bunn

I've been avoiding shopping at Amazon, since they seem to be so peculiarly unpleasant to their staff and after all, one can buy the same things easily enough from much smaller businesses online -- but yesterday I was checking a wishlist, and the site showed me a  kayak for 59 quid including delivery from a local manufacturer.   I'm pretty sure that the price was entered wrongly and it should have been 259 or even 359, but  I bought it anyway, and the money has been taken and the order not cancelled yet, so I'm starting to think they will honour the price.

Feeling weirdly guilty about it, though I'm pretty sure that selling 260quid items for 60 is not going to make Jeff Bezos any richer.  Also, yay!  new kayak!?  Wait and see, I guess.

... and they finally noticed the pricing error, and cancelled the delivery at 2:30pm today.  The kayak is now listed at £329, which puts it well out of impulse buy territory.  Drat.  Oh well, I expected it really! 

I bought two new dog beds today.   After much agonising over online options, I decided to actually take the dogs to choose beds, so that I could check they would fit.  So, I got the beds off the shelf, and I made the dogs sit in the beds to check that they were the right size.  And I swear, in the shop they WERE the right size.

Now we have got home, both beds appear to be rather too small for the dogs for which they were purchased! I conclude that my dogs are actually larger when they are inside my house.    At present, the nice new bed I bought for Rosie is quite empty, and the big squishy bed I bought for Brythen is occupied by a small and enormously smug Bungle cat.   Both dogs are upstairs on their old beds quaking at the sheer horror of being expected to cope with new beds.

Edited: New theory,( Read more... )

We went to Bere Alston today, in search of a second hand bookshop.   Bere Alston is a large village in the middle of the Bere Peninsula, which is an oddity in that it is a sort of fully-retracted peninsula in the middle of a land mass.  It is separated from Cornwall and the rest of Devon by rivers that bend round to make it almost an island.   So Bere Alston has oddly few connections to the outside world, and feels quiet and isolated.   The core of the place is tiny nineteenth century miners cottages, all huddled together around the few shops, and then around the outskirts there are sprawling estates of ugly twentieth century bungalows.

When we arrived,  a small group of children (the girls dressed in oddly timeless long skirts and boots) were cheerfully flying supermarket plastic bags on the end of long strings, like kites.   But this was not the odd part.

( The odd part. )

On Saturday,we popped to Liskeard, a local market town.  I've not been to Liskeard in a couple of years, probably, and it was a shock to see how many shops were standing empty.  Liskeard is a small town relatively recently blessed by the addition of an extended out of town large supermarket, and a small retail park.  Together, these really seem to have sucked the already-ebbing life out of the place.  
( A Portas Town )

philmophlegm had some bad news on Friday - he is being made redundant.  This came as quite a shock, as he has been zooming around like a blue-arsed fly for weeks and had a small mountain of things on his work 'to do' list.  Here's hoping that our location lurking on a damp peninsula a Very Long Way from Everywhere between two vast and empty moorlands will not stop him from finding something else.  I can see us having to move house though - either West, to get within commuting distance of Truro, St Austell and Falmouth, which have all come up enormously in the world since we moved to Cornwall or East to within commuting distance of the Small-to-Medium-Sized Wen, Exeter.  Preferably Truro : Exeter is OK, but I think it had more character as Isca Dumnoniorum...   

It's gone cold and wet and 'orrible today.
( A chilly dog demands clothes )

The card machine at the Coop has taken to asking questions while you wait for shopping to be scanned.

Some of these questions I was heartily in favour of , for example:
"Did you find everything you were looking for" is an excellent question for a supermarket to be asking that has been known to run out of bread, milk, lemons, bananas,tinned sardines etc entirely by 6pm in the evening.

I can even cope with questions like "do our ethics make it more likely that you will shop at the Coop' because although there is an obvious quibble over putting ALL the ethics into one giant pot, and I would definitely like to add footnotes like "if you are that ethical how come none of the meat in your fridge is either free range or organic" and "dubious about the concept of ethical supermarket" and even "my personal ethics prefer THESE bananas" ... yet on the whole, I can probably say a generalised 'yes' to the idea of ethics in food shopping.

I'm not sure about the "were the staff neat and clean" type question which seem a bit intrusive, but I can honestly answer yes to all of those as they are a lot cleaner and neater than me with my wellies and post-dog-walk birdsnest hair.

Today's question: "Is it good that we support Variety Club" though - I have no yes no answer to that. My first reaction is : What the f*ck is Variety Club? And in what sense 'support'? Do they mean they currently fund it, whatever it is, or are they asking if they should fund it, or is this 'support' more in the sense that they take all Coop employees down to cheer it on Saturday afternoons?

Despite the lure of being asked for an opinion - with buttons to press that went beep! I had to ignore it. SO HARD!