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).

Nature Notes Special - Floody Hell!

Water used to be our friend, our playmate.  We shower in the stuff, we add bubbles to it and bath in it, sometimes with candles.  We add bubbles to it and we drink the stuff, sometimes with a slice of lemon.  We water our plants with it, we water ourselves with it, we fill big pools and swim in it, we fill slightly smaller pools and communally bath in it after rugby games.  We even swim with dolphins in it, we like water so much that we can stop thinking 'fish poo' for long enough to splash about with Flipper in it.
Recently though, water has become the implacable foe, the slow creeping menace that inches towards the nation's doorsteps, or the rushing torrent, the same brown as the underwear of anyone unlucky enough to be caught in it.  The floods have come, and come, and come.
It is now, officially, beyond a joke.  What started before Christmas as the 'storm surge' turned to filthy weather at Christmas, leaving people with no power, a big raw turkey and realising that KFC for your Christmas dinner isn't really all that bad, as it means no sprouts and extra chips all round.  Ironically there was an advert doing the rounds over the festive season that posed the question 'can you barbecue a turkey?'.  Yes, you can is the answer, but you'd only know that if you had a telly, meaning you had power, in which case, you wouldn't be wrestling a reluctant barbecue from the back of the shed where it's become entangled with hose pipe, bicycles, cobwebs and the other Summer paraphernalia, but instead sitting snug getting hammered on red and waiting for the oven timer to ping before forgetting to put the scouts on, like any civilised person.
For future reference, yes, you can barbecue a turkey.  A mate of mine did it one year, even though he didn't have to.  A Webber kettle barbecue is best, lots of coals that are well banked for a constant heat, then drink red wine until its ready and you are pissed enough not to notice you've barbecue a turkey.  As with most cooking, it's all in the preparation, in this case, uncorking breakfast.
As the days turned to weeks, the rain continued to fall.  The television showed spectacular pictures of huge waves crashing over sea defences and nightly heart-rending images of flooded front rooms.  There was nothing to be done, it would appear.

Then Prince Charles visited a flooded village.
Several things then happened, very quickly indeed.
The first was that question 'what use is the monarchy in the twenty first century?' was answered, as the Prince got blanket TV coverage and sympathised with the plight of the flooded villagers.  He then, one imagined, 'phoned the prime minister and gave him a Royal bollocking.  Because the next day the prime minister was chairing the government's emergency committee after which the army was deployed.
Following Prince Charles's example, politicians unwisely began popping up in wellies in villages.  Unlike the Prince, they were bollocked by very angry villagers who wondered what the fucking fuck they had been doing for the last few weeks.  Hint: if the answer was not 'filling sandbags' they you looked like a prize tool.
The other question that was answered was 'Is there more to UKIP than racism?'.  Yes, yes there is.  There's stupidity too.  UKIP's leader, Nigel Farage, was seen dressed in what one imagines a repressed country squire might look like, in suspiciously new wax jacket and wellies, droning on about how we should cut the foreign aid budget and use it for flood defences.  The BBC bloke then asked what he was doing to get relief money from Europe, which is available.  The answer - f**k all, Mr Farage apparently believing that the entire structure of the European Union closes down on a Sunday.  Next item on the news, EU officials making a statement about some ruling or other, on a Sunday.
As with many disasters, this adversity has brought out the best in people.  Communities coming together to help one another, the British Army doing their usual spectacular job in crap conditions, and monarchy leading.

Water water

There's an air of magnificence about the British weather. A lot of this is a result of Britain, although geographically relatively small in the global scale of things (not too small, you couldn't lose it under a breadcrumb on an atlas, although a chunk of scone would do the job), apparently extending through more climatic zones than your average continent. So it can be that the southern extreme can bask in Mediterranean sunshine (the price the Channel Islands pay for being close to France), while the northern extremes shiver under snow clouds (affording an excellent opportunity to stoke the peat fire and distill some more whisky). Meanwhile in the west Ireland is famously home to an infinite variety of 'wet' and in the east, farmers are worried about both water shortages and reprisal attacks from otters furious that their habitat is being pumped away to irrigate fields of cucumbers.

Moreover, there's a growing sense that the British weather has a sense of humour, and a sense of timing that would not disgrace a comic actor or a pissed housewife at a party choosing to give her husband a dressing down just as the party's 'mute moment' - the instant at which a room unexpectedly and unaccountably falls silent as all conversations (but one) simultaneously pause - happens.

It has been for years an accepted fact of climatic life that 'bank holiday weather' is best described as trying to keep your barbecue going in a thunderstorm. It could be because the majority of bank holidays are scheduled at times of the year when the weather is unpredictable (January to December) but more probably it is because the weather gods enjoy a laugh as much as anyone. Moreover, if one pictures a weather god, does one get the image of an easygoing bloke in shorts and sandals, giving all a sunny smile and clear skies? No, one gets the image of an angry, constipated looking Viking with a beard that has to be wrung out every two minutes, farting thunderbolts and pissing on the bonfires of a nation.

If there is anything more likely to promote precipitation than a bank holiday, it's the announcement of a hosepipe ban. And lo! It came to pass that a number of water companies in various parts of England, busy pissing away millions of gallons of water through cracked pipes and supplying buckets of the stuff to industry who then use it to mix with poison before dumping it in a nearby nature reserve, imposed a hosepipe ban this weekend.

The English do not like hosepipe bans. They love their hosepipes. They use them to water lawns and floral borders, to spray noisome children, to separate copulating dogs, to fill paddling pools, to wash their cars and, of course, to put out burning sheds and fences, aflame as a result of recent creosoting and carelessness, drunkenness or careless drunkenness near the barbecue.

Previously, hosepipe bans have been enforced by, among other things, helicopter surveillance. The expectation this year was that thanks to the development in airborne surveillance techniques, and with Bin Laden now found, there must be dozens of drone craft knocking about in hangers that could easily be re-tasked to criss-cross the yellow gardens of the South East looking for suspicious squares of green. Just make sure that the drone is disarmed so that the operator's usual response on spotting a likely target - bombing the shit out of it - is not an option.

But apparently in this case it won't be choppers, coppers, drones or eyes in the sky spying, it will be eyes over the fence, with neighbours being encouraged to shop their neighbours. This is something the English can really get behind, and despite appearances owes less to the Stasi and more to the school of 'try winning cucumber of the year at the village fete from behind bars, you tuber growing bastard'.

But given that it has rained every day since the ban was announced, one cannot escape the suspicion that there is a secret order high in the combined ranks of the National Farmers Union, RHS and several water companies who, on certain occasions, pray for rain, then sacrifice a goat.

Postcard from Malvern

Malvern is a charming spa town in the West Midlands. It's famous for its water, its hills and its Elgar. It is a delightful place, actually comprised of a number of villages strung out along the hills, each with their own distinct personality, Great Malvern is posh - that's where the theatre and lovely wee independent coffee shops that sell cake are, Malvern Link is more commercial - that's where you find shops that sell things that are useful, instead of just pretty or conversation-stimulatingly ugly, and Malvern Wells is home to the bohemian set - artists and musicians drawn to the area's beauty who can essentially be characterised as men with long hair and women wearing too much eyeliner.

Malvern is also home to Quenitic, or however the hell you spell is. It used to be RSRE, where lots of toys for the armed forces were made. Then it was privatised and renamed, presumably by some marketing consultant who managed the twin feat of annoying everyone who thinks that 'kinetic' should be spelled kay eye en ee tee eye cee and causing the sort of person who froths with indignation at the thought of somebody being paid ten grand to mis-spell a word reach for their green ink. Having said that, if the brief was 'come up with an anonymous word that doesn't advertise what we do', then bravo! What they do is an open secret in Malvern, and given away because not many West Midland engineering firms have the latest armoured vehicles parked up in the car park, waiting to be tricked out with lots of things designed to put a crimp in your day if you live in a cave and think that letting off an RPG at a squaddie is the action of a fearless freedom fighter. Thanks to the boffins at Malvern, people like that often hear a 'woosh' noise shortly before they are redistributed across no fewer than five post codes.

It also means that there are a lot of rich people in Malvern, because it turns out that lots of people all over the world have enemies they would like to relocate over the landscape, and consider that while an armoured vehicle is all very well, an armoured vehicle bristling with enough offensive weaponry to let you safely queue barge at Asda in the run up to Christmas is just the ticket.

I have a mate who, on a fine summer evening, would walk on the hills, find a comfortable, secluded spot to recline and smoke some weed. He swore to me that one evening he saw a UFO. This was at the height of the popularity of the X-Files and so I put his seeing lights in the sky down to an over-stimulated imagination and plenty of Moroccan black rather than an alien visitation. More likely still is that they were testing some sort of aircraft, although whether bothering hippies was part of the design brief, I'm not sure.

As a spa town, Malvern has a curious, if delightful, atmosphere. It's like a landlocked seaside resort. There is a theatre, lots of grand houses and excellent rail links to London, a relic of the days when folk from the capital came up to the town to take the waters as part of the 'cure'. Now, of course, London has its own spas, although the water is shipped into the capital from all over the world at great cost. In Malvern, the water gushes free from the springs in the hills. The locals pitch up and fill containers with spring water. To anyone used to paying for their expensive bottled water in the shops, this is something of a revelation, like chardonnay bubbling up from the ground in a spring in Surrey.

And yes, the free stuff does taste better.


One of the rather lovely shops in Great Malvern is the fabulous Austin & Co. (austinandco.co.uk). This small shop sells the sorts of greeting cards, jotters and note books that you won't find in high street chains. I spoke with the proprietor about note books and he explained that he had weaned two of his customers off of Moleskien notebooks to a superior German brand that, when written in with a fountain pen, did not allow the ink to leak through the paper. Make that three customers now weaned off of Moleskien. The hand written sign advertising the notebooks announced that they were a recent arrival in the UK and were 'a must for any stationary fetishist'. I do so hate to be pigeon-holed, so accurately.

The hills themselves have many moods, changing minute by minute as the light changes. They can be shrouded by mists, bathed in sunlight, festooned with walkers. They can be black or bright green, or occasionally orange, when they catch fire.

The hills, and the spectacular views of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire that one has from them, means that the area attracts plenty of walkers. These come in all varieties but are universally underdressed if unaccompanied by a dog. There are backpackers, with maps, there are ramblers, with sticks, there are runners, with thighs of steel and there are those who see having to use a walking stick or a mobility scooter as no deterrent at all to strolling or rolling along the path to the peak to enjoy the view.

The locals love it to, throwing out the friendly greeting 'lovely view' got me the response 'aye, that's why we must protect it'. Whether the chap meant that a beautiful landscape looks better without a filthy great industrial development in the middle of it, or that his view would be better without the chatty bloke in an annoyingly bright anorak and his ridiculously happy dog tearing round in circles in it, I'm not sure.

As well as gentle paths and steep climbs, there are many places to stop and admire the view, with handy benches augmenting your ability to combine sitting and appreciating the view with the simple act of enjoying a refreshing cup of flask tea. Many of these benches have wee plaques explaining that they are in memory of this person or that person, who loved this view.


There's nothing quite like a practical memorial. My favourite is not a bench, hardly even a seat, but a sort of outdoor stool, perfectly positioned for the solitary contemplation of the Herefordshire countryside, a view of rolling countryside uninterrupted by large towns or shopping centres that most locals observe while giving silent thanks that they live in Worcestershire.