisness, to concentrate their efforts on high yeilding (and high risk) opperations like overseas and venture capital investment, futures and derivatives markets (a complex form of financial gambling) and of course the highly lucrative short term credit market which was providing the money fuelling the high street spending boom. it was becoming harder to find money (and more expensive) to start a buisiness - for some reason your local manager no longer seemed to have the power to make the decission - but on the plus side regulations in respect of mortgage provision were being loosened in order to reinflate the sagging housing market. Now this was a stoke of genius. By allowing people to 'self-certify' themselves for a mortgage - ie by allowing all of the checks and verifications that someone could actually afford a mortgage to be swept asside - a demand for housing unprecedented was stimulated as every Joe, employed or otherwise, jumped on to the band waggon of home ownership. And there was no chance any of them would not be able to pay for these home loans; why they told us they would be!

Through the ninetys ant two thousands we kept on buying that stuff we wanted from the high street, The TV's and mobiles and computers etc, etc, etc. The only problem was we weren't the ones making the stuff. Those little chinese people who would work 14 hours a day for £3 were knocking the stuff out like there was no tomorrow and we were the ones soaking it up. And what was worse, when our financial systems started to feel the pinch in terms of the money that was available to keep the whole bloated system going, it was the chinese themselves, awash with money from the stuff they had sold us, who stepped in to bail us out by lending us back the very money we had paid them for all the tat we were impoting in the first place. The investment companies and banks, realising they had lent shed loads of money to people who were never going to pay it back started bundling up all the bad debts and sup-prime mortgages as they were now known (notice how the 'self-certified' has been dropped) into 'collateralised debt obligations' and a vicious game of pass the parcel of toxic assets began with each company hoping to scrape a bit mour profit out of the empty jar befor handing it on to the next sucker that would buy it. And then in 2008 it was sold to a Bank called Lehmans - and the rest I, think, is history.

What T F is it with scratch cards. I work in a shop where we sell a range of 12 or so cards varying in price from £1 to £5 (a £10 card is about to be released as we speak). I sell myself, about 20 cards a shift and say the value of these is £40. I work 5 shifts a week so sell approx 100 cards a week. There are ten of us in the shop so lets say the shop sells approx 1000 cards a week. I've been employed there for 6 years so in that time ths shop has sold say 300,000 cards at a total cost of approx £600,000. In this time I have seen approx half a dozen payouts of more than twenty pounds and can say with absolute suretey that at least - I repeat at least - 90% of all the money paid out (mostly in £1 and £2 'wins') is repaid back over the counter immediately for more scratch cards.

I have seen on numerous occasions people spend what must be a days wage in ten minutes - and not win a penny. I saw one man buy 28 cards of differing prices (£78 in total I believe) - and win £2. I have seen staff dismissed for stealing them and mothers spending thier child benefit allowence on them while thier babys howl with hunger in the pram. I have seen children as young as five begging to be allowed a card and parents who make their children choose for them as though somehow God or fate will smile on them more kindly because the choice was made by an innocent child. I am not a fan of scratch cards.

Why one might ask is the government tied up in such a pernicious means of extracting cash from the weak and gullable ( for lets face it - like it or not scratch card purchase is a pursuit almost entierly of the lower end of the intellectual/social scale), and the answer my friends is this. Because a very large proportion of the money spent on 'scratchies' (as the little feller's are chumily known) is bennefits money. The scratch card is no less than the governments way of recouping a proportion of it's own money paid out in bennefits. If you or me as working people are stupid enough to throw our hard earned away on the the blighters then more fool us - it's a free country, but your shiftless layabout who spends his morning in bed and his night getting sozzled on 'Frosty Jack's', well he will throw away those last few £1coins on scratchcards without a seconds thought. What does he care - there's plenty more where that came from. And so next time you see the little finger crossed sign an think i might have a quick punt think again. You aren't going to win, you aren't meant to - and you never were.