Category Archives: students

Just like post-communist Russia

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I don’t understand supermarkets.  Well I do, obviously:

  1. Park up as close as possible to the entrance
  2. Pick up a trolley – one of the midi ones because bending down to put stuff in the big ones is a touch too much for your ageing back
  3. Wander around the store, picking up items from your shopping list, tutting occasionally at shoppers who abandon their trolleys in the middle of the aisle with not quite enough of a gap to squeeze yours through without touching theirs*.
    • Grapefruit – check
    • Milk – check
    • Mozzarella – check
    • Warburton’s thickest loaf – che… Ooh, look, it’s on offer.  I’ll get two and freeze one.
    • Mustard seeds – check
    • Turmeric – check
    • Ground cumin – che…  Hang on, no cumin?  At all? 

So you go to the “ethnic” aisle and prepare to buy a 4kg bag of the stuff – none there either.  What the fuck?  So you are then compelled to return to the normal spice aisle and do this:

Honestly, what were they thinking when they designed this packaging?  But it’s nice to know that shoppers can have this fun in Tesco, Sainsbury and Waitrose.  They don’t do herbs and spices in Asda because they only sell bottled “He-he, this’ll make you shit” and “Fucking poof coconut girlie shite” curry sauces that are ready made for the exquisite tastes of their own particular brand of shopper.

The great thing about the world foods section is that you can get what you want for a lot cheaper than from the standard produce aisles.  For example, red kidney beans in salted water for 30p a can instead of shitty red kidney beans in salt-free water for 50p a can.  I got three cans of really nice coconut milk for 50p a can tonight when the normal crappy stuff is about £1 a can from the next aisle.

I’m sure this amounts to discrimination against white, British people who are a bit wary of venturing into those sections of the store where the packaging comes in foreign languages.  

*What is it about other shoppers’ trolleys that makes them off bounds in terms of moving them out of the way, or ramming them into the backs of their legs when they dump them right in front of the shelf you want to get to?  There’s an unwritten law that says you simply cannot touch another person’s trolley with any part of your anatomy, you have to gently squeeze past it or give it a gently nudge with your own trolley.  Just think about it next time you’re in Tesco.  You’ll find yourself doing it.

Anyway (:@), you finally fill your trolley with stuff that you didn’t need and none of the things you did want and take it to the till where you don’t have to interact with the checkout assistant any more.  They just fling things at you after scanning them and you face the task of bagging things up before your entire load of shopping piles up around your ears.  The transaction is completed by the shopper too, sometimes prompted by a nod and a “put your card into the reader”, you take your own receipt and trundle out of the store… slowly…. as you’re always caught behind somebody in their 60s taking their 90 year old mum for her weekly shop.

Of course we have self checkouts these days. If you don’t have the privilege of having your shopping scanned and thrown at you by somebody else, surely you should get a discount?

The “unexpected item in bagging area” is usually a bag.

There will be an uprising.  Not of layabout, so-called “students”, or agitator union-types (I will attend to these imbeciles in due course).  No, the normal, every day MOP (member of public) will decide one day that they’ve had enough and they will demand service.  Come on Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Waitrose, the lot of you.  Get some real people on the tills and make the experience of your customers not quite so soul-destroying.

Every little helps.

Students are wankers

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I’m not sure I need to add anything further to qualify the statement made in the title. I encounter many students from universities in Manchester. These encounters often occur as I try to battle my way the length of Oxford Road to get from the big hospital where I work to the crank veggie healthfood shop a mile or so away. By the time I have repeated the round trip, I am often on the verge of trying to kill somebody by ramming a spinach and chickpea calzone and Greek loaf down their stupid, ignorant throats.

The reason for this? Students. They walk in their groups, dressed way too fashionably, pumps on their shuffling feet that they can’t be bothered to pick up off the floor. They walk into me, they block my way, they’re too engrossed in their texting, eyes down, to notice that they’re about to collide with me. Such self-absorption cannot be healthy, such a lack of awareness must bring with it all sorts of dangers – mainly from people like me who, one day, will snap and go on the rampage with a responsibly-sourced canvas bag filled to the brim with heavy vegetarian delights, Moleskine notebooks and mechanical pencils.

That’ll learn ’em!

Only sadly, it won’t. But it might get me a few months’ rest in a psychiatric hospital while they “do tests”.

Veganism
The reason I visit the crank cafe is because it was suggested to me by mental vegan Ruthie when she was trying to assimilate me into the Borg of radical feminist lesbian, rentamob, anarchist vegans. I thought I’d give it a go, as it’s something that’s intrigued me, however I knew that I’d never seriously consider this is a lifestyle choice. Vegetarianism, a definite possible, but veganism, absolutely not. It’s not just a case of making a choice of what you eat or don’t eat, or wear, or feed your dog, or clean yourself or your house with….. there also seems an extremist core that turns what people eat into a political argument. And you can kind of see why this is; vegans don’t want animals to be abused, in any way. And many feel so strongly that they see that they’re not being true to themselves unless they actively try to do something to change humans’ view of their relationship with animals that we share the planet with. In fact, the term “speciesism” is used in relation to this and, with my “I hate people, what gives us the right to ride roughshod over the planet, I wish we’d all just die off and give the rest of the world a chance” head on, I can see what they mean. But then things start getting a bit warped; people who use animal products have been likened to child rapists; we’re accused of a global holocaust; we basically deserve to rot in hell.

So the dogmatic world view of vegans put me right off them. And the fact that the one I was sort of seeing (well, not seeing: texting mainly, the odd bit of instant messaging, but not seeing) was absolutely fucking mental was a slight turn off too. As was vegan food if truth be known. It’s all too processed. You buy meaty sausages from a good butcher, you know you’re getting pork from happy pigs with nothing else but seasoning, some herbs and a bit of fat for flavour. Vegan sausages? Processed shite. It’s all processed shite and I don’t like processed food.

Besides, I like sausages, I like ice cream, I love sardines, butter, the odd bit of cheese. And what’s more, if we suddenly stopped eating meat and using animal products, such as dairy (which I acknowledge is cruel), what would happen to all the animals? All these animals that have been domesticated over thousands of years, what would we do with them? And how the hell would they learn to live in the wild?

But anyway my foray into the strange, dark World of the Translucent People, introduced me to a fabulous cafe and veggie health food shop, and to the delights of spinach and chick pea calzone. I won’t name them, because if they searched for themselves and found their name associated with “cranks”, “extremists”, “fucking nutcases”, etc, I think they might be offended. While it’s OK to use such terms in a very tongue in cheek way (with the exception of when I refer to nutjob Ruthie and her merry band of weirdo extremists), even I concede that it’s not fair to risk having a decent business being linked to them.

I wonder how easy it is to start a political movement based on food that you won’t eat? I could certainly think of some foods that should be outlawed. Cottage cheese fans everywhere should be quaking in their boots.