December 8th 2009

It’s that supermarket again ! You know, the really, really silly one – Sainsburys.

Last Saturday December 6th at about four p.m. I went to buy just a handful of things at Sainsburys. Just imagine my astonishment at finding a huge queue of cars slowly edging forward to get into the car park.

Christmas shoppers must have gone berserk, I thought. It was the first Saturday of December and perhaps they were all desperate to get rid of all their money while they still had any; before the banks orchestrated another financial crisis and all the cash finally ran out just before Christmas, or the banks held onto everyone else’s cash for good because they just felt entitled to it as a Christmas bonus for themselves anyway.

When I eventually got into the car park it was even worse – completely jammed with cars with lights on and engines running honking at each other with frustration in the drizzle as they desperately tried to get out of the hellish place with their shopping.

But none of them were going anywhere, and that was what was blocking any cars from coming in and parking so as they could do their pre-Christmas shopping. It was chaos.

None of the long queue of cars waiting to go at the exit was moving, so I thought I would go and have a look to see what was stopping them leaving the car park.

Two shiny new barriers blocking the exit to the Sainsburys car had just been installed and two queues of completely stationary cars waited motionless with engines grumbling in front of them.

A rotund Indian looking gentleman holding an umbrella delicately in one hand was engaged in lengthy and earnest conversation with the driver at the head of one of the two queues of traffic waiting to escape.

“Do you have a card ?” I heard him say to the driver of the car.

”What bloody card ? Can’t you see the entry barriers are permanently up and no-one is being asked to press the entry button to get a swipe card to get into the car park,” said the irate driver.

The Indian looking gentleman slowly and painfully passed a few words of explanation to the driver before bending down awkwardly and fumbling around underneath the barrier control to press the release button to lift it and let the driver go. It took ages of fumbling to achieve this. It looked like a real bit of complicated skill was exerted to perform this simple button pressing function.

Then, the Indian looking gentleman slowly turned his bulk around and straightened up with some considerable effort to walk leisurely across the three yards to the other barrier to have the same conversation with the driver at the head of that queue before deigning to release him from the parking hell that Sainsburys car park had now become.

I watched this oaf ponderously ambling from one barrier to another and was completely astonished at this sight. What on earth possessed the man to make such an art form out of being as slow as possible to lift the barriers for each individual car. As cars were still entering the car park much faster than they were allowed to leave there were clearly going to be a lot of very angry people stuck in Sainsbury’s car park for the rest of the afternoon instead of being able to continue with their Christmas shopping. They were going to be hopping mad in fact.

So I approached this Indian looking gentleman to politely enquire why he didn’t just lift both the barriers and leave them up so the traffic could leave unhindered by his solicitousness.

Imagine my astonishment when he hurled a torrent of abuse at me, shouting “ Why, you stupid bloody man can’t you let me do my job, I’m not talking to you. You ‘re stopping these drivers from leaving are you ?” And further inarticulate insults wheezed at me in a thick Hindi accent.

As I thought this was quite ridiculous, I thought I would speak to the duty store manager lurking at the Customer Services desk as I went in. He identified himself as ‘Steve’ and pointed to his badge which also said ‘Steve’ with no surname.

So, Sainsburys obviously make their staff deliberately anonymous and unidentifiable then. I wonder why ?

Anyway, this ‘Steve’ commenced by telling me the car park was nothing to do with Sainsburys as they pay sub-contractor Euro Car Parks to manage the Sainsburys car park. He added there was only one car park attendant on duty at the moment which is why only one barrier at a time could be opened.

When I asked ‘Steve’ why, as it was Sainsburys’ own car park, they couldn’t just leave both barriers permanently up so both queues of cars could just go and stop blocking the entire car park of several hundred cars, Steve said, No he couldn’t do that because Sainsburys needed to retrieve all the swipe cards from shoppers who did actually have them to operate the new barriers.

Well then, said I, seeing as how he was the duty manager at Sainsburys, couldn’t he put one of his many staff at one of the barriers to help the Indian looking gentleman let the second irate queue of trapped stationary cars out at the same time as the first queue, ‘Steve said, “it’s more than my job’s worth”.

“Why’s that”, I said. “

Well”, ‘Steve’ told me, “It’s insurance isn’t it. I can’t just just put one of my staff out there. It’s a health and safety issue.They wouldn’t be insured to operate the barriers to let people out of the car park, would they ? ”

“It’s more than my job’s worth. I haven’t any authority to do that. What would happen if one of my staff was killed letting cars out of the car park. Where would that leave Sainsburys ?”, he said.

“What”, I said incredulously. “ All they have to do is press a button to lift the barrier for each car. It isn’t what you would call a dangerous job, is it ? I mean it is a bit difficult getting yourself killed just pressing a button, isn’t it ?”

“Well I can’t just ignore health and safety rules‘, Steve repeated. “It’s more than my job’s worth. I mean if someone got killed or injured out there or something Sainsburys could be lumbered with a huge insurance claim and I would get fired.”

So, dear reader, although I only had to spend a few minutes buying about ten items from Sainsburys, I was trapped in that bloody car park for three hours before the queues of cars ceased snaking all around the car park preventing people from even leaving their parking spaces, as they were doomed to just sit in their cars gnashing their teeth while their precious Saturday afternoon of Christmas shopping ebbed slowly away from them.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Think about this for a moment. An ordinary middle class, very civilised family, both parents working in extremely well paid jobs and with two sons of eleven and fourteen. They decided to sell their own house and rent a house from a private landlord for a year while they look for something attractive to buy.
They find a suitable four bedroomed house in an attractive village in Sussex and they would like to pay the fifteen hundred odd pounds a month to rent it for their family of four for a year.

But the landlord says other children are not allowed to be in the house. How utterly insulting this idiot landlord is. Why does he think he has a right to impose his warped, narrow minded, busybody control freakery on other people ?

What a pathetic, sad individual he must be ! No doubt he must be one of those dreadful people employed by the government whose full time job it is to be an interfering bureaucrat of some sort; paid a high salary to be an official professional control freak on one of those Labour Government pointless job creation schemes that squanders billions of pounds of our money.

Perhaps it is this that gives him delusions about telling people who rent his house what sort of people they can socialise with.

It does seem the countless horde of Labour Government employees – now most of the workforce and still rising – are living in a fantasy World where they all have the delusion their duty is to tell the rest of the population exactly what to do every minute of their lives; to control everyone with a positive blizzard of forms and tickboxes. Databases for everything and everyone with lists of all the details of the entire population’s daily lives. Video cameras malignantly following your every move, wherever you go. A Police State monitoring you, threatening constant arrest and State sponsored violence and thuggery whatever you are doing at the time, however innocent it might be.

My own son has been mercilessly persecuted by the goody goody interferers of the bizarre anti-child brigade ever since I moved to this Sussex market town seven years ago.

- A visit from the police after a member of the public reported my then ten year old son being seen playing in the park ‘too often’ and observed holding small cans of some sort in his hands. I was asked if this meant he was a graffiti sprayer because the cans might be spray paint. They were soft drink cans.

- Reported to social services by the headmaster of the boy’s school when an officious idiot of a teacher told him my then eight year old boy was actually allowed to go and play in the nearby park all by himself without an adult being with him.

- The subsequent visit from a social worker who told me that no child under the age of fourteen should ever be allowed out without an adult being with them !

- The retired ex-headmaster of the local secondary school who is the Chairman and gimlet eyed controller of my allotment association telling me allotments were actually dangerous places for children and they were not allowed there unless their parents rented an allotment.

Even then they were absolutely forbidden to leave their parents allotment and go anywhere else on the site. In addition, the allotment rules would not even allow children on their own parents allotment unless they were actually working on the allotment. They were not allowed to play on their parent’s allotment, only work.

No visiting their friends on nearby allotments then. Hard labour only – or else !

- Official letter of warning from the boy’s headmaster at school that he had been seen riding a bike to school without a ‘permit’.

- The amazing Pizza restaurant – “Sorry Sir. We don’t allow children here except at lunchtime”.

And so it goes on – endlessly. These are only a small fraction of the barrage of anti children complaints I have had to deal with from a population of miserably humourless, self centred, misogynistic fools nurtured into existence by the evils of a politically correct socialist mindset which has gripped the UK in it’s deathly embrace as the Labour Government systematically wrecks what used to be the best country in the World to live in.

Now, it is rapidly becoming one of the worst.

It has also been officially branded by the rest of the World as one of the most unpleasant countries in the World to be a child.

BLOGSURFER

Also, very annoyingly, my huge apple crop is rapidly diminishing to nothing as all those mouldy apples fall off the tree and I’m being left with very few left on the trees to ripen fully. I think it is the weather conditions encouraging mould. Spuds and tomatoes are already completely wrecked with it.

I have no freezer space. My thirty year old chest freezer had a tantrum when I gave it it’s once in two years clean and it stopped working. My daughter then gave me a newish little under the counter freezer from her old micro flat with it’s extra micro kitchen that was so small it made boiling an egg a challenge.

In my then research into the possibilities of buying a new chest freezer I discovered just how expensive ancient freezers are because they gobble electricity voraciously. I had already noticed mine was not only on all the time, but huge chunks of ice formed on the outside wall at the bottom as well as creeping out of the top and preventing the lid from being closed. It was obviously trying it’s best to heat up the entire planet at my expense.

Although the precious little thing recovered from it’s tantrum when the electric motor eventually dried out and it started working again, it was too late. There was no way I was going to pay about £400 a year in electricity to keep it going when all the modern freezers talk about annual costs of about £25. Anyway, I am so short of money I can’t afford even the most basic electricity bill at present. So, no silly extravagances like ancient power guzzling, manic, hyperactive freezers then.

And, when you have an income which is so low it is impossible to make ends meet anyway, you soon learn a simple rule of basic economics which is, if you can survive without it now, then don’t spend money buying it – whatever it is ! As I already have a very small freezer I cannot justify even thinking of spending anything at all on a larger one unless it pays for itself – which it wont.

I would have frozen all this fruit as I have done in the past, but I thought bottling it was an alternative and it might also preserve taste and texture better too as freezers destroy food over time. They are not what they are cracked up to be ! It also occurred to me that when things are frozen there is a constant ongoing cost of paying for electricity to keep them frozen, but once you have finished the bottling process, there is no further cost at all. Something to bear in mind !

Nobody has really told me the answer to my question. Can you just chuck boiled stuff in sterilised jars just like you do jam. The answer seems to be no. So I did it anyway and wait to see how long it lasts. I don’t suppose botulism will be a problem as it is more likely the fruit might ferment instead. We’ll see.

I have loads of Kilner jars as I used to make tons of jam once. In my efforts to make sure they were completely sterilised I made them too hot (something to do with having a lousy permanently overheating oven with almost no temperature control). So when I started plonking boiling fruit into two very large and expensive ones they just shattered . Aaaaaarrrrgh ! Usually that only happens when people don’t heat them up and just put hot stuff into cold glass jars. But I think my Kilner jars were so hot the glass was almost melting as I poured the boiling fruit in.

I don’t have time at the moment to make jams and chutneys etc, so will just try bottling stuff properly now and stop trying shortcuts as it has all been more hassle than just sticking to the idea of cramming the stuff into bottles and leaving them in the oven to sterilise.

Having mentioned the two women, I suppose I ought to offer a word of explanation. the first woman was a wife of nineteen years who seemed to have a brain transplant at some undefined point and so became someone completely different from the person I imagined I was living with.

Suddenly becoming someone with no concept of family life, maternal values, homemaking of any description or perception that contributing at least something towards the family might be useful, she ran off with a serial marriage wrecking professional philanderer with no morals or decency as a human being whatever.

I think she thought he had more money than me or something like that which might have attracted her to him, or maybe it was because she was so fed up with the idea of actually contributing to family life that the idea of being able to do more or less nothing made her think running off with him was a good idea.

The second woman became seriously mentally ill and after years of trying to look after her I had to give up after it had destroyed just about everything else in my life – and she was basically unreachable really, but that took me ages to realise that I was ultimately just wasting my time. We’re still on good terms, but she might as well be on another planet. She can’t even get her act together to see her son.