beef burgers and snow

This week we have seen Blockbusters in the news as the latest retailer to go into administration, following other famous names like HMV, Jessops and Comet. Then there was Tesco with it 30% horse-meat ‘beef’ burgers. Then there was the snow…

I liked the beef burgers story the best. The tweets and jokes on Facebook were brilliant.  Out of the same stable came:

I knew there was something dodgy about Tesco Burgers. I bought some yesterday and put them in the fridge beside some vegetables, when I woke up this morning the carrots had gone…  Ho Ho Ho

I almost couldn’t decide whether to buy the top brand burgers or Tesco’s finest burgers.. In the end Tesco’s finest won by a length and a half.

Other news was that the price of a lottery ticket will be increasing from £1 to £2 later this year. You’ll spend twice as much won’t you? Me neither. They might as well scrap the Wednesday draw now. I’ll just stick to the Saturday one, now they don’t televise the Wednesday draw. The Saturday draw isn’t worth watching on TV. It was a good idea and then they ruined it by getting greedy and introducing more games and stupid scratch cards. Remember when we used to have Super-draws?

Then there was snow…

Yes, on Friday the snow came down here in central England. We had about 10cm in the morning and I was taking photos. By the afternoon, it had slowed and I even got most of the stuff off my path and put some rock salt down.

It’s snowing again today. It was forecast for this afternoon, but seems to have come early. I was hoping to get out there and take a few interesting photos before more of the stuff came down.  There’s only a light dusting of the white stuff so far and so I’m not giving up on the idea just yet.

I’m really glad my heating was fixed earlier in the week, it was a bit chilly when I went to bed last night, but no heating would have been really bad. We don’t know how lucky we are these days, I’ve read about places where they have snow all winter and it’s –20C. The problem is in the UK, we are never prepared for it. You get ripped off buying rock salt unless you buy 2. Who wants enough to last the rest of their lives? Not many people managed to get snow shovels either. The council has been giving them away, but that’s a closely guarded secret until after the snow has gone, then we have bloody ‘snow champions’. I assume these are friends of local bloody councillors that managed to get the shovel and salt. I hate these humps in the road, but they are really a pain when they’re covered in snow.

Local councils are now announcing rent rises for council tenants. That is part of the cause of poverty, really high rents that came out of the property market bubble. The heads of department on the council and the chief executive earn  as much as executives in industry now; more in some cases. While they build their empires there are people sleeping rough in the parks, because they can’t get a place to live. So spare a thought for the homeless this weather.

It’s ‘Blue Monday’ tomorrow, designated the most depressing day of the year. My psychology article is about depression, so read that as you decide the snow is too thick to go to work. My art and photography blog on Tuesday will be about photographing snow. What else? My ambition is to write a weekend ramble for a famous magazine, newspaper or even a website. Someone must want a sarcastic and facetious writer once a week. I’d even do a bit of research, this week it would have been beef burger research! 

One of the things that I think will be in the news this year is the plan to cut housing benefit for people who have spare bedrooms. It’s a daft idea. Whatever happened to an Englishman’s home is his castle? It harks back to the candle tax, the hearth tax and the window tax; except those were on the rich. This is a tax on poverty. Never mind, the stock market has been doing well just lately. No need to buy a lottery ticket when you own a zillion shares in Tesco.

That’s the lot for this week. Please comment and share your thoughts. It’s still bloody snowing…

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