We were due to have a food delivery today. However, TESCO sent me a text saying that due to “technical reasons” they were going to have to alter the time slot, and would message me to let me know the new time slot.
I can see how this happens, so wasn’t too bothered, at least it wasn’t a short notice cancellation, like we have had twice before. So I waited . . and waited . . .
There was no message, but when I looked at my account to finalise the order I noted the new time slot. Not only was it mid-morning, a time I consider inconvenient, but it was tomorrow, instead of today. This was annoying. It’s not that I don’t have enough food in, it’s that they made a major alteration and weren’t even efficient enough to tell me.
The delivery charge was £7 and they were still going to charge me that even though they weren’t going to deliver at the right time, or the right day. ASDA are able to deliver, their delivery charge is £5 cheaper and the groceries are £3 cheaper. I know this because I just ordered off them and cancelled the TESCO order.
ASDA also has better availability – TESCO seems to have run out of some items very common items. To add insult to injury, they have run out of some of the items they are advertising on TV. I could go on about the deficiencies in TESCO management, and compare the efficiency of the two shops, but I won’t. It’s Christmas and I have better things to think about, such as the choice of soup for lunch.
We’ve just been to pick up the shopping order from TESCO. There were a couple of things that weren’t available and one substitution.
This was bagged rocket (or arugula if you speak American). Yes, I shouldn’t be buying it, for a number of reasons, including expense and ecology, but I try to eat a variety of things and at least you can taste rocket. Well, not this week, because they substituted it fro lamb’s lettuce. They could have substituted organic rocket (though it may have made their price guarantee squeak a little), or watercress (another salad you can taste) or even the “peppery” salad, but no, they substituted it with the lamb’s lettuce. It will do, but it doesn’t look like the obvious substitution to me.
They don’t leave it to the discretion of the packers to do the substitution, they use an algorithm. Heaven help us if the robots ever take over – I cannot even begin to imagine what life will look like once we fall int6om the hands of the algorithm-wielding little metal menaces. That’s another good argument for not living to be a thousand.
The strange thing is that when I check rocket on the website, it is available, and lamb’s lettuce isn’t. Probably because they’ve been fobbing all the rocket customers off with lamb’s lettuce.
Easy answer is to give salad a miss until we can start growing our own again.
I watched The Saintat lunchtime. At the age of 8 I thought this was the best TV show ever made. Today, 55 years later, the tale of a mad scientists breeding giant ants in a Welsh cave system, though dated and not great literature, didn’t impress me quite so much. However, to be fair, it was far from the worst thing I’ve seen on TV recently.
The clock picture is to mark the occasion of me getting round to altering the clock in the car, after the clocks went back at the weekend. I kept meaning to do it but never got round to it. The story of my life.
That’s right, it’s 4p more than ASDA. If that was the only bad thing I had to say about TESCO it wouldn’t be too bad, but it isn’t. They rang this evening, at around 4.30 to tell me they had cancelled my delivery due to driver absences, but they would arrange for me to pick it up at the Click and Collect bay if I still wanted it. I have just come back from doing that, which is why I am publishing another soup review so soon.
I sympathise with TESCO and their driver problems, but, to be blunt, that is their problem, not mine. They are a massive company and they should do better. If all else fails, send it by taxi. And don’t leave it some poor lad from Customer Services to ring me, make the duty manager at the store ring me. I think he’d have a different view of things if he needed to listen to the customers and their views about his store, which has now cancelled deliveries twice at short notice.
They have, to be fair, sent me a £10 voucher for my inconvenience, but part of that is a refund for the delivery that they didn’t make. They must think I’m stupid not to notice that half the voucher is just a refund.
Anyway, the soup…
It’s another variation on the theme of grey, this time with a hint of reddish brown.
Oxtail Soup and a free mug we were given by a local scrap merchant
It looks slightly chocolatey, but it has a pleasant spicy flavour, albeit with a slight aftertaste of glue. However, I haven’t had oxtail soup from a can recently, so it’s possible I might detect that in a canned soup if I tried hard. There is a lot of cartilage in an ox tail, as I recall from when I have seen them offered for sale, and it’s quite likely there is a taste of glue from that.
There were some small songy bits left in the bottom of the cup when I finished – possibly bits of ox? Freeze-dried and reconstituted ox…hmm, lovely.
It was spicy, warming and not totally revolting, but if was having company to dinner I don’t think I’d select this as the soup course.
It looks quite healthy until the end
How many shades of grey?
I posted this in “Uncategorised”. I was going to post in “Food” but it didn’t seem appropriate.
Next time I write a to-do list towards the end of the evening I am going to include Number Eight – fall asleep and sleep past midnight in my chair, Number Nine, wake up feeling like rigor-mortis has set in and Number Ten – make sandwiches in the early hours of the morning.
If I’d done that I would at least have achieved three of my objectives.
As it was, I didn’t even reach Number One – write sarcastic letter to TESCO. We had a delivery at just after 8.00. It gives us time to relax and cook before bringing the shopping in from the door. There were no brown cobs with this delivery, and a few other bits and pieces of omission or change that I found a little annoying, but that’s the price (plus £4.50 for packing and delivery) that you pay for not jostling with the germ-ridden denizens of our local supermarkets.
The prize for the most bizarre substitution ever, and the reason for my planned outburst of sarcasm.
It was going to be along the lines of –
FAO CEO TESCO
If you opened your sandwich box in the Executive dining room, looking forward to a lovely cheese cob, only to find a mere heap of cheese and pickle, because your grocery supplier couldn’t be bothered to supply any bread rolls, and had failed to find a suitable substitute, I bet you’d be disappointed, and wonder how people can stay in business if they can’t even supply bread rolls.
If you then reached for your delicious finale – an easy peel citrus (as they call small oranges these days) and bit into a lemon, I imagine you would become quite annoyed.
I am, I confess, more than quite annoyed that you substituted lemons for my order of easy peel citrus. I was tempted to pack one for my wife’s lunch to see what happened, but am, frankly, too frightened.
Remembering last week’s non-delivery debacle, I think I will be going back to ASDA. They are useless, but not quite as useless as you.
Having been kept at home this morning by various jobs, we popped out to do a bit of shopping this afternoon. It was raining a bit so we went to TESCO in Bulwell because it has a car park under the shop and you can walk from car to shop under cover.
I’m in such a state these days that if I get wet I’ll probably need a going over with WD-40.
We are currently on diets as the kids are cooking and trying to make us lose weight, so we decided to sneak a scone while we were out. It was a mistake.
Dirty knives
Dry scones
The cutlery was dirty, the tea was OK but the scones were dry and tasteless. We did have cheese scones to be fair, so there was a lack of jam to help things along. We were trying to avoid excessive amounts of fat and sugar. Honestly.
Definitely not moreish.
Must do better TESCO.
Below, I have put the links for the first 15 parts of this series – I had to do that as I couldn’t remember if I’d covered TESCO before. I hadn’t.
It’s been a mixed day, but at least I’m back on the blog and feeling enthusiastic. I even took some video of clothes going round in the washing machine. It’s not very exciting – the excitement came later when I emptied the machine containing six of Julia’s jumpers. It turned out that the spin cycle wasn’t up to much on that machine and I ended up with seven wet jumpers (my contribution being a modest single item), a pool of water on the floor and, it later turned out, a drier that wasn’t up to the job.
I won’t bore you with the video. Partly out of consideration for my valued readers, but mainly because I can’t get it to download properly.
The damp jumpers are currently draped over a variety of convenient items in the bathroom.
I think we need to have a talk about knitwear. Why one small woman needs her own bodyweight in knitted garments I really don’t know.
The view out
Yet anothre (inelegant) selfie
Notice in the Laundry at Sherwood
I’m going to start going to the laundry later – it can be quite hectic at 8am as we all try to get in before the rush, but at 10am it was empty again and quite relaxing. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to rush, despite all the talk of eating frogs.
You can take pictures when nobody is there.
After writing a menu for the week, which is going to be healthier and better structured than I’ve been managing recently, I then went shopping. It was a special day today, with everything set up to make it difficult for a man having a bad joint day.
One of the doors is still jammed, people seemed to be targeting me like something in a chariot race and then the trolley wouldn’t release the £1 coin. I’m seriously thinking of writing a letter so TESCO can ignore me.
I also noted some unusual items in the bins they use for collecting for the Food Bank. Quinoa and Couscous?
Don’t get me wrong – people using food banks deserve good food, but I’m a little sceptical that there are many eaters of Quinoa and Couscous amongst the typical users of food banks. Some collection points specify the types of goods they want, and I’ve never seen either of these on the list. They aren’t generally on my list either, but this week I happened to buy both as I’m going to be eating healthier lunches.
By the time I finished shopping the light had gone so I went home to prepare red cabbage and put the gammon joint in the oven.
Finally, on looking at some internet pages relating to the Winter Olympics, I ended up looking at our medallists for the first Winter Olympics at Chamonix in 1924. We aren’t particularly good at winter sports and it took us from then until Sochi in 2014 to win four medals again – a gold, a silver and two bronzes. We’re currently on four again, a gold and three bronzes, so people are getting excited. My experience of British sport indicates we’re heading for disappointment yet again, but you never know, I may be wrong. Perhaps our famously unlucky speed skater might stay upright until the end of a race. Or perhaps not…
If she does, we will have to make a film of it. Disqualified three times at Sochi, crashed twice at Pyeongchang and has one last chance to fulfil her destiny. It would be brilliant if she did.
It would make a better story than the British Ice Hockey team at Chamonix. At least eight of the ten were Canadian, Wiki is silent on the place of birth of the remaining two, though I suspect they were probably Canadian too. Several of them had interesting careers, particularly Blaine Sexton. It’s an interesting link, particularly the picture of him in the uniform of the Windsor Swastikas, in the days when they were one of three teams using the name, and Swastikas were merely seen as interesting good luck charms.
I’ve always thought of people swapping between nations as a symptom of the moral bankruptcy of modern sport. Looks like I was wrong.
