TESCO MISSHAPEN VEGETABLES, AND THAT SELFIE

JOLLY

British Gas blew £10,000 at Alton Towers on a jolly for staff to learn how to cope with customers angered by the companies 9% price hike.

The jolly was for the staff who cut people off because they can’t pay their bills. Seems some of them actually feel bad about doing that. Not anymore they don’t because there’s nothing that gets rid of a conscience quicker than a free go on an Alton Towers carnival ride.

It hasn’t occurred to the British Gas that the reason that people can’t afford to pay their bills is because British Gas keep increasing them. That’s obvious to everyone except British Gas.

The visit to Alton Towers comes three weeks after the company spent £20,000 on a morale boosting talent show at a hotel. A sort of British Gas’s Got Talent, won no doubt by someone singing “Baby, its cold outside” and “Baby it’s cold inside too because we’ve cut off your heating”.

MISSHAPEN VEG.

Tesco have been complaining that customers don’t want to buy misshapen vegetables. In days gone past you just couldn’t get odd shaped veg because the BBC bought them all up and used them as the entire premise for That’s Life. In fact Ester Rantzen wouldn’t have a career if it wasn’t for carrots that looked like, well you know what they look like, and potatoes that looked like someone’s bottom

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Tesco claim to throw away 60,000 tonnes of food every year, and that’s just in the cucumbers they chuck out because they are shaped like bananas. Then there’s the other 40,000 tonnes of bananas they chucked away because they are shaped like cucumbers. They are missing a trick here because people like exotic fruit and veg so why don’t they sell them Cubananas or Bacumbers.

Despite throwing so much away Tesco still make a fortune from vegetables. The reason being that a lot of people don’t buy loose vegetable. They prefer them packaged. Therefore a single carrot purchased loose costs around 6p, whereas the same carrot cut into strips and packaged is priced around £1.20.

Do the maths. The people who buy packaged carrots obviously can’t.

It would indeed be better for the consumer to buy misshapen veg because they would cost less, and they taste exactly the same. And it with save some poor souls having to sit in front of a conveyor belt grading carrots.

I would draw line at Tesco selling meat from misshapen animals because that’s maybe taking it too far.

Although, last year Tesco and many supermarkets did just that by selling horse meat in the shape of a cow.

Sell by dates also account for a lot of waste, especially when they err on the side of caution. The rule of thumb for eating food that’s just by its sell by date is: if you ate it and ended up with food poisoning, you maybe shouldn’t have eaten it.

Sell by dates doesn’t apply to all produce. Well it does, but in the case of UHT milk it has shelf life of 2000 years. It’s like uranium in that respect. It doesn’t taste anything like milk though.

According to the Daily Mail Eastern Europeans have no problems with misshapen veg. That’s good news for Tesco then because come January 1^st  all the Tesco’s stores will be full of all the millions of Bulgarians and Romanians who’ll be allowed come to the UK for cheap misshapen carrots.  

Tesco research found that two thirds of supermarket food ends up in the bin, including 68% of bagged salads, half of bakery goods and a quarter of grapes.

This leads me to believe that at the tills the staff should make the customers sign a legally binding document stating that they will eat what they’ve bought.

Not quite sure why Tesco are moaning about this. They’d have a lot more to moan about if they sold 68% less bagged salad, 50% less bakery goods and 25% less grapes because their customers came to the realisation “Pointless buying these because I won’t eat them”.

£1

Labours former City Minister Lord Myners has announced that he’ll be paid £1 a year for leading a review into the troubled Co-operative Group.

He’d asked for £1.50 a year but the Co-op told him that they are in so much trouble that a £1 a year is all they can afford.

SELFIE

Probably best not to take a selfie at a memorial service, probably even better not to take a selfie when the memorial service is being beamed around the wold. That didn’t stops Barack Obama, David Cameron and Denmark’s Helle Thorning-Schmidt though. There they were at Nelson Mandela memorial service having a selfie. They probably thought everyone was far too busy watching the fake signer for the deaf.  The culprit said that he suffered a schizophrenic episode and was signing what the voice in his head was saying, that and he doesn’t know sigh language, but thought “10,000 Rand for a couple of hours work, how hard can it be”.

Bruno Druchen, the national director of the Deaf Federation Of South Africa told the Associated Press that Thamsanqa Jantjie was “he was literally just flapping his arms about”.  Adding the only time he did making any sense was when he pointed at Obama, Cameron and Schmidt and mouthed “Oh my god, they are taking a selfie, come on there’s a time and a place”.

The one thing that made Nelson Mandela different from other politicians is that went from prison and into politics. Usually for politicians it’s the other way about.

THE AUTUMN STATEMENT, BALLS BALLS IT UP.

A LOAD OF ABSOLUTE BALLS

In replying to Chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn Statement Labour MP’s are all agreed that Ed Balls gave the worst performance seen in the House for decades. His performance was even worse than Chamberlains “I’m just back from meeting Adolf Hitler and he’s a lovely man, so we’ll be fine”.

Red faced and shoutie the useless Balls refused to acknowledge the UK’s rising growth and continued to focus on the cost of living problem. Something, that he knows nothing about because his household has two MP’s wages, plus two MP’s expenses coming in. Having said that he does know the cost of shaving foam because he goes through gallons of the stuff daily thanks to having such a giant fat face. That is balanced out family budget wise because he doesn’t need very much shampoo because his hair is far too small for his head. And sadly for him, his hair looks like an ill-fitting wig even though it isn’t.

Odd that his MP wife Yvette Cooper hasn’t taken his name. Probably because Yvette Balls and Missus Balls both sound respectively like a medical procedure for male dogs, and how the dog feels after the procedure. And, well………..how could the electorate take any politician with the surname Balls seriously. And taking his surname and broadcasting the fact that she married him would just highlight just how unsound her judgement is. And if her judgement is that unsound in her personal life how many bad choices would she make when given a position of responsibility in Government.

Despite the UK’s growth rising Balls stood up in the House and insisted that he was right, right, he’s always right to oppose austerity all along. But Labour MP’s are now questioning if they can get anywhere near to winning an election with an economic policy which is no more than Balls insisting that he’s right, he’s right, he’s always right, even when he’s wrong.

According to the Daily Mail the Chancellor branded Balls speech a “turkey” and went on to rib him about his decision to cancel his grade three piano exam because it clashed with the Autumn Statement. Eh?

MRS BALLS

Balls is learning to play the piano? I suppose he has to have something to fall back on when the electorate come to the realisation that he really doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about and vote him out of office. He’ll end up annoying passengers in a cruise ships cocktail bar with his renditions of I Will Always Love You and Moon River. I say cruise ship, but I mean the Dover Ferry. He’ll probably play the piano like Les Dawson. Yes, but Les Dawson could play the piano, and only played it badly as a joke. Balls will just play it badly. Much in the same way that his speech was the political equivalent of Les Dawson’s bad piano playing, except that Balls didn’t mean to be so bad. Still it’ll be interesting to see if can still look as smug and be as arrogant when’s be playing piano with one hand whilst holding the pint of a passenger whose popped to the toilet in the other.

One Labour MP said “He f***** it up, I was watching it thinking we are f*****” .  Watching, watching it on the telly, you’d have thought wife would have been there in person to support him.

So what was Ed Miliband doing while all this was going on? He was pointing at Balls and mouthing “I’m not with him”, especially when Balls criticised Osborne’s announcement that primary one and two kids in England and Wales will be getting free school meals. Balls said “That will make them fat and the Tories are completely ignoring the obesity problem, shame on them, shame on them”. 

The big question everyone is asking: can Labour seriously think they have any chance of winning the election when victory would see Ed Balls as Chancellor of the Exchequer. No one yet answered, but they will when they’ve managed to stop laughing at the very idea of it.

ARMS.

And more from Nigella Lawson in court.

In extraordinary scenes she was forced to deny that she kept cocaine in a hollowed out Delia Smith cookbook, that she associated with drug dealers, and that she had frequently been seen with a runny nose and white powder on her face.

On the latter, perhaps she has a lot of colds and never seems to have a glass of water with her when she takes an Askit powder.

. Nigella was asked if she had a drug problem and she replied “You know as well as I do that regular cocaine users don’t look like this “. She held up her arms to show that they WEREN’T scrawny, and said “They’re scrawny and look unhealthy”.

I’m not sure that’s strictly true. Pretty sure millionaire cocaine users don’t have the same look as non-millionaire cocaine users because non-millionaires can’t afford to get themselves a tan on a beach on the Caribbean any time they fancy, and they can’t afford to get lovely nutritious meals delivered daily in big Waitrose hampers. Therefore Nigella’s statement really doesn’t bare close scrutiny.  Somehow don’t think that athletes at the Olympics will ever be dope tested using the Nigella System.