Tag Archives: business

Day 169

12 Replies

I won on the Lottery last night – £2.60. That’s enough to buy another ticket and have 10p left over. There’s not much I can do with 10p – can’t send a letter, can’t invest it and I’m not allowed sweets.

Fate seems to keep dangling the prospect of riches just outside my grasp.

If I do win big I’m going to buy an electric tandem and employ someone to pedal it for me if the battery runs out. I am a man of modest ambitions.

We finished the hoovering this morning, tidied under the workstations and washed the doors of the kitchen units, which I forgot to do yesterday. It’s looking smart for its inspection on Monday. All we need to do is polish the counter tops.

There was plenty of time for cleaning because we weren’t interrupted by many customers. We didn’t actually sell anything though the shop, but fortunately eBay came to the rescue with a steady stream of small sales during the day. This was fortunate, as very little sold over the last two nights. It’s been a quiet week, but with holidays, sun and constant talk of a cost of living crisis it’s not surprising people are holding back a bit.

It always makes me laugh when people on TV talk about a cost of living crisis. I’ve seen what they are paid, and it’s clear that we employ different definitions of the words. When you are paid this sort of money, the term “crisis” means cutting down on caviar so you can keep the kids in private education. When you are paid minimum wage, it’s a little harder to deal with.

However, that’s a discussion for a different day. Today is all about us having a clean shop and me winning the lottery.

 

End of The Beast

13 Replies

It was definitely wet this morning, with a few drops of rain in the air as we walked to the car and puddles where ice had recently been.

The temperature is now a couple of degrees above freezing and I’m hoping that his will continue. If it freezes at this point it will be like being in the middle of the biggest ice rink in the world. The forecast for the next week is rain and rising temperatures. I imagine that the rivers will rise and we will move seamlessly from snow to flooding as our topic of conversation.

It was noticeable that ebay sales were down in the shop over the last week, something we attribute to a general feeling of misery in snowbound areas. The post has been a bit haphazard over the last week or so, with people not able to get to the post to send me things, and our post office not getting a collection sent out  when the van failed to show up. I also had no post at home for two days, followed by a big wad yesterday. None of it was actually important, or even interesting.

In the shop we still saw quite a few customers, both buying and selling, though not on Thursday. On Thursday only the staff turned up, and at least one of them would rather have been at home. I still haven’t really got the hang of this employment thing.

By Friday it picked up and Saturday was back to normal. Hopefully ebay will pick up now.

Thoughts about renewable energy

24 Replies

I watched The Apprentice last night.

At one time I used to watch in the hope that I might learn something about business. I’ve not learned anything I can use, though I do now know that every year proves there is a seemingly endless supply of idiots.

If I can find a way of converting idiots into electricity I may have found the next big thing in renewable energy.

Talking of which, we drove past another solar farm today.  It seems like every time we drive north from Nottingham we find another new field of black panels. Land use has changed considerably over the last ten years in North Nottinghamshire – first we had willow, then we had miscanthus. Currently we seem to have a small forest of wind turbines springing up and the latest fashion seems to be to cover acres in photovoltaic cells.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Solar farm in north Nottinghamshire

When I see that I feel more comfortable about using electricity, but then start to worry that we won’t need it, because if we cover the land to generate electricity there will be no food to cook.

I’m a bit worried about food, after listening to a radio programme tonight. In order to halt global warming we need to scale back on meat production (mainly on account of the methane produced by cows) and would, they calculate, only have 19 grams of meat a day. That’s 133g a week, about the weight of two moderate burgers.

In the Second World War the bacon and ham ration ranged between 113 and 227 grams. However, there was also a meat ration, controlled by price – between 1 shilling and 1 shilling and two pence (5 – 6 pence in modern terms). I’m struggling to find a comparison of prices – one I found suggests that could be about £1.50. It’s not a lot, but compared to 19 grams a day it’s a positive feast.

To add to the complexity of looking into the future it also seems that grass fed beef (as generally reared in the UK) is worse for the environment than intensively raised beef fed on maize and soya (as raised in USA). It’s not about the method or the food, it’s about the fact that grass fed beef takes longer to grow to full weight, and thus spends more time emitting methane.

Now, methane is the main component of natural gas, so is it just me, or are other people thinking that some sort of gas-collecting nappy on a cow might be an alternative to fracking? Ah, just me…

That’s not the end to it of course, there’s also milk to consider. If they were telling the truth (and I fear they are) we will only have enough milk for four cups of tea a day.

Four cups of tea a day?

I could see myself as a vegetarian, but I don’t see myself cutting down to four cups a day.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Under threat – my cup of tea

 

 

 

 

 

 

.