The Grumpy Old Blog

I would love (and I know it will never happen) for just one conspiracy theorist somewhere in the world to prove just one, or even half of one of their claims. My local Professor Conspiracy dropped in for a coffee and has some new theories she is convinced of. 1. The internet is just out there in the sky and is free. We should not be paying for it. Yes, Sir Tim Berners-Lee indeed wanted it to be free, which depending on what you use it for (ie avoiding data hoovers), it can be sort of free. However, I cannot get Professor Conspiracy to understand that the "free" internet cannot be brought into your house without charge for the infrastructure and technology that enables it via the providers. I asked her why then does she not drop her internet provider and just go get it for free herself. Her reply. "But you need to pay someone to bring it into your house. All the wiring and that." In effect, she is arguing with herself. 2. Amazon was never started by Jeff Bezos. It wa...

Three weeks of Christmas advertisements suffered thus far, and not one mention of Mary, Joseph or the infant Jesus. Just message after message telling us in incredibly sincere and twee language how much the supermarkets are putting in all their grandest of efforts to ensure we can put on a microwave-to-table family spread fit for a king.  Just like last year. And the year before last. And the year before that.  Seeing they start making more of a fuss of "the big day" Christmas each year than most host countries do for the Olympics, perhaps Christmas should be held just once every four years, thereby giving us three wonderful "big day" free years, thus making Christmas really, really, extra special. As I said, they never seem to mention Jesus any more, so if it's to be so commercial that the founder doesn't even warrant a mention any more, why not slim it all down? The furnishing companies with their 365-days-a-year sales are busy telling us there is st...

The supermarkets have been at it now for a long time. Once one of the big ones diversified away from their core grocery business, the rest followed. We seem to have long-since accepted that the big supermarkets sell clothes, white goods, brown goods, magazines, greeting cards, crockery, gifts, in fact you name it, they sell it. Originally, and to a degree still representing a good deal for the consumer - apart from their fake special offers that they always claim when exposed on the TV consumer programmes as an “error” – it would be more acceptable if they didn’t kill the local high streets and suburbs with their total unethical, and at times, dishonest attitude to the small local business. But this can be partially explained by lack of reality and short-sighted councils who just see these metro supermarkets as reliable businesses that can and will stump up premium business rates, month-in, month-out, without question. Despite it being we the residents who pay these...

Had a fantastic morning preparing for England's win in rugby. Or will it be a win in Derby? Well, it's not that I will be attending the match, or that I might even watch it on television – in fact I don’t even know if or when they are playing - but I could tell something might up judging by the copious amount of Carlsberg Lager people were buying from the supermarket when I popped in at 7.30am. I had been instructed by the wife to purchase some "low fat" (could have sworn that is the name of our local Chinese Take-Away) red cheese, and found out something that made me slightly suspicious, not that I might be in any way cynical when it comes to supermarket shopping, you will understand. All the red cheese - the normal, the "Be Good" to yourself, the simply red cheese (presumably the stuff Mick Hucknall buys), the super-duper "Taste the Difference" and the Con You Sir, oops, I mean Connoisseur red cheese contained EXACTLY 33.7g fat p...

At the bottom of the road we are blessed with a Tesco Metro. It's a fine shop that contributed greatly towards the early retirement of both the newsagent and off-licence located a few metres from their door, not that this particular contribution from Tesco was necessarily welcomed with open arms by the new retirees. Especially as they have families to support. For the majority of older residents in and around it, this convenience shop is just that. A convenience. Saves them taking a bus to the Sainsbury's located a half a mile down the road. Now I'm not a retail analyst. In fact I know nothing about retail at all really. I can't explain why a tube of Colgate is £1 in a pound shop, yet £2.95 in Tesco. Or why an Arid deodorant is also a £1 in the pound ship yet £2.45 in Tesco. Or why the Tesco Metro doesn't keep dried lentils and barley in stock. Or Red Leicester cheese. Or Walkers Cheese and Onion crisps. And runs out of bread and milk way before closing. Or th...

Check the queue at the main till, and weigh this up against the number of items you have in your hand (a litre of milk, a chocolate bar, a toothbrush and a small bag of salad). Make the decision that scanning these four items at the self-service check-out can't possibly take longer than waiting in the assistant-serviced queue, especially as the current customer, a fur coat-clad woman, is arguing about the supermarket running out of GM, gluten-free, diet, sugar-free, fat-less lettuce and having to pack her own bag. This despite the fact that the assistant, who, although half your age, is certainly worth you standing there and being mentally undressed by you as you wait. But you sensibly opt for speed over a very attractive young woman. Press “Begin”, and scan in your loyalty card so the machine can spit out some extremely “relevant” offers when you have completed your purchase, thus proving that the supermarket knows everything about you - your buying habits, your shirt size, whe...

Maybe I'm just getting older and more miserable, but are quiz shows on television, and in particular on the BBC, - which I might add you and I fund to the tune of almost £200 a year each - becoming more inane and ridiculous? They all seem to follow the same format - a slick-witted presenter presiding over to two teams of "B" stars comprising of the same, old, second-rate stand-up comedians and unemployed soap stars, just because it’s one particular agent who holds sway over the BBC light entertainment department. The format, presenters patter and audience reaction is identical, whichever the show. It's just a great pity the programmes on the BBC aren't as good as their link advertisements between those programmes. Back on commercial stations, banking advertisements have become so solemn, customer-friendly and twee. As the banking institutions take their long-suffering customers even further for a ride on their single journey of increasing dishonesty...

I had a rather nasty confrontation in my local supermarket this morning, just at a time when I didn't need one. It was a full-blown argument over a packet of paracetamol. Being middle-aged, I was convinced that I had the right to purchase. But the checkout assistant thought otherwise, and everything came to a grinding halt. I sought help. But in true supermarket tradition, their out-of-normal working hours trading habits - 24 hours a day opening or not - do not transcend to having help freely available before 8.30am or after 7pm. The assistant kept infuriatingly telling me "I needed authorisation". With only a decade to my old aged pension, I felt I did not “need authorisation”. Sadly, these self-service check-out machines don't listen. They're the things that supermarkets seem to insist replace the grumpy teenagers otherwise subsidising their huge student loans and who normally sit at the end of the conveyor belt and have perfected that stance so bel...