Christmas Coffee Cups

A few posts ago, I was ranting about coffee cups and Christmas as a marketing ploy.  Thinking about it, it’s only natural that coffee shops should have seasonal cups.  They’ve been trying to personalise the coffee experience, just like the cola companies have been trying to, and so no wonder that they changed the design of their beverage containers to make us think ‘ahhh, lovely, let me guzzle this and go out and buy another, this is fun!’.

It does lead me to wonder why the hell aren’t these people making a bit more of an effort during the rest of the year.  Christmas is not the main Christian holiday, Easter is, and so why don’t we have special; designs for Easter.  Or for other seasons or holiday, God knows the shops seem pretty bloody keen to sell us stuff related to Halloween, why not cups and cola cans too.  (Honourable exception here, Krispy Kreme, they make one hell of an effort.  I don’t know what’s in that orange icing they use, but it’s practically a legal high).

Given the drive for personalisation of your gulping experience by cola companies and coffee shops alike it is unsurprising that they seek to make the experience special with a seasonally decorated beverage holder.

Gentleman & Player’s favourite though is, you will be unsurprised to learn, the Waitrose coffee cup.

Let’s pause for a second to consider the Waitrose beverage.  If you have a ‘My Waitrose’ card (which is one of those customer loyalty cards that allows, depending on your point of view, either you to get reward points and vouchers and special offers or for the store to build up a profile of you based on your shopping meaning they know what you eat, what you drink, when you go on holiday, what birth control you use, when you menstruate, and can sell all this to, in ascending order of dreadfulness, other companies, foreign powers or Our Own Government!) you can get a free tea or coffee every day.  The idea is of course that you go in there thinking ‘just a free coffee, just a free coffee’, start getting your coffee, think ‘must…be…strong’ and then exit with at the very least a pastry and more likely a 42 inch telly.  Such is the acknowledged power of going to the shops for a bottle of HP sauce and coming back with an HP printer.

The Waitrose seasonal coffee cup is…it’s…well…it’s very Waitrose.  It’s a white reindeer and seasonal scene on a green background.

Two things.

Firstly, tradition.  Apparently, before the evil elves at the marketing department of a certain cola company got busy, the traditional colours of Christmas were green and white, not red and white.  This makes sense, as we have green Christmas trees in the house and the only red traditionally on offer is the breast of a robin and the claret spilled during the traditional family punch up (always after the Queen’s Speech, we’re not savages).

Secondly, it’s just so very classy and understated.

But surely they can do more.  Costa have four different characters, with the occasional variation, Waitrose can turn a cup into a collectable.

Obviously, a simple red dot on the snout of the animal turns a random reindeer into a beloved character.

A tartan bow, and we have a wee ‘Monarch of the Glen’ moment.

For our American Friends, who think nature is best admired when mounted on the wall of their double-wide trailer, a cross hairs on the forehead.  Actually, that’s the Scottish stalking method, if it’s an American, it’ll be a green haze and a line of print along the bottom that reads ‘cluster bomb option selected’.

I actually rather liked the Waitrose coffee cup.  Possibly because it was full of free coffee but probably because it was astatically pleasing.  The reindeer in question actually looked quite jolly, the green (Waitrose corporate colour though it was) was understated but festive, and appropriate, it was the sort of green you might encounter in nature.  Possibly in woods where fir trees grow.  Possibly at night, armed with a hacksaw, I couldn’t possibly comment.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

If you needed reminding that the festive season is upon us, you need look no further than your beverage cup.  Cola companies, of course, have a long tradition of festive cans, one even going as far as to adopt the festive colours of red and white as a permanent design feature of their cans (although there is a story that the red and white we now associate with Christmas is in fact a result of that particular cola company imposing their company colour scheme on the season.  Frankly, although the idea is cynical, it’s believable as, asked the questions ‘do you believe in Father Christmas?’ and ‘do you believe those bastards in marketing would even try to hi-jack Christmas for their own evil ends?’, I know which of the two I would be more confident in answering in the affirmative.  Having said that, if a cola company was responsible for the clothing colours of any character beloved of children, then, given the sugar content of the stuff they peddle, I’d of thought the tooth fairy would be a better example).

Cola cans now come in festive designs and, if you like that sort if thing, it’s all very jolly.  Ho Ho Ho.

But the fun doesn’t stop with a tin can.  Coffee cups now come with Christmas characters on them.  Costa are an excellent example of this, with four different designs of paper beaker, a snowman, a reindeer, an elf I think and, possibly, Santa.  Given the design limitations of a receptacle that, to be at all useful, has to have a rather abrupt straight edge to the top, they all look like beloved characters that have been in an industrial accident, but they are sort of jolly all the same.

Naturally, as soon as I saw them, I wanted to ‘collect the set’.  Be advised, drinking four cups of coffee in one day is sensational for productivity, next to useless for producing anything of worth.  You may well be typing like a demon, but the word ‘wheeeeeeeeee’, with another 274 ‘ees’ is not, as I soon discovered, acceptable content for an e mail or text.  At least not on its own.

In case you are wondering, coffee saturation is not best dealt with by drinking alcohol in a classic ‘you give a drunk guy coffee, so it’s best to give an over-stimulated fellow booze, right?’.  That’s the sort of idea you have after your forth store-bought latte.  I discovered.  It doesn’t work.

Elsewhere, the commercial signs of Christmas are everywhere.  The worse thing about them…they work.

Day to day, I have very little interest in port.  If I am at a restaurant and am having the cheese board, I’ll probably order a glass because a socially acceptable way to drink fortified wine and gives you the necessary courage to try the stilton brooding thuggishly and untouched at the end of the slate of cheeses that these bloody people insist you eat from left to right.  However, wandering down the ‘seasonal’ aisle of the supermarket at Christmas (in effect, the entire shop), if I see a half bottle, boxed with a cheese knife and a cheese board, I want it.  I don’t need it, I don’t particularly like it, but I want it.

The same goes for whisky.  I feel manipulated, I should not be thinking ‘must…have…scotch’ just because it comes packaged with a couple of engraved glasses.

In days of yore, Christmas was heralded by perfume adverts on telly (switching, at 5:30 on Christmas Eve, to holiday adverts, because in yore, Dads earned the money and had to be told how to spend it), now, it’s the same stuff you walk past every day, in a new box, that lets you know that the season of peace and goodwill to all men, and especially consumers, is upon us.

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).

Tesco in the toilet

Trebuchet.

Bless you.

A trebuchet is a siege engine.  That is, it is a bloody huge wooden tower with a weighted throwing arm, designed to throw heavy objects against or over castle walls, from a distance further away than the longest ranged weapon available to the castle inhabitants.

That’s right, like in LOTR.

Trebuchets were the heavy artillery of the age of castles and siege warfare, and lasted right up until the arrival of the sapper, a bloke with a beard and a spade and some stuff he called gunpowder, who explained how he could tunnel under the castle walls and explode the gunpowder.

Two obvious points before we move on, why couldn’t the hirsute little sod keep digging, like a Medieval Manic Miner, for a few more yards and so make a tunnel into the castle enabling troop deployment into the Keep?  Also, why did none of these idiots ever think of attacking the castle through the weakest point; the gift shop.

Imagine though, having something like a trebuchet.  A tall tower with a throwing arm like Ian Botham on a good day.  And these things were made out of wood, not Lego.  Essentially, you took a tree, which had been withstanding gales and gusts for decades, then strengthened it with all sorts of fastening and, oh I don’t know, elastic bands or whatever, then you pulled the bugger back and then…TWANG!

I love trebuchets.

What I love about them, is their versatility.

Previously, I may have remarked that I have something of an antipathy for the popular chain store and tenth circle of Hell, Tesco.  This is based on a number of factors, such as the way they abuse their suppliers, and the way their customers abuse one another when in their stores.  I stopped shopping at Tesco after witnessing an argument between a couple who were pensioners.  I had previously thought that they were just an argumentative pair who shopped at Tesco and who, after 60 years of married life, enjoyed a public bicker.  Now I am more inclined to think that they are a loving pair who, after 60 years of married life, only ever argue in Tesco because of its conducive atmosphere.  I was also not a fan of the way that my local petrol station had a ‘Tiny Tesco’ or whatever the fuck they are called, and that they were convenient and open late when I needed wine.  Yes, I did see people shopping there in their pyjamas.  No, I never did.

So after the curious incident of the guide dog in the Tesco, I was researching how to build a trebuchet, thinking I might contact a farmer, buy a large quantity of manure, then fling the mess at my nearest store (having stocked up on wine beforehand, obviously).  This seemed the only way in which such a callous commercial monster might be wounded.

Then I turned on the radio.

Turns out, Tesco are in the shit.

So this is a company that makes a fortune, right?  A success story, right?  They post profits and then go and rub themselves against trees or something, right?

Apparently not.

Apparently, somebody has now queried the company accounts and the problem is that what was reported as ‘Finest’ is actually rather more ‘Value’, and either quite a lot of people forgot to carry the decimal point, or there has been a gross (or net, I’m not quite there with the accounting terms) misstatement of the amount of money that the company makes.

The enjoyment of the misfortune of others is a concept so alien to most civilized societies that only the Germans have a word for it.

What an absolute bunch of arseholes.

I mean, it’s not as if you had any ethical credibility, or were an outstanding employer, or your food was that good or your stores were a pleasure to visit.  All you had was that you made shedloads of money, and also possibly that you had the good grace to keep your shops that were attached to garages open late so that people who fancied something red and cheeky of an evening didn’t have trek the extra five minutes along the road to Sainsbury’s.

Postcard from Norfolk – Farm Shop again

The final visit to the farm shop, to stock up on fresh, muddy, fruit and veg before going home. While I was there, fondling the apples so large one feels like a borrower, a delivery van pulled up. Nothing unusual in that but this was, if the sign painted on the side was to be believed, delivering 'rare breed cuts'. Getting rarer all the time I would say. I'm not sure if the best way of pressing a breed is to ensure that members of it are sliced up and served up with chips, but I guess the farmers know what they are doing. Maybe if we discovered tigers were delicious, farmers would rear them, although it would take one fucking tough dog to round them up.

Postcard from Norfolk – Farm Shop

A few minutes' drive from the cottage is the local farm shop. One one side sits the orchards that grow the apples sold in the shop, on the other side are the Pick Your Own crops, with strawberries thoughtfully grown on tresses so one doesn't have to bend over.

The fruit and veg on sale looks good. It looks different to that sold in the supermarket for a few reasons. The first is that, like all farm shop food, there is the occasional vegetable that does not conform to the supermarket aesthetic, looking either like a prop from a sci fi film, or a prop from a porn flick.

The second reason is that the fruit and veg is authentically dirty. My tip is to make sure that you knock the larger clods of muck off of your potatoes before you get them weighed.

It was very busy, with folk pulling in and stocking up on this and that. A group of very posh looking blokes travelling in a BMW (middle class fancy gentlemen rather than gangsters one thinks) were ahead of us in the queue and the shopkeeper managed to keep a straight face when announcing that the bill for their two bags of shopping was 'three hundred pounds please'. Oh the hilarity.

The owner did, however, redeem himself with a small notice he had placed next to the RNLI Christmas cards on sale, apologising for having Christmas cards on sale in October, but explaining that it was a good cause.

On weekends, a mobile fish shop parks up in the car park of the farm shop. Naturally, I ended up purchasing quite a lot of cockles. Of course, one could purchase 'the kit' in any garden centre, a fork, some wellies and a bucket, but cockling looks like something of an art, the art being knowing where he cockles are. Moreover, my pace when walking the beaches of Norfolk is a cross between 'amble' and 'meander', what ive observed of cocklers leads me to believe that one must stride out with purpose.

Returning to the cottage, I collected some kindling for the woodburner.

I do not get on with woodburners. There is no point in having a fire that you cannot poke and, whatever safety or efficiency measures putting doors on the front of a fire might add, what they detract in terms of pokability make them more a frustration than a feature. When in Norfolk on a cottage holiday a real fire is important, when I unpack after the holiday I expect all of my clothes to smell of woodsmoke and I expect myself personally to reek like an Arbroath smokie. Woodburners are not romantic, one may as well cuddle up in front of a radiator, which produces an unfortunate, and not terribly romantic image, for anyone familiar with the Beirut hostage crisis in the eighties.

As it was, we were lucky to get the thing working at all, some genius had removed the handle that opens the front of it and it took the holiday cottage people a week to sort the issue. Luckily, last week was the week of the unexpected heat wave and so the fire wasn't needed. But it's the principle.

Kindling is, I should say,available for sale everywhere. But I balk at having to pay for the stuff when it's available for free on the ground if you can be bothered to stop, bend over and pick it up. Firewood is a little more problematic, but we do have a building site a few cottages away an I've noticed plenty of pallets stacked up. This might be an option for a dead of night pallet raid, although one has to be prepared to put up with watery eyes from the creosote burning.

The science of chance

I am walking, in my normal jaunty fashion, from the train station to home, looking forward to uncorking dinner, listening to 'a history of the world in 100 objects' on my iPod. The episode I am listening to is about a golden statue of a goddess, from Sri Lanka.

It's pretty racy stuff. The goddess is described as a two thirds life size female figure, with an hourglass figure, wearing a sarong on her lower half and topless with 'perfect' breasts. Rather than an object of titillation, she's an object of veneration, the narrator explains.

And just as he's describing her, I mean to the very second, I walk past the window of just about the only clothes shop in the village and the mannequin in the window is wearing a skirt but has her top half exposed.

Why? I'm not sure. I assume that the window dresser is back of shop, looking out a new top (it's way after closing time and, as odd as this may sound, seeing a topless mannequin makes me somewhat embarrassed for the plastic woman I the window.
Has she been forgotten, has the window dresser left in a rush or, god help us, is the shop trying to be controversial or trying to really hit that giggling schoolboy demographic? The mannequin stands in a typical cocktail party pose, glass in one hand, the other hand on hip, wearing a long skirt. Her head is cocked as if half listening to somebody enthusing about Star Trek while looking for somebody more interesting and better looking to talk to - it's a pose I recognise - and totally unselfconsciously unaware that she's topless. At a party it's bloke's dilemma number eight; at what point do you tell a woman you are talking to that she is experiencing catastrophic blouse failure (answer - you don't, there is no way that woman is ever, ever going to speak to you again, the atmosphere simply cannot cope with the heat generated by frequent meetings of somebody that embarrassed; so you just have to stand there trying desperately to think of a tactful way of explaining that you're catching an eyeful while simmering in the social hell that you've already delayed too long and she'll think that you're some sort of leering pervert. If you must, the correct way to deal with this is to mention the situation as early as possible in the conversation and do so by commenting either on her tattoo or lack of. Simple.).

What are the chances of that happening?

There are two explanations. The first is that the probability of seeing something related to something I am listening to is actually quite high. '100 objects' is my podcast of choice for my walk home and as my route takes me past a number of shops, and in particular charity shops, it's reasonable that in a podcast about artefacts I'd be walking past something that bears a resemblance to the object being described.

The alternative is that, along with all the other laws and rules that govern the smooth running of the universe, from the way electrons orbit atoms to the way that steam wafts from the open window of a burger van on a cold winter's match day, there's room for a set of rules governing the lives of individuals and the universe ordered the events that led to the circumstance we call 'coincidence'.
And don't worry, that doesn't mean that everything is predetermined - quite the reverse - it means we may possibly have been missing stuff that's been organised for us, like a bloke who nips out for a fag at a stag do and misses the stripper. Everything from missing out on meeting someone significant because you went to the doughnut shack rather than the cafe for breakfast, all the way to missing being centre stage in a natural disaster because you decided not to visit a small Pacific island during asteroid strike season.

Hethrow Airport

(On our drive into Heathrow, we gave the strikers from UNITE a friendly toot. This was not out of any particular sense of solidarity; after being comically overcharged by BA on a flight back from Edinburgh to London (my carbon footprint is the size of a yeti’s…what of it?) I’m going to be punching the newly uncluttered air when BA fold like a cheap tent, but I reckon a little toot makes the workers feel a lot better and hey, the flags were jolly. Actually, I can’t see what all the fuss is about over the BA strike. This is cabin crew striking, right? So, if the people who hand out sandwiches, crisps, tea and stun guns (I’m presuming) on National Express coaches go on strike, can we expect the same degree of media hysteria? God, I hope so.)

Heathrow Airport. It’s huge, like a modern urban sprawl composed of places that were once villages in their own right, with customs like inbreeding, morris dancing, scrumpy festivals and duck ponds for dunking witches in. At Heathrow, it’s the terminals that are the villages, with their own shops, cafes and pubs. But unlike most villages, the majority of the population are just passing through and those that do work here come from all over the world, (well, all over Eastern Europe) rather than from all over the surrounding half mile radius.

The main occupations of the transient population of a terminal village (odd name for a place where most people are going from or through rather than ending up) are: waiting, sleeping, eating, drinking, battling constipation or nerves, and shopping. Luckily the shops of the terminal village are there to provide a diversion, reasonably priced coffee and extravagantly priced luxury items.

In the golden age of air travel, rich people flew from aerodromes where the terminal was a hut and transatlantic flight was mostly powered by glamour and hair oil. The arrival of the package holiday meant affordable travel for the oiks – sorry; ordinary folk, while the rich invented first class. Now the terminal is full of the sort of people who might travel standard class on a train or even, throwing caution to the wind, decide that coach travel is for them.

However, if you want to purchase a handbag that costs three hundred quid and, because it’s tax free, still feel like you got a good deal, then the airport is the place for you.

Mostly because in the terminal you have quite a disconnected sense of reality and it does make sense to buy designer sunglasses in preparation for an English summer and a bar of chocolate bigger than your mouth (Toblerone, what’s going on there?). Boredom has a lot to answer for.

And like many villages, it has it’s own backroads, byways and winding lanes, or in this case, a walk to a boarding gate so far away that I fully expected us to be greeted with a different regional accent when we arrived and then asked to adjust our watches to the new time zone.

Bloomin' marvellous

Well, Valentine's day has come and gone for another year. A forest of trees has been felled to provide the cards while the pollen count in supermarkets has gone through the roof thanks to the amount of cut flowers for sale.

An anonymous message of love sent to somebody you have amorous feelings for! On the fourteenth of February, this is considered romantic; any other time of the year and it's stalking.

This weekend was also marked with a trip to my local megamart, a shop so vast that it has its own tribe, called shoppers or, to give them their common name, Chavs. They even have their own language - the snarl. Such as 'yer, well, like, that's what I'm looking for innit, follow-on crisps for toddlers'.

I was taking the opportunity to purchase some flowers and, for reasons to far-fetched to explain, was paying for them at the 'Digital Counter'. This is not, as one might expect, a huge clock but is instead where you might, for instance, purchase 'Medal of Honour' while also indulging in some blooms.

The chap behind the counter expressed shock at the cost of the flowers and suggested that I could get a value bouquet for a couple of quid.

Looking at a bloke who works behind the computer games counter at the supermarket, advising a customer who was spending thirty quid on a console game to go with a cheap bouquet, one had the feeling that cupid really has his work cut out sometimes.

Anticipating the Big Dump

England is bracing for the Big Dump. The news and weather shows us that a band of snow is moving inexorably southwards, sweeping down from the north like the glaciers did. The pictures coming in from Scotland are grim, and not the usual grim of social depravation and the sort of dental hygiene only a lifetime of abusing irn-bru can bring. No, the news has decided to ease off on the pictures of jolly people enjoying snowball fights, people swimming in pools and seas where the temperature makes your testicles retract into the roof of your mouth (not somebody else’s, that’s the plot of ‘frozen fun V’) and have instead gone with pictures of people trying to dig their car out of a snowdrift, dig their house out of a snowdrift or, if they are anything like me, dig a path to the shed where the leftover Christmas booze has been stashed.

Danger arriving from the north has obviously sparked some sort of ancestral memory. On the way home from work I stopped at my local mini-mart (a soulless Sainsbury’s that, two weeks after opening, had managed to ensure that the excellent Budgens in the high street closed, leaving us with a much narrower selection of crisps and other corn based snacks. Indeed the only plus point of the store is the ridiculously cheery staff, who always ask how you are and how you day has been – this is a bloody high risk strategy as I always have to remind myself that the chap on the till does not necessarily want to hear a forty minute monologue on the inequities of my train operating system, my constant battle with fuckwittage (some of which, admittedly, is my own) and the million petty miseries and triumphs that make up modern life. Hence, I always answer ‘not bad, how are things with you?’ and, to be fair, he always gives a cheery answer although I am braced for the day when he either says ‘I need a hug’ or says something that sounded like ‘great, I killed a fox with a hairbrush last night’, leading one to have to make an instant decision about whether to ask for clarification or just nod, say ‘great’ and hope that he actually said ‘great, I booked my holiday for summer last night’, because otherwise the next time you see him he’s going to want to talk about bludgeoning garden pests again.) to try and buy some anchovies.

It looked as though the hoards of Gengis Khan had been through the place. The shelves were bare of stock and I expected to hear ‘pony poo clean up on aisle five’ coming from the tannoy at any moment. With no fresh food on the shelves and no anchovies to be had, I panic bought red wine and headed home.

Panic buying is, I think, a very English thing. Foreigners have a different system, they just oil and load their guns and start to figure out which of their neighbours is the weakest and has the best stocked larder. The Scots are able to forage in the wild, in the highlands this means stalking a deer (which does not mean trying to befriend it on facebook) while in the cities it’s rather more along the lines of shuffling to the nearest pie or chip shop. This means living on chips. This is normal. The Welsh, of course can live off their own body fat for weeks and failing that the body fat of any English tourists they have waylaid.

I think in part it’s due to supermarkets now being open twenty four hours a day. People go into some sort of meltdown at the prospect of not being able to visit the shops at three in the morning to by aubergines, or an X Box.

Luckily, I still have a selection of food (and some back-up booze) left over from Christmas. It does present a challenge trying to pull together a meal from what is basically a cheeseboard, pork pies and some nuts, but I find that if you eat all that while pondering what to have for dinner, the urge to cook something vanishes.

Now awaiting the snow.

Postcard from Edinburgh - Tartan tat an' aw' that

Scotland's major export is, I'm now convinced, not tartan or tweed or scotch or oil or wry humour or racial stereotypes or shortbread or aggression or red hair or even tourists that go from blue to red to flaming balls of flaking skin in the Mediterranean sunshine. No, based on the evidence of my recent stay in Edinburgh, Scotland's main export is happy Japanese people.

There are a hell of a lot of Japanese people in Edinburgh and most of them seem to be coming out of tartan tat shops with carrier bags so laden with tartan and shortbread you think they are going to need a fleet of wheelbarrows to get all that shit back to the hotel.

Every time you walk past an Edinburgh tat shop, (which is every second shop on the Royal Mile) there is a happy family of Japanese tourists exiting, laden with bags brimming with tartan products. All I can think is that there must be a hell of a lot of obscure clans; the MacFuji's, the MacKunioshi's and the MacHiroshogi's must be delighted to discover their family tartan exists here in Edinburgh, at such reasonable prices! God alone knows what downtown Tokyo looks like when everyone decides to wear the gear they bought on holiday, Seven Samurai meets Braveheart.

Not that I was immune to the charms of tartan tat (tatan?) myself. I now own the most expensive shortbread in the world, not because it is made from organic panda harvested at the full moon by Madonna but rather because I loaded up on so many ‘memories of Scotland’ (ironic given that the most famous Scottish export is responsible for memory lapses when enjoyed in quantity) that on the flight* home I had to pay excess baggage. It may have been the flags or the tee shirt or the bottle of booze (oops) but I know, just KNOW, it was the shortbread. Or the Jimmy wig.

*That’s right, I took a domestic flight. Carbon footprint like a clown me.