Tag Archives: chocolate cake

The Second Part of the Story

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Here, as promised, is the second part of my shopping story.

I ordered groceries from Whoosh, the instant delivery service from TESCO. It costs £5 and promises delivery within the hour. A normal home delivery from TESCO is around £3.50 so £5 isn’t too bad. Prices always seem a little higher than normal, and you can’t get a great range, but it’s adequate for what it is – a service for affluent young people and older people who can’t plan properly (like me).. It’s a bit like shopping against the clock, because they give you a time limit and the website isn’t the quickest thing to use – you can’t always find what you want and they keep interrupting with automated filling in of search terms, which is a nuisance and a time waster. All in all, I don’t like the system, but sometimes, like when you want to buy chocolates and cake to stop your wife passing judgement on your housekeeping skills, it’s useful.

Well, it would be if they delivered the right thing.

I knew there was a  problem when I opened the bag and found a lettuce on the top. Still, a random lettuce isn’t the end of the world. Then there was a bag of salad, organic bananas and free range eggs. And cat food and toothpaste for kids. And cheap jam tarts. As you know, I have got rid of the kids, don’t have a cat, distrust salad and think free range/organic is, in the main, a rip-off. That leaves me with cheap jam tarts. Why waste the money? They are all crumbs and thin layers of cheap jam. If I’m going to kill myself with fat and sugar (and I am, have no doubt about it) I’m going to do it in style. At least the milk was full fat and the strawberry jam was a good brand.

Anyway, I rang the helpline. They couldn’t help. What they could do was issue a refund (though it will take several days to show up) and tell me to keep the groceries. So I have £30 of free groceries. Fortunately I can use most of them, though I my have to buy a cat.

The header picture is just a stock cake picture in a story that does not actually involve Battenberg. Sorry about my low standards of journalism.

Day 126

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I thought about talking about 1st World Problems (this is the second week in a row ASDA has failed to supply the figs I ordered!)

I thought about discussing politics. But I decided against it.

I even thought of mentioning that I saw a man on a cycle wobbling through traffic as he used one hand to look at his mobile phone (an operation that would be considered both dangerous and illegal if he were to do it in a car. But I decided not to bother.

So I deleted it all and thought “What can I write about?”

I could write about the emails we had on eBay today. One is from a German demanding to know where his goods are. The answer is that they are in Customs at Frankfurt Airport. He could have established this for himself as he has the tracking code. Sadly, the German Postal Service is currently so inefficient that most eBay sellers in the UK snigger at their name. They are finding it difficult to cope with the UK being out of the EU.

Another customer wrote to complain that we had under-stamped an envelope and he is being asked £1.50 for excess postage. He has written to us via eBay demanding a £28 refund. When we asked what was wrong with the letter he told us he doesn’t know, as he hasn’t seen it yet and is only assuming it is the one from us.

Then we had one in the afternoon enquiring if I would check that we had remembered to post his order as it had been three days and he hadn’t had it yet. I did check. We had remembered to post the letter. We mainly remember, as that’s how we pay our wages, But sometimes the Royal Mail isn’t perfect.

And that, as the word count rises to 300, is probably enough. I’m going to go now. We have chocolate cake to eat (it was heavily reduced in M&S and called out to Julia s she passed) and I have imaginary sarcastic letters to write to customers. I’m not allowed to write actual rude replies. This is, to be honest, a strain.

Kind Hearts and Chocolate Cake

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We went back to the farm today. It was raining heavily and the farm track, which seems to have had some hard use recently, had several streams running down it. In terms of the pathetic fallacy it was like the sky was crying onto the ruins of the farm. In fact that was rubbish, it was just bad weather and a badly maintained track, but it gives me a chance to allude to past problems and the fact they are too lazy to maintain a simple farm track.

The aim of the journey was not to remember the bad times but to visit Men in Sheds and eat chocolate cake to celebrate Bill’s 85th birthday. We didn’t know it was chocolate cake when we set off, we just knew it was “cake”, with the chocolate element being a bonus.

Since we last visited they have sorted out the catering and now make breakfast for themselves as part of the daily routine. They have also been making nest boxes and bird feeders and are now making markers to identify the trees in the new edible woodland. That’s woodland that produces fruit and nuts to eat, not a selection of trees you can eat. You’d have to be a beaver before woodland became truly edible.

It was a pleasant enough way of passing a couple of hours and we have been invited back in a fortnight for another birthday.

We followed up with lunch at the garden centre and a trip round some charity shops looking for curtains. We found some at the 5th shop (oh, how glad was I?). They are excellent curtains, even I can see that,  and are long enough to cut down and use the leftover bits for making a couple of cushion covers.

That’s a woman thing – no man would think of it.

I wouldn’t have a cushion in the house if it were left to me. I’ve never seen a use for them, apart from throwing at the kids, and in a house full of books you don’t really need cushions for that.

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All looking serious…

 

Second post of the day

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Sorry if it seems like I’m running a bus company, no blogs for a while then two come along at the same time…

It was quite a good week last week and it mostly got steamrollered by Open Farm Sunday and the scarecrows.

We saw a red kite over Screveton for the first time in the four years we’ve been here. It was a great view too, with a really good silhouette against a beautiful blue sky (and who had left his camera in the back of the car? Yes, me.)

We had chocolate slab cake after one of the mothers made cakes for a volunteer event that was cancelled. Sadness at the cancellation was, I’m sorry to say, short-lived when I looked into the tin.

I know I lead a dull and boring life, but they are surely highlights even in the life of an exciting celebrity. Did Demi Moore see a red kite? Did anyone give Barack Obama a chocolate slab cake? Does my choice of celebrity mark me as being out of step with the modern world?

Anyway, far from the lifestyle of the rich and famous, we also had around 325 children in the activity tent over the course of Open Farm Sunday.

I was quite pleased with that – 325 kids who now know a bit more about food, farming and the environment., though I know it’s a drop in the ocean when you look at surveys like this that tell us 40% of people don’t know we grow oats in this country (I selected that one because of the next paragraph, but some of the other findings are equally worrying).

Then I started thinking about future events – it will be World  Porridge Day in  October and part of that is about Mary’s Meals – we’ve supported them in the past and they’ve just fed a million kids. A million! I’m now slightly less impressed with our 325.

However, we have another 30 coming in tomorrow (leaving me just 999, 645 of the million) and we’re doing insects and habitats with them. This calls for less blogging and more reading as I’m hopeless with insect ID.

Watch this space…