Bottling It

Let’s be clear, I am not some sort of rabid anti-capitalist.  I don’t much like Tesco because, well, need I go on? and I don’t really like the idea of the exploitation of children manufacturing garments, because in the age of the sewing machine, you don’t need tiny hands to sew small stitches and, if you do, hire some fucking elves.

Indeed I like shops.

I like my local greengrocer.  Obviously I don’t buy my groceries there, because Waitrose is more convenient and, frankly, I find his purple sprouting broccoli a mite intimidating. But I certainly buy my Christmas tree there, and last year hauled it home myself.  This turned out to be slightly more effort than I had anticipated.  It took fully twenty minutes for a) feeling to return to my fingers and b) my opinions on child labour to self-right; if I had seen a couple of kids on the way home, I’d of bribed them with Haribo to cart the bloody thing to my door.

One of my favourite shops is the petrol station I gas up at prior to coming home from visiting family.  It’s the last stop before the motorway and so obviously the place where I load up on diesel and wine gums and, if I’m feeling flush, a Costa from the machine.  (Fuck Nespresso, when I win the lottery I am having the ultimate bean to cup machine, a full sized Costa vending machine in the hall.  Where else?  The kitchen?  You need a vended coffee when leaving the house.  If I want a coffee in the house, I’ll get the model I’ve had re-trained as a barrista to make it.  In this fantasy, I’ve won the lottery, remember?)

It’s a fairly interesting place.  As well as dispensing much needed four star or whatever to local white van men drink, it does a roaring trade in those other staples of white van man life, porn and sandwiches (a sandwich being a lunch you can conveniently eat one handed in a secluded layby).

Below the porn though, are an interesting selection of magazines.  How many petrol stations stock ‘Horse and Hound’?  I suspect what we have here is a corner shop with pumps.

This would explain why whenever I’m in the queue, the people ahead of me are greeted by name, and why they are buying booze, and why they walk off the forecourt rather than drive.

Obviously, I buy my bottled water there and obviously, I try to avoid that filthy French stuff, meaning I go for the own brand, ‘Spar’ mineral water.

Putting aside for one moment the delicious irony of a shop called ‘Spar’ selling water, let’s settle the whole bottled water thing.

I was pretty much convinced it was a sign of the end of days when I saw that you could buy mineral water from Fiji in the supermarket.  Now, I don’t know much about Fiji, but I didn’t think fresh water was something they had in abundance enough to export.  I may be wrong.

Certainly, there are those that bang on about the health benefits of mineral water.  I’m not so sure, especially when it comes to that glacial water stuff made from, well, glacier ice that is supposed to have formed before the industrial revolution and various exploding volcanoes made the atmosphere as dirty as a Yewtree suspect’s past, as it may also contain traces of stuff our ancestors were immune to, but we’re not, like smallpox or racist remarks at the dinner table.

The virtue of the mineral water bottle is that you buy it, and then refill the bastard from the tap for the next year.  I have been doing this for a while now and really must remember to give my bottle a good clean, the rim has probably got more culture than BBC4 on it.

But I love my Spar bottle of tap water.  It says ‘Man of the people’.  And ‘hydrated’.

It also makes me feel somewhat smug when I see the tribe that have gone one better than the mineral water carriers; the people who make their own mineral water.  Have you seen them?  They have a bottle that looks far too much like a Tommee Tippee toddler drinking cup for my liking, which has a filter in it.  This is, presumably, to strain out the worst of the pigeon essence that is an essential, accepted part of any water tank in an office building.  They are also ruinously expensive.

The one thing I’ve learned about filters is that you have to change them.  And in this case, it’s pointless.  It’s turning water into…water.  What the fuck is the filter actually trapping anyway?  Unless the water company are putting plutonium in the supply, how worried should we be?

So, until they invent the Jesus filter, that turns H2O into ViNo, I’ll stick with my water, direct from the Spa(r).

Merry February

Post Christmas

During the festive season, friends and family are greeted with the question ‘keeping up the Christmas?’, meaning: ‘it is ten o’clock in the morning, with the day now in double figures, have you had a drink yet?’. Keeping up the Christmas conveys well the situation when it comes to food and drink at this time of year. Essentially the last normal meal anyone has is Christmas dinner, thereafter everyone just tucks into what is essentially a thinning selection of leftovers until it is time to supplement it with cheese, ham, pickle and of course, a constant flow of booze.

Certainly the Christmas season was extended this year. Thanks to the snow in December bringing postal deliveries to a grinding halt, people were still getting the Christmas cards and presents delivered in mid-January.

One of the odder ways in which a Christmas continuation manifests itself is the availability of Christmas branded stuff after Christmas. I’m not talking about actual Christmas leftovers, no, they are all reduced in price by about 75% and fly of the shelves as hoards of shoppers pick up cards, wrapping and baubles, baubles, baubles. What I mean is the ordinary stuff that, around Christmas time, is sold in Christmas packaging, cola being the prime example. In December the familiar red and white can usually sports a grinning bloke in a beard and this is all very jolly in the count down to Christmas. Mid-January though, when the vending machine is still spitting out cans decorated with bewhiskered old men, all it serves to do is to turn the January blues positively indigo.

This year much was made of the early appearance of Easter eggs in the shops. This was a good way of getting a lot of free publicity and was also excellent for those us who were going into chocolate withdrawal by 29 December after all the selection boxes had been emptied, chocolate coins cashed in and things were getting so desperate that one starts eyeing up the chocolate with nuts in it.

With Easter eggs being available in December and the weather in April sometimes including a festive looking dusting of snow, there is I think a justification for making novelty chocolate snowmen available at Easter.

Then again, perhaps the attitude to adopt to ensure a smooth transition from one religious holiday to another is to say sod the chocolate and crack open the sherry.