Those words keep popping up on all sorts of products. Why do they do that? Especially as it always seems to be for products that are popular anyway. They’re selling millions of units, but the company decides what everyone buying it wants is a new improved version. Why? Are they getting thousands of messages? I always buy your product, for the quality, or the taste, because it’s useful etc., please eff around with the formula and update it cos I’m sure it would be better. It rarely is and the company slinks the old version back into use on the quiet. The new improved price always stays at the same increased level though.
The most famous was new improved Coke, back in the eighties; they had to revert back to “classic Coke” due to the backlash. They’d changed it because they were getting battered in taste tests against Pepsi, but they managed to make an already inferior product even worse. So, they moved onto plan b, which is much more successful for them. They bully retailers into not stocking PepsiCo items by bribing them with branded fridges and the threat of not supplying Coca-Cola if they do. This is why I often have to go into several shops before there is a drink worth buying. Not that I’m addicted or anything. Although one of my #VSS365 offerings from last week may suggest otherwise.
He was addicted, and he knew it. He had beaten the need to drink every night. He had given up smoking. He had never really been into drugs. He stayed away from casinos and bookies. Yet he was addicted to this. The #effervescent brown liquid couldn’t be kicked. Oh Pepsi.
Still the sesame seeds appear each evening, I don’t know how but at least it gave me more song lyrics to mess with.
Every day
No matter what I eat
Whether it’s bread or if it is meat
Can you tell me how my teeth
How they produce Sesame Seeds?
Rinse my mouth
And they seem to appear
Popping out from gaps
Suddenly there
Can you tell me why my teeth
Why they produce Sesame Seeds?
How can it be Friday already, it was Wednesday morning, and then I blinked and it was Friday afternoon, at least it means it’s home time soon, and I can leave the oppressive atmosphere of the kitchen table and move to the living room sofa, plus it’s Pizza Friday. I’ve been mainly distracted by the ghost trying to escape from the oven all day. I see the movement out of the corner of my eye, and it’s not pets for a change, but the oven door slowly swinging open. There is duct tape to keep it in place, but it doesn’t seem to be working today; or the ghost has got stronger and can push their way out now.
Saturday morning started promisingly with an “Important information about your ticket” e-mail from the National Lottery. £2.90 later, it meant I still had to go to work next week. I went out walking, the full transcript to which can be found here.
Whilst I was out walking, Helen was out with her mum at a garden centre. A bit carried away may be a slight understatement. It took four people four trips each to carry all the plants out of the car and through to the back garden.
With all this other activity going on, Charlie hadn’t been walked, and so his reward to us for this was to be an annoying woofy tw@t all night. I let him out before we went to bed, and even with the door closed I could hear the little sod trying to tear down one of the fence panels. From going to bed until half three he didn’t let up on the intermittent barking. It wasn’t even as if he needed the toilet, as at half three he went out and straight to the fence he was wrecking. After being shouted at, he slunk back into the house, and thankfully stopped barking.
On Sunday morning while Helen was out shopping I went and had a look at the fence and restacked all the wooden panels in front of the panel Charlie was trying to tear down, and went and got some additional ones, much to the obvious disappointment of the damn dog. Along with the food shopping, even more plants and garden accessories came back with her. I’m now wondering if we’re (well Helen) setting up a side line industry and starting a nursery.
Helen spent the afternoon spray and brush painting various pots in bright colours so they were ready to put the newly acquired jungle in (and yes, it is massive). I tried to keep Charlie inside to prevent him becoming a multi coloured springer. But being the idiot he is, the first thing he did when he went out was to drink out of the bucket with the water in that was being used to clean the paint brushes. And so he ended up with a blue tongue and whiskers. And then later on he managed to get orange paint on his body and tail brushing past one of the painted pots because he was being a nosy sod.
I have previously mentioned how he’d literally knocked all the stuffing out of his bear companion. Well, a neighbour brought an intact bear around, one that one of her children no longer wanted. He ignored it and tried to get at the wrung out husk of the old one we’d put on the side. Helen tied the old one to the new one and he was on it like a car bonnet.
Even going out for a walk in the encroaching dusk didn’t stop him from woofing as soon as the lights went out. Every time I was just about to drop off he’d start with another woofing chorus. So annoying. It says that most people fall asleep within seven minutes of closing their eyes; I’m normally around the seventy minute mark, so I don’t need a woofy fool making it worse. Just after one I’d had enough, I went to let him out, and he went straight to the painted pots to see if he could get some more paint on him. One expletive filled rant at him later, he was inside and quiet for the rest of the night.
I was a bit sluggish Monday morning, and not looking forward to the fact that some sociopath had arranged a 9am meeting. I was happy to find that after logging on they had moved it to a much more manageable 11am. And so the tedium continued.
During the weekend I levelled up on Jigsaw World, I’m now at level 17 and officially classified as a jigsaw fiend. And after posting more collections of themed street signs into the Memories of Crawley Facebook group, someone suggested I might try train spotting. Little did they know I’d been through that phase as a kid, but I had a whole host of other geek activities on the go. I had completed three sets of street sign collections, Londoners, period design styles, and dales.
Opening a new packet of toilet rolls, I noticed they were recycled. From there my mind jumped to the old list of things you wouldn’t want to be buying from second hand shops (toilet paper, nappies, underwear, condoms etc.). And then I realised we don’t really have second hand shops anymore. They seem to have disappeared, forced out of the market by charity shops and car boot sales; which to me is a bit of a shame; I miss the un-sanitised haphazardness that old second hand shops used to have.
Not quite able to get her words out in the right order, Helen was off to the garden to plant some pot. Now I know that there has been some relaxing of drug laws around the world, but I’m not convinced growing pot is legal in this country. Yet. Give it a few more years and it will probably be fine.
I see the reopening of shops went well, social distancing was in full effect, and nice patient orderly queues formed everywhere. Or not, as the case maybe. Being a country full of pea-brained halfwits it was a free for all, not just at the expected Primark, but the scenes at Niketown on Oxford Street and at the luxury outlets at Bicester Village just goes to show that we, as a country weren’t ready to come out of lockdown, and that wave two is coming, and despite what the media will try to tell you about who to blame, it will be nobody’s fault but our own.
Tuesday is Sussex Day, which if I’m honest until this year I’d never heard of, but I have seen a lot of it over social media this week. I automatically thought that it was an age old event, dating back to when the old Kingdom of the South Saxons was first formed back at the tail end of the fifth century. But no, it is a fairly recent thing, having only come into effect from 2007 after the idea was raised to the then head of West Sussex County Council and now Crawley MP – Henry Smith. It is celebrated on the 16th June because that is the saint’s feast day for St Richard of Chichester, the county’s Patron Saint (something else I wasn’t aware of).
The Sussex Martlets flag is flown in the original six towns that were the centres of their rapes in the Middle Ages (Chichester, Bramber, Arundel, Lewes, Pevensey and Hastings), and in other towns and villages, whilst other towns and villages read out the Sussex Charter (again branching into areas I had no idea about – mainly because Leicestershire doesn’t do or have anything of this ilk, they will probably get around to this sometime in the 2040’s); and sing the unofficial county anthem of “Sussex By The Sea” (all five verses, choruses and refrains!)
Just so all those who live in Sussex know, the charter is as below.
For all the people of the ancient kingdom of Sussex!
Let it be known: the 16 June of each and every year shall be known as Sussex Day.
Sussex day shall be celebrated according to the rites and traditions of Sussex.
Let it be known all the people of Sussex shall be responsible for the maintenance of those boundaries that join to those of our neighbours.
Let it be known all the people of Sussex shall be responsible for all the environs within those boundaries.
Let it be known, the people of Sussex shall recognise the inshore waters that lie inside a line drawn from Beachy Head, and extending to Selsey Bill as being, the Bay of Sussex.
Let it be known, the people of Sussex will undertake responsibility for the general well-being of our neighbours.
Let it be known the people of Sussex shall be guardians of our wildlife.
Let it be known the people of Sussex will, through custom support all local business.
Finally, let it be known, as guardians of Sussex, we all know Sussex is Sussex … and Sussex won’t be druv!
In God we trust.
God Save the Queen!
Charlie wasn’t impressed there was a blue tarpaulin sheet down on the grass to the left of the garden next to the patio. Well, to be fair, when I say grass, most of it is dead as it is Charlie’s favourite pee spot. After two days of the tarpaulin being down so Helen could paint the plant pots and not the ground, Charlie had had enough of having to go further down the garden and he just peed all over the tarpaulin, which needed to be rinsed and hung up to dry. I’m never quite sure whether the dog is a complete imbecile, or he’s actually a genius in getting what he wants.
Someone mentioned that cleanliness is next to godliness, so I checked it out in my dictionary and it turns out they were a liar, there are 78 pages between the two words.
I let the cat in before going to bed; he ran straight to the kitchen for food, ate a couple of mouthfuls and went back to the front door to be let out. I opened the door and he backed away as if frightened of the dark (that he’d just come in from), and so he turned tail and headed to the back door. I opened that, and he backed off even quicker, it’s a lot darker out the back because there are no street lights. So he went back to the front door, I opened it and after a slight hesitation he finally went out for the night.
Wednesday was a momentous event for me, it was all ready, and I was able to go back in and work in the office. No pesky pets to deal with during the day, and a clear and obvious break between home and work. Before I left the house I had another “Important information about your ticket” e-mail, perhaps I wouldn’t need to go back at all. Oh well I would, it was only £2.10 this time.
So I get into the office, get to the allocated desk and start to set up. Only to find that the bank of desks I’ve been allocated to is the only one in the whole building that don’t have any power to them, and that the desk in question seems to be the only one around without a docking station. So until they can fix that I’m on a different bank of desks on a lower desk than ideal. I’m the only non-facilities person in the building. Someone comes around every hour or so, just checking to make sure I’m not dead at my desk or anything, which is new, as they hadn’t used to check for brain deaths when the office was full.
I have to say, it feels great to be back in the office, I’ve got that home / work split back, with the added bonus of there being no morons to come and interrupt me at my desk. And time isn’t racing, I didn’t blink and it was suddenly half past three and the flapping about getting things done before the end of the day started. There just felt like there was more time to get things done. We’ll see how it is when anyone else comes back in.
