Bread is dead

'Log on to Kingsmill confessions now and send us yours', advises a recent advert for Kingsmill the breadmakers. Are people really doing this? Are people really stealing unguarded sandwiches and then logging the theft on some kind of database? It doesn't sound like something people would do, but you never know what will capture the imagination of the British public. Without wanting to get in to too much depth, some of the thefts sound quite poorly executed. I know it isn't supposed to be Diagnosis Murder - nobody would even think of trying to steal Dick Van Dyke's sandwich, but, for example, in one scenario the original sandwich creator is tricked in to thinking he just never made it in the first place. Amnesia, it's a serious business, let's not start using it to gain free sandwiches.
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Unbelievably there's even a website dedicated to the art of sandwich stealing. Perhaps even more unbelievably people are logging incidents on it, 'I lock myself in the stationery cupboard at work so I can enjoy my favourite sandwich in peace and quiet', writes the amigously named Julie. You lock yourself in there or you've been locked in there Julie? There's only one word different, but it changes the tone of the whole thing. Colleagues are questioning your sanity, people are talking about you and wondering if you're OK. In short, you have bigger problems to contend with.
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Another effort from Kingsmill pictures a teenager asleep in bed. Nothing can wake him, not even some kind of Wallace and Gromit style contraption with symbols and bells attached to it. A real nightmare, and I can't tell you how many families I know who have resorted to a series or pullies and levers to wake their child up. Fortunately a solution is at hand, the mother toasts some bread, wafts the sweet scent up the stairs using the door and, as if by magic, the teenager surfaces and eats all of the toast. A charming story, almost certainly based on real events.
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What these companies all seem to have in common is a similar element of borderline lunacy that has made them think people care about bread. Trust me, they don't. If Kingsmill shut down tomorrow, it would take me three, four or even five months to anyone to even notice. Sometimes you have to just accept the sad truth that you're product is what it is. It's isn't going to evolve, improve or really become any better or worse than it was when it started. Not that this logic has stopped some companies from trying and succeeding at reinenting the wheel as what is essentially the same wheel. The common toothbrush is a good example of a product which has supposedly been evolving for years and still looks exactly the same. The fact is that people need bread. People will buy bread. Who really knows what actually makes you choose one type over another? I suppose for the one person that managed to pursuade Warburtons in to an ill fated production run of Jolly Ranchers flavoured white loaves might enjoy that one loaf and buy it, but I imagine it's generally the little things. Which name do I remember? Which loaf hasn't been trodden on by the shelf stacker that stacked it? Which is least expensive? For these reasons perhaps it's the companies cited here that are really getting it right and holding my attention the most.

Two's company

Have you ever wondered what makes you choose a particular seat on an empty bus, or a certain urinal in an empty toilet. Convienience? Superstition? Perhaps if you're a woman you might well wonder how you've ended up in a toilet with urinals in to in the first place, but no matter. There is an unwritten code, I think it's a British thing. It differs from region to region, but I'll come on to that later. If you walk on to a bus or train and the seats are all empty, you'll pick any vacant seat. Eveyerone else, unless they happen to know someone on the bus or train, will do the same thing until all seats are half filled. Then any newcomers have to start sitting next to people they don't know, and that's when you get these regional differences. In London, getting a seat on public transport is like winning the lottery, they're like gold dust to these people. A copy of the Metro or London Lite and a seat, they'd choose it over sex I'm sure of it. It doesn't matter who that seat is next to or how inconvenient it is to get it either. Children will fall to the floor, people who are reading will be jogged (and because of said Britisness show no emotion at all). Elsewhere in the country, people won't do this. They would rather stand than be so forward as to actually sit down on an empty seat next to someone they don't know. Sometimes the first incumbent of the other seat will try and engineer ways to keep the seat next to them free, they'll guard it with a bag or fall asleep on it. We really are quite an odd species when it comes to possession of public seating.

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Anyway, this long introductory digression aside, I was recently on a train. You don't know need to know why I was on a train, there wasn't any particularly top secret about it, it just isn't really relavent. The fact is, I was on a train. It wasn't empty, but it was certainly closer to being empty than it was to being full, there were many empty seats. The train stopped at one of these Godforsaken villages you wish it would just drive straight though. An elderly man gets on and after looking down the carriage and deciding the walk wasn't for him sat next to me. You just don't do this. These aren't the rules. This isn't what has been agreed. There are other seats available, people start to think we must know each other, we don't! The man then continues to indiscreetly read my newspaper, this is where the Britishness comes in again. I begin to feel guilty for turning the page of my own newspaper in case this strange man hasn't finished reading the review of this week newly released albums. What a bizzare situation, occasionally I would turn and he would quickly look away as if to try and mask the fact he was stealthily, or unstealthily as the case may be, enjoying my newspaper. When I eventually got up to get off the train I left it there, although I suspect he'd already read most of it. The trouble in this situation is you can't just say 'excuse me, don't be offended, I don't begrudge you sitting in that particular seat, but I'm going to move to another one so I can stretch out'. Even if you're on a long journey and by the time you get to where you're going to there are barely any people left on the train, people feel rude moving. As if you've developed some kind of connection in the time you've been thrown together by chance for 40 minutes or so that makes you both feel obliged to stay where you are.

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On the way back the other way, the same thing happened. This woman smelled of vodka, I think I really just paid the inevitable price for choosing a seat near the doors, it's invariably going to attract people either incapacitated by alcohol or age that can't or won't walk very far. I don't think there's really any conclusion I can draw from my experiences other than that when you're on the train or the bus you've bought one seat. Sometimes you don't even get that. You have no right or ownership over the other seat, it's a total lottery. All you can do is hope that if someone does target the next to yours they are at least odorless and bring reading material of their own.

Signs That Scare

By Alex Allen

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Have you ever seen a sign or a certificate that was obviously designed to reassure or convey some kind of positive intention but had completely the opposite effect? That's probably quite a in concise way to express that thought, so let me give you some examples. On the bus today there was a sign which read, 'safety is important to us, that's why we enter our drivers for safe driving awards'. You enter your drivers? I'm sorry, but that really doesn't mean anything. That's like me putting myself forward for the job of senior surgeon at BUPA and then opening my own drop in health clinic in the local shopping mall and performing surgery on strangers while telling about my extensive healing credentials. A complete nonsense. For the record the bus driver was not a safe driver and almost caused a collision on a roundabout, I suppose that illustrates the point. The fact is that, to me, 'we've entered' translates as 'didn't win'. It's a bit like when you see 'Oscar nominated' on Tom Cruise DVDs. What does that mean? Again, 'didn't win'. Bad luck Tom, I can see why you're trying to sell this film as Oscar worthy, but it wasn't and you aren't fooling anyone.

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But let's not turn this in to some kind of crusade against Tom Cruise, there examples closer to home, too. I've seen a local takeaway that has a certificate for 'basic food hygiene level 1' in the window. What the hell is that? It doesn't exactly inspire confidence does it? That this place has managed to certify that, as a general rule, they've managed to avoid poisoning anybody. I suppose that there's a chance that there are other takeaways that don't have this certificate, but to be honest until I saw it in the window I wasn't even thinking about food hygiene. It was that unnerving certificate that made me begin to think 'hold on, level 1? How many levels are there? Is this actually cooked?' It isn't as if I'm up to date with takeaway hygiene awards, not really my forte, someone could have just knocked this 'award' up in 5 minutes on Microsoft Publisher who am I to know? Bottom line, do I feel more reassured after seeing the certificate than I did before, probably not.

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It's not just a written thing though, have you ever heard someone say that for all another person's faults, as least 'their heart is in the right place'? This, to me, seems like the least you should expect as a functional human. If it weren't true you probably wouldn't be functional at all, you'd be dead. So if the absolute best thing someone can think to say about you is that, physically at least, you're capable of operating correctly on a day to day basis even though the things you are actually doing are probably pretty despicable, that really doesn't say a great deal about you as a person. You're greatest asset is something that a, is true of the majority of other people, and b, is something you had absolutely no control over in the first place. Finally, have you ever been walking somewhere quite innocently when someone's massive dog jumps on you and the owner, usually called something like Sheila, tells you that 'he likes you'. I'm sorry, but that clearly is not the case, your dog is biting my leg. I like people, I don't bite them. You have no idea whether your dog likes me, you or the brand of dog food you feed it, it's just a dog. Let's not go mental. Rather, let's stop laughing like this is a hilarious turn of events and get rid of this dog. Not necessarily from the Earth altogether, but at the very least from my leg.

Posting Away Your Possessions

By Alex Allen

I know that money is tight at the moment, but is there really a necessity for the plethora of companies advertising on TV for us to send various things off to them in envelopes for money? The first example of this that registered on my radar was Envirofone, a website that will give you money for old mobile phones. What exactly are they doing with these phones? Because, come to think of it, I never actually bothered to ask. So fixated was I with the cheque for £11.72 that had come through the post that I hadn't even contemplated what they might be doing with my Sony Ericsson K700i. It's not that I particularly begrudge someone inheriting my collection of numbers for local takeaways and my high score for Bejewelled, it would just be nice to know. 'Send us your phone, it'll help the environment' advises the chav in the advert. Will it? How? That isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely intrigued. Is someone else going to get my phone? Are they just going to strip it down and make vending machines out of it or what? Frankly I do wonder where the product I'm going to spend my £11.72 Argos voucher on will prove to be any less redundant to me in three weeks than the phone I've just relinquished. Or perhaps there is a website in the pipeline to deal with those, too. There are many websites such as this, Envirofone was just the first that came to mind, so perhaps their awful advertising campaign was the best of the bunch. Mazuma Mobile are another, at first I wondered whether Mazuma was a word at all. It is, it's actually a 19^th Century Yiddish slang term for money. I'm sure that won't be lost at all on the sort of people sending their belongings in. I think I've just become more of a cynic, but I do wonder what the catch is. It seems like quite a generous offer when, to be honest, if someone came round and asked if they could have it I'd probably give it to them. It would be an odd request, and if you're reading this and thinking of coming round and trying your luck I'd request you don't.

Of course the thing about sending an old phone somewhere is that the object is generally worthless to the sender anyway. The service works because it's offering you money for something that up until then was just lying around. But the latest fad just baffles me completely, sending all your gold in an envelope for cash. So, to recap, they want you to send your most valuable possessions in an uninsured envelope, something they call a 'process pak' (unfortunately not a typo), to a processing plant where your gold will be looked at by a valuations team who will then pay you a fair price, or at least a price, before melting your jewellery. There just seems something intrinsically untrustworthy about this, as if their headquarters are set somewhere in Mordor and the gold is melted in Mount Doom to make swords and arrows for Oarks. Come to think of it Cash 4 Gold probably would have saved Froddo an awful lot of time, although even he would have baulked at sending the ring in an uninsured envelope by standard delivery. As a general rule, I refuse to trust any company that has anonymous testimonials as part of its literature. I feel compelled to tell these people that just because you write something in between quotation marks doesn't instantly make it credible, and writing that Joanna thinks that your service is fantastic means fuck all to the rest of us. I don't know who Joanna is, and to be honest, I'm surprised that someone who was apparently so financially fucked that she had to resort to mailing her belongings to a melting factory to get by could find the time or motivation to write about how pleasurable the experience was. If you're going to start making stuff up, how about 'of course having to melt my wedding ring to pay my electricity bill was a real bitch, but given the circumstances the company did what they said they going to do when they said they were going to do it'.

Don't like those, well why not just sell your entire house to some sort of shady phone line and rent it back from them again? How low can this ship sink, Bone Marrow 2 Go? The Insta-Child Adoption Line? I feel bad because these companies are preying on people who grew up and lived through and age where they felt they were entitled to a certain quality of life regardless of whether they could pay for it and are now realising the unpleasant truth that the bubble has burst, but it isn't as if there aren't alternatives to these sleazy phone companies and if you are really prepared to send all your stuff to someone you don't know with nothing but an envelope to protect it then you may as well put whatever little common sense you had in with it.

"You Are What You Wear"

Thanks for that Free Spirit.

If the shop wasn't already a total bastardisation of anything good about alternative sports and culture then it surely is now. The truth about these companies, about the bands that explode with hits on myspace or the people whose twitters are read is that it is done so with the intentions of men and women in expensive suits. Don't forget that.

I understand that Quicksilver, Animal etc. etc. are multinational companies and clearly were always destined to be and to be honest I couldn't give three hoots. But when the silly little impressionable youths only preoccupied with bebo, facebook, skins, shite 80's throwback 'indie' and whatever else will be along in a few months can't see this then I guess we wave goodbye to authenticity forever.

Clearly, it's easy to claim that authenticity is manufactured just about everywhere but it's not true, that's just what businesses want us to think in order to stop us looking for that true authenticity. Businesses want to bring it to 'us' to stop us making it for ourselves. Yes it's fairly obvious, but I bet you take it for granted.

With just about everyone in the world uneasy with venturing from what is acceptable, now that facebook forces us to compare every and any bloody thing happening in our social lives, I guess we're not even allowed to complain that this is the way it is.

Shame really, because it seems to me that it has suddenly become unneccesarily hard for people to find the truely alternative side of life. How? Because they think they already have it and that actually is a shame.

So no - Free Spirit, you are wrong. You are not what you bloody wear, you are not what you post yourself posing as in facebook, you are not the culmination of your twitters, you are what you do away from all that crap.

Fools.....rebel!

To Twitter or Not to Twitter?

By Alex Allen

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It's a slippery slope becoming an old person. And I know that 70 is the 50 etc etc, but have you noticed that it's generally 70 year olds that say that? Before you know it, you're holding on to that veneer panelled 21" television because it 'works perfectly well' and does 'everything you need'. This is a stupid argument in itself, who actually needs a television? Nobody. It's a total luxury in itself, in terms of an actual use, it doesn't have one. There's only one end to that depressing situation, buying your electrical goods from the Co-Op department store because 'you trust it and they're reliable', and basing you next hifi on the criteria of 'being sturdy'. I refuse to let this happen to me. I'm going to be the exception to that rule, I'm going to change history, you'll see. Having made these points, I find it extremely important not to lose sight of the next big thing. I refuse to be the stubborn friend that refuses to sign up to facebook because they prefer their simple life. Of course, in the end, everybody caves in that respect, usually under the guise that they've 'just joined to look at the photos'. The trouble with Twitter is, I just don't get it. Obviously I understand what it does, I'm not an idiot, I just don't find what it does that is particularly useful. If you don't know what Twitter is, essentially it's another user generated content website that gives you 140 characters to let the world know what you're doing at any given time. It's like a website with just the facebook status updates and nothing else. That's great if you lead an full, exciting life which warrants a minute by minute update.
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Mine doesn't. In fact, usually the reason I'm logging in to Twitter is because I'm doing nothing. What am I really doing? Probably lounging on the sofa watching the Half Ton Son. Who wants to read about that? If I was out gallivanting round the west end, watching musicals, and eating in expensive restaurants the last thing I'd be concerning myself with is whether or not I'd updated my band of Twitter followers or not. The trouble is, I trust Stephen Fry. Generally, if I don't agree with him about something it's because I'm wrong, so I feel a bit unsure about condemning something he support so passionately. Still, I think my argument is still founded. Stephen Fry is interesting, he does interesting things, and there are thousands of people who are interested in reading about them. As a celebrity update service, which humanises celebrities and lets us, the public, see what they're up to, what they think, and goes deeper than their portrayal as a brand, it's really good. Unfortunately, few celebrities are willing to put their head on the block by revealing their own personal feelings and opinions about the world, there are simply too many media pitfalls. Nobody wants to be the next Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, Ross can get away with it - he can do pretty much whatever he wants, but nobody else could. So while a few give their own personal updates, there are a great deal more 'official' celebrity accounts reeling off details of their next cookery book, book signing, gig or signature clothing range. I think it's ultimately facebook for the famous, it's a way for celebrities to give an impression of keeping up with the modern age with little effort. As with all websites based on user generated content, as popularity snowballs it will find itself more and more vulnerable to a sea of advertising which will devour that aspect, too. People will grow tired of sifting through details of the new Mitchell and Webb DVD for something interesting to read. For the common person, I'm not convinced it has even that brief lifespan. These websites rely on new content, on there being something new and interesting to look at. People stalk their friends, look at photos, play around with applications. Will people keep coming back to Twitter to find out what I had for breakfast? I doubt it. Yes people are joining, probably to find out what all the hype is about, I don't think the majority of these people will come back again.

2nd Class Service

Royal Mail, now there's a poor excuse for a service. Now I'm not generally a bitter person - for fear of picking up the Daily Mail and shouting at the TV, but Her Majesty's postal service really has got a lot to answer for. I don't really care about the number of daily collections, post office closures, or even what time my post is delivered. But there are a few things which I really shouldn't have to complain about.

First of all, 'Special Delivery'. Exactly what's special about it? Am I missing something, or should receiving something posted to you just be the service - to just go without saying? Should I really have to pay more to guarantee this basic requirement? But even worse of course, even 'Special Delivery' doesn't actually guarantee delivery of the item, it just insures the value of it. So what's the point? I might as well just post my letters into the bin, or give them to a tramp in exchange for some old Burger King wrappers. At least then there's a chance I could receive some free burger coupons or a plastic Woody Woodpecker toy.

Then there's picking up a parcel. Now I've no idea, not being very old and all, about how Post 'used' to be. But I'm pretty sure Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, or Winston Churchill didn't need to wait 48 fucking hours after receiving a parcel slip to be able to retrieve their consignments. And I bet once they'd got to their parcel depots, theirs were the ones you can actually see through the hatch, not the ones which are so hidden in the labyrinth of failed deliveries the postal assistant emerges after 35 minutes looking like he's just slayed a dragon.

I think what's been lost here is the common sense. Replaced, like with so many things in society, with bureaucracy. I once bemused the assistant in my local parcel depot by asking if I could post something. The fact is, it's not difficult to deliver something which has the delivery address written on it. So just get on with it, and stop pretending efficiency is a chargeable luxury.