Meals For One

It came to my attention yesterday, whilst I was doing my supermarket shopping, that you can buy packs of food 'For One'. I was horrified.

I mean, you don't get meals 'For Two', 'For Three', 'For Four' etc., do you? True, it will say in small print how many people it serves ("serves four"), but they are not marketed on the basis of how many people can eat them. It's outrageous.

They may as well have labels saying 'You Are Sad', or go one step further & have an entire section for single people, e.g. 'Meat', 'Fish', 'Breakfast Cereals', 'Household', & 'MEALS FOR SINGLE PEOPLE, & IN CASE THIS ISN'T CLEAR ENOUGH, WE MEAN PEOPLE WHO LIVE ALONE AND DON'T HAVE A PARTNER - THIS MEANS YOU!'.

Who made them the food police? When I put a pack of non-single-person food into my basket I felt really greedy, & ended up putting two packs of 'For One' into my basket. What??? It's bonkers. If I choose to eat three times as much as a single person should (or at least 'should' as dictated by Mr Asda, Mr Sainsbury or Mr Tesco) then that's my choice.

Quite apart from the above connotations, it's insulting: frankly I am quite capable of putting together a meal just for myself; I'm not about to mistakenly cook myself a whole packet of eight sausages because I've failed to work out that this pack was meant for a family & not just one person.

Perhaps it's meant to reflect the fact that there are far more single people today than ever before. According to The Times:

"There will soon be more single people than married ones in Britain. The number of single households is set to rise by 53% over the next 20 years to 9.9m, according to a report by Alliance & Leicester Mortgages. In the same period, married households are set to fall from 9.6m to 8.8m. "

Or - & I haven't actually done the research as yet, so I could be wrong - it could be that buying two 'For One's will work out more expensive (& thus bring in even more money to supermarket chains) than buying a normal size packet & eating it over two (or three) days. But maybe I'm just being cynical.

"Important lessons have been learned."

Whenever there is a disaster, caused either partly or wholly by incompetence &/or mistakes made within a company/government department/school/whatever, the inevitable response is that the "relevant issues have been addressed", "important lessons have been learned", "individuals involved have been identified & dealt with accordingly", & "procedures have been implemented to ensure a more 'joined-up' approach in the future". There are a variety of other combinations of words used in such circumstances, but essentially they are all variations of the above.

These 'lessons' are not always learned, a fact which is of course flagged up when a similar disaster occurs as a result of the non-learning of the afore-mentioned lessons. It really does beggar belief sometimes.

Lesson-learning is something that should apply to any given situation. From being very small we learn a series of lessons - some through experience, & some through being taught by parents & teachers.

But there are lessons I never seem to learn & here are some of them:

Unlearned lesson #1.

I persist in buying hair products that say they will give my hair 'volume'. They never do.

Unlearned lesson #2.

So-called 'ready meals' are a waste of money - they never taste as good as they claim, & by the time you've added all kinds of other ingredients & seasoning in order to make it edible, you could have made something from scratch. And it would have tasted a hell of a lot better.

Unlearned lesson #3.

Getting ready to go out always takes me a really long time - it always has done. I have always needed a good hour to get ready, and that's without allowing myself any time to get to where I'm going when I am ready. So why do I continue to give myself 15 minutes, thus making myself anything up to an hour & a half late every time?

Unlearned lesson #4.

I look absolutely terrible in drainpipe trousers. I looked awful in them when I was still young enough to wear them - I look even worse in them now. So what exactly was I doing trying on that pair in Asda the other day? Did I think that a miracle had befallen me overnight & suddenly I had a figure like Kate Moss? Did I think that my eyes had been deceiving me for the last 20 years & actually I had always looked fantastic in tight trousers? I looked as atrocious in them as I always have done - clearly no lesson learned there, then.

Unlearned lesson #5.

Squeezing spots will ALWAYS make them worse.

Unlearned lesson #6.

However much that lipstick may suit me - I will never ever wear it more than once. I may as well save my money.

Unlearned lesson #7.

Getting lost in my car & just driving around 'looking for something I recognise' is NEVER going to end up in anything but tears.

'Twas The Season

It's all over now, bar the residual mince pies, sausage rolls, chocolates, & any other Christmas related foodstuffs not consumed over the festive period. There's also, of course, the Christmas cake - which will last well into March, by which time you will be completely sick & tired of it, & not care if you never clap eyes on another for the rest of your natural life. The tree will stand in it's spot, looking more & more incongruous as your lives have returned to pre-Christmas normality. It will, however, leave a gaping hole when it's finally taken down.

You will feel, as you do most years, cheated out of those wonderful & glowing Christmases of old. The ones where you still wanted to decorate the tree, & hung your stocking on the end of the bed for Father Christmas. Don't forget, though, that those are real memories - Christmas really was that good. And once you accept that Christmas can never be that magical again, you can begin to enjoy Christmas again - for different reasons.

Plus you get presents.

Holidays On The Moon

I've been listening to The Specials, who used to be a favourite band back in the day (well, before I got a bit more 'exclusive' in what I listened to, i.e. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd & especially Bob Dylan. The other music just went 'underground' - I wouldn't admit to liking it, though I listened in secret.)

In my mind, they (The Specials) were a fairly recent band - well, not 'recent' but recent-ish. I did the maths & discovered to my horror that they actually split up 25 years ago. Which means that I was listening to them 29 years ago - a very sobering thought indeed. Anyway, it struck me for the first time that the world they were describing was, whilst not completely different from the world today, a significantly different place (unsurprisingly, given how long ago it all was).

For example, one of their songs (Stereotype) describes how the main character (the 'stereotype' of the title) catches 'VD':

"He blames his fiancee when he gets VD
The doctor says no drink for 17 weeks
He wants to go out but he has to stay home
Sit in & watch colour TV on his own. "

Now I (& others of my generation & older) know what VD means, but I doubt whether kids in their teens would know; such conditions have long been known as an STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases) - which I have to say sounds a lot better. Also, nowadays we wouldn't qualify what kind of TV we are watching as all TVs are colour; in those days their were 2 types (black & white and colour). I am old enough to remember that you were quite posh to have a colour telly, which seems really strange now.

This whole thing got me thinking & wondering how the world has changed. As my memory alone is fairly rusty, I looked up '1979' in Wikipedia (this alone shows how far things have progressed - the whole Internet thing would have been considered fantastical by 1979 standards; if someone had told me back then that I would someday be able to chat to someone on the other side of the world using a computer and something called the World Wide Web, I would have thought they were mad. Bizarrely I was quite happy to believe Blue Peter presenters when they told me that by the 2000's we'd be going for our holidays on the moon, & eating meals in capsule form).

The world really did seem far bigger back then then than it is now - with mysterious far away countries with their mysterious cultures. Also a lot of part-knowledge of historical events, some which interested you, most of which didn't. The world feels like a much smaller place now; partly this is due to advancing years - I've visited more places & learned about a whole variety of things, some important, some less so - plus a whole host of trivia. Obviously the more years you are knocking around for, the more knowledge you gain, which inevitably brings the world closer .

But a large part of this shrinking world is due to the technological advances that have been made over the past 20 years or so. As I've said, the concept of a world wide computer network would have sounded outlandish back in 1979. But it happened, & now we can do all kinds of things: we can buy stuff, we can chat in 'real time' with people in Australia (or any other equally distant land), we can bid on online auctions (e.g. eBay), we can buy our car insurance, book & pay for holidays, & we can even register to vote. If we feel like sorting out our finances in the middle of the night, we can access our bank details, move money around & view our up-to-the-minute bank statements. We can meet future partners, reveal intimate information about ourselves (to the whole world - at least those with internet access), & even have 'cyber sex'. We can join the Ku Klux Klan online if we so wish (though I certainly wouldn't advise it). It's extraordinary, and I really do wonder how on earth I got by before, though of course I did.

Another invention that would have sounded fanciful in those days would have been mobile phones ("Mobile telephones? That you walk around with? Yeah, right.") It happened though.

But before they came along we all got along fine. If you were out & needed to use a phone, you would go & put 5p in a public phone box (2p when I first started using them). If there were no public phones you just had to wait till you got home, simple as that. And we all had the same phone (below).

There were different colours available, but the phones were essentially exactly the same. You got them from BT, who would come to your house & install them - & that was your phone - end of story. They had a distinctive ring, which was pretty loud as I recall, & heralded by a single 'ding!' so you had advance warning. This made it virtually impossible to make clandestine phone calls on another phone - if you had an extension as we did - as they would 'ding' on both phones, alerting other members of the household that you were using the other phone. This made ringing friends when you should have been doing your homework extremely difficult - though there was a way of picking up the receiver without it 'dinging', which I discovered just as the phones were replaced by touch-tone ('button') phones which didn't have that problem.

I was in my last year at Middle School, where I was finally finding my confidence & some good friends (one of whom, Deborah, I am still in contact with). I felt hopeful about 1980 - which sounded terribly exciting - & looked forward to growing up.

I was also into music in a serious way. Though I mainly favoured chart music (which wasn't so bad - the late 70s was a very good time for music), I had already borrowed (& played to death) Never Mind The Bollocks by the Sex Pistols. This album still ranks in my top ten favourite albums - I'd say it was very nearly perfect.

Here's some of what was happening:

The good:

Rapper's Delight - Sugar Hill Gang
A Message To You Rudy - Special
Boogie Wonderland - Earth Wind & Fire
London Calling - Clash
Public Image - Public Image Ltd
The Devil Went Down To Georgia - Charlie Daniels Band
Off The Wall - Michael Jackson
Don't Stop Till You Get Enough - The Jacksons
My Sharona - The Knack


And the utter tripe...

Do Ya Think I'm Sexy? - Rod Stewart
Bad Girls - Donna Summer
Born To Be Alive - Patrick Hernandez
Coward Of The County - Kenny Rogers
If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me? - Dr Hook
Nice Legs Shame About The Face - The Monks


And in the news ... (as provided by Wikipedia):

• Kurt Waldheim announces the Internation Year of The Child. Mr Waldheim was president of Austria in the late 80s & early 90s, & secretary general for the UN during the 70s. It later emerged that he had played more than an observational role during the Nazi regime, after which revelations he found it difficult to continue his career in politics.
• Pol Pot's Khymer Rouge regime fell, resulting in Mr Pot fleeing the country & going into hiding. The Khymer Rouge were an extreme communist party who controlled Cambodia btween 1975 & 1979, & under whose rule around 1.4 million were slaughtered.
• The Sahara desert experienced 30 minutes of snow.
• Jim Callaghan's Labour government lost a Motion Of Confidence, resulting in a general election which the Conservative party won by a landslide. Margaret Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister & stayed in power until 1991, though the Conservatives continued in govt until 1997, making their stay in government 18 years.
• Iraqi president Hasan Al-Bakr resigned & Saddam Hussain took over
• Three families fleed from East Germany in hot air balloons
• 1st nudist beach in Britain opened in Brighton.

Blimey.

Spamalot!

The amount of spam mail I get to my email account is alarming. What's more alarming are the titles, which are often bizarre in the extreme. At best they're funny, & at worst they are mind-bogglingly X-Rated. In between these two extremes there are a variety of incomprehensible, inexplicable & intriguing titles. Having made the mistake of opening one particularly bizarre spam email - I just couldn't curb my curiosity- & downloading about 250 infections, thereby screwing up my computer, necessitating 'system restore' & running all my anti-virus programmes (all of which were out of date so it involved re-subscribing etc., etc.), I no longer open them. I have, however, been keeping a record of some of the stranger ones - here are a few of my favourites:

Is Salmonella So Salon
Realise Total & Absolute Power
The Small Cap Trend
Wolfe Kennith Just Wants To Give You This Hint

And my absolute favourite:

Manually Goldfish

It always makes me wonder who sent them & the circumstances under which they were sent. I imagine various scenarios. There's the classic 'slightly wierd loner' type, who I imagine living in one room (probably a bedsit), surrounded by WWW posters & sitting at his PC for a large amounts of time in order to send spam emails & viruses for his own unknown (but doubtless nefarious) reasons. Another scenario involves 'wacky' first year Computer Studies students, who are doing it "because we can".

Far more sinister are the hundreds of loans I am offered on a daily basis. I picture the senders of these to be the 'financial services' equivalent of blokes called Vince, who would rough you up soon as look at you & say things like "You love your mum, don't you?" as they pin you against a wall with a knife at your throat.

The amount I receive increases literally by the day. For example, yesterday I recived 179 (I counted). Amongst these I was variously offered several loans (see above), 'penis enhancement' (??), & asked if I wanted to get in touch with someone called 'Irina' (answer: no). This necessitates spending a good amount of time deleting them, which is pretty annoying. What I find hardest, however, is restraining myself from opening the more peculiar ones. In the case of ones with titles such as 'Manually Goldfish', this proves a difficult task.

Deeply Annoying

One of my Christmas presents hasn't arrived, so I've had the joy of trying to contact the company I ordered it from. By this I mean the tedious & soul destroying experience of going through the "Welcome to ______ , if you wish to _____ , please press 1, if you wish to _____ , please press 2, if you _____ , please press 3 etc., until you finally reach: "if you require ____ , please press 15". At that point you have: a) lost the will to live, & b) realised that your query hasn't been included in the list. Then you get the false hope of: "If you wish to speak to a customer sales assistant please hold the line", at which point the phone goes dead. I actually was in tears after 4 identical phone calls.

Frankly if the present arrives before Christmas I'll be pleased, but if it doesn't I really don't care. If this sounds callous, then I don't care about that either! (Nothing personal, Dad, if you're reading this).

At the risk of sounding like an old gimmer, I really do think that things were better in the old days - at least as far as telephone calls to companies was concerned. If nobody was there to answer your call or everyone was busy, the number just rang & rang - either it was picked up or it wasn't. YOU KNEW WHERE YOU WERE. So much has changed for the better: power steering, invention of gift bags, car indicators that switch off by themselves, videos & DVDs, remote controls for TVs, walk-around telephones, & many more that I can't think of at the minute. The introduction of automated phone operators is NOT one of them. Word.

We sang Shang-a-Lang as we ran with the band

I'm not at all sure how I ended up here; this happens to me a lot on the internet - I just sort of end up in places. I have never really seriously entertained the idea of keeping a blog, but typically I just ended up creating one - sort of because the opportunity presented itself. It's the same with online surveys - I always feel it would be rude not to take part, then spend months & months deleting useless spam mail generated by my taking part.

I do this a lot, now I come to think of it ... for example my navigational skills leave a lot to be desired & I find myself in completely the wrong city when I'm trying to drive somewhere. I know it's not ideal, but I'm trying to make peace with it; I'm 40 now so I can't see myself changing. Truthfully I can't be bothered. I also remind myself that I know how to say the letter 'H' properly ('aitch', not 'haitch'), am conversant with the correct positioning of apostrophes, am very good at reverse parking, & know almost every lyric written by Bob Dylan during the period 1964 - 1969. I reckon that makes up for it.