Last week, I tried to top up my phone. As ever, a normally simple task proved inordinately difficult, as I was informed that the post office closes arbitrarily of a Friday afternoon, then that O2 don’t much like my choice of debit card. When I got home I resorted to their lengthy and inconvenient debit card top-up line. This has nothing to do with the story for now, but it is worthy of note as we will come back to it later.

Earlier today, I started to play Bureaucracy, a ridiculous text adventure set in a dangerously familiar seeming world full of red tape and unhelpful people. In many ways it seems only fitting that it took five attempts and two separate DOS shells to get the programme to run at all, but run it I did. I quickly tired of it, though, because the only real differences I could find between the game and real life was that I have a girlfriend in the game, and in real life I am not destined for an early grave by consistently mis-typing the word “inventory”.

A little under two minutes after I stopped playing O2 texted me to tell me that if I couldn’t find a store to top-up at I could now do it by credit or debit card. Meanwhile, our phone from BT (who used to own O2, and now rather would like to have them back if that’s okay) has been bugging us since we got it set up with repetitive calls from an unmasked phone number which likes to beep at us. Exactly how somebody could have become so convinced that our phone number (which presumably didn’t exist two months ago) is in fact a fax machine is unclear, but it is entirely possible that they are not terribly bright — otherwise they might have given up trying to fax us by now.

Being faxed, though, is not the only problem we have. The considerate neighbours have decided to dump their trash outside our house (since being on the end of the terrace we have a wall and they don’t), so now we have a rat. Or rather, we have at least one rat. (Or rather, Lee has seen a rat, which does not necessarily prove there is one, it may simply prove he has been drinking too much tea again.) Another joy of being at the end of a terrace is that we have a big billboard attached to our house, which currently bears the slogan “200 prices dropped every week. So why wait?”. I don’t know who came up with that one, but they should probably be fired.

A lot of people look back fondly to some indeterminate period known to mankind only as “The Good Old Days”, in which life was better, despite (or some say because of) the lack of technology and modern conveniences. And it starts early. At least two of my housemates appear to be regressing to their respective childhoods, and therefore have taken to shopping at the Early Learning Centre rather more often than Tesco’s. Which is all well and good, but some of the toys aimed at children today are almost unbelievable. They seem to be aimed (probably with the intention of ‘developing’ children) at turning them into adults before they hit eleven. For example, whereas in The Good Old Days you could buy a toy which you pushed along the floor and beads inside it flew around, this toy is now shaped almost exactly like a vacuum cleaner, to the extent that it has lights, sound effects, and — I swear — a hose attachment “for those hard to reach spots”. On the same page of the catalogue are two toys designed by Hotpoint, which are smaller replicas of their leading washing machine and oven units, which come complete with laundry basket, fake Persil pack, plastic ovenware, and imitation food. The catalogue even boasts that these can be combined (along with another company’s sink-dishwasher-cupboard combo) to make a full imaginary kitchen. It has already been observed that though children are given toy phones to play with, the moment they hit seventeen they are shouted at for hogging the phone, but the more modern development is to buy them toy mobiles, then act disappointed when they want a real one (which they plainly don’t need) at age eleven. And nostalgia won’t work for our kids. It just won’t. You cannot, I am convinced, look back and say “do you remember Lucy The Amazing Doll?”. Because this is the sort of name toys have now. They have real names, and the dolls blink, cry, and drink milk, and some of them even go to the toilet to dispose of said milk. The toy cats scream if you stand on their tails. Children’s toys are rapidly becoming more technologically advanced than most of the other objects in your house, though not my house, since I am a gadget freak.

I would like to make it clear, also, that I am not a gadget freak in the traditional sense: I want gadgets to do as many things for me as possible, but I want these things to be done by as few gadgets as possible. Therefore my mobile phone is also my organiser, address book, email client, and camera, my piano-keyboard is also my MIDI wavetable, my personal stereo is also my portable data storage unit and my computer is also my stereo. This last is an arrangement I have no intention of continuing. As good as my MP3 playlist is, I want a slightly higher-quality sound, and if possible one that doesn’t require a couple of minutes to boot up (besides which until I buy a CD player, I probably won’t buy many more CDs). And if I hadn’t met Adam, I might even have made the mistake of going into Dixon’s and buying a CD player. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m sure it is entirely possible to get a good low-end CD player from Dixon’s, but the fact is that what happens there is that you walk in, look at them, and pick one based entirely on that. If you drive a car, you get a test drive first. If you buy a games console, you get to play it instore. The TVs are on demo. Only once in a general-electronics store have I seen all the stereos on demo (though for some reason they almost always show you what they look like, as if that matters in the slightest). Adam has advised me to go to a low-fi specialist shop in Leeds, and I think I might just do that instead.

Sometimes, I hate being single. In these times, I lie alone in bed, wishing I had a girlfriend to share it with. Fortunately, I developed a very mature and sophisticated way of dealing with it: watching Loose Women on television. While watching loose women on television is a tactic employed by many single men, mine is subtly different, in that in involves the talk programme on during the day, and can be done in company (even female company). The show is ideal for men who wish that had a woman in their lives, because it rather effectively makes the urge go away.

The show is fronted by a group of women — presumably loose ones — who range from ex-members of girl bands, to ex-hosts of poorly thought out quiz shows. They spend the time discussing topics of little or no interest to the modern woman, such as whether or not bottom-pinching should be illegal. Really. I mean, I understand that I am not the target audience for this programme, but I have never once seen a woman have her bottom pinched. I have never heard of it happening (except on Loose Women). I have never met a woman to whom this has happened. I have, however, know it to happen to men, because on more than one occasion I have been that man. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only person on the show who mentioned this trend was the guest, who was a man (specifically, I think, a racing driver). After having several minutes of uninformed and irrelevant discussion, they threw the debate open to the nation in a then-new section called “Woman on the Loose”, in which their then-new presented found some people with no opinions and asked them for their thoughts on the matter. For the most part they said it was only a bit of fun, but asked where you draw the line. After this roaring success it was passed to the viewers at home, or at least the ones who felt like calling in, who between them offered just one opinion, which was that the caller was all in favour of bottom-pinching, but nobody seemed to want to pinch her.

But she lived in Scotland, which is more than a bit out of my way.

The game I own with probably more bugs than any other is, depending on your definition of the word ‘bugs’, either Counter Strike, or Worms World Party. The first features fun bugs like “the bots throw themselves off cliffs preferably to killing you” and “the console randomly vanishes”, while the latter features more heavily armed bugs with amusing names. It was also widely criticised for being altogether too similar to the previous game, but when Worms Blast was released it was criticised for being “just not Worms”, basically for being too different. I mention this because I personally have no problem with Worms Blast, and therefore don’t want to see it take another popularity hit for no reason. To this end, I intend to stress the following point: Worms Blast is a computer game, whereas the killer virus is called the MSBlast worm.

Or, more accurately, it isn’t. Technically, any geek could tell you that a worm is not the same as a virus is not the same as a trojan. A virus is “just not worms” either; it is in fact a small program that is good at going unnoticed and copying itself programmed by a pasty-skinned male with no social life when he clearly ought to have been either drunk, asleep, or both. A trojan lives inside another program and offers a way in to your computer, and was named after a famous horse. (This is where we derive the phrase “beware of geeks bearing GIFs”.) A worm is… well… it’s something else entirely, and that’s the point. But whatever it is, it appears to have infected the entire university, which is one of the reasons I haven’t been able to update the site recently. A larger problem, one may suspect, is that very soon the next semester starts, and at three on a Wednesday, for example, the Viglen cluster is booked out for a module called Introduction to Computational Physics. Fortunately, if the ISS department haven’t by that time managed to get rid of this worm there should be only the most minimal disruption to that module, since the module doesn’t actually exist. It has a reference code, three hours a week timetabled, and a course team of two, but will not have any students for at least another year.

Planning ahead, of course, I am all in favour of — I hope to try it myself some day — but I can’t help thinking that booking out rooms four hours at a time for a module with no students at all is at best redundant and at worst insane. If only it came as some kind of a suprise. Unfortunately, however, this is somewhat par for the course (if you’ll excuse the pun). In a few weeks I hope to start a module called Laser Physics And Photonics, but I don’t know if I will be allowed to since I haven’t done all of the pre-requisite modules. I expect this will be overlooked, though, on the grounds that the offending pre-requisite module doesn’t actually exist either. We are also offered two modules which are felt to have too much overlap with other modules and consequently if we wish to take one of them, we cannot have studied an overlapping module. By now only the most naïve readers can actually expect either of the overlapping modules to exist, but allow me to clarify just for those people: They don’t, Annie. Meanwhile Adam is trying, quite reasonably, to use the phone network to produce a loud enough ringing noise somewhere in the Physics department that they might pick up their phone and talk to him in order to make the ringing stop. This is in the vain hope that they might tell him when the electronics exam is before said exam takes place (which may of course be in the past).

In case you are new to my webpage and have not yet sat down and read every single column I have typed over the last two years — don’t laugh, it’s happened — I think I ought to mention that we have a lot of irony around here. To recap:

Twenty-one Alistair Griffins attended the Dave Gorman show.

The local incinerator burned down.

Richard got the wrong change at the maths cafeteria.

For this reason, I chose to re-christen Leeds “Ironyville USA”, for reasons which are many and obvious. And Leeds, for its part, rose to the task admirably. The £1-shop in town is currently having a half price sale. The Bodington Bar in Bodington Hall does not sell Boddingtons. (I have no information regarding the bar at the Tetley Halls.) The Dry Dock is shaped like a ship, but The Ship is not. (The Dry Dock is run by the same people as The Library, who apparently elected to specialise in confusing pubs.) All the cashpoints seem to have no cash (and therefore no point). It’s beginning to get silly, really.

If you are, or plan to be, at university, I offer you the following advice:

1. If you are at Leeds, do not attempt to trim your student card to credit card dimensions. Many freshers do this. Once.
2. If you do not live in halls the first year, for God’s sake make sure you go out enough.
3. Find a local bakery which will be better and cheaper than the Uni’s coffee bars.
4. Sell their sandwiches at a markup in said coffee bars.
5. Fail your exams.

This last one may come as something of a shock, but the fact remains that all of my friends have to revise this week to pass resit exams to avoid repeating the year, whereas I only have to fit a lampshade. I feel like I have the harder job. You see, the reason that everybody thinks I have no common sense or real-world knowledge is that, for some unknown reason, every little thing I do is made impossibly difficult by a variety of conspiring factors. I don’t expect you to believe that, so here are three examples of traditionally simple tasks made difficult by coincidence and idiots. All three stories are true, and all happened to me earlier today.

Going Shopping

First, I went to the nearest shop to our house: Londis. Londis sell sandwich meat, bread, dairy produce, and alcohol. They do not sell enough items to make a good shop. Naturally, I was not going to carry shopping from there to the Co-op, and then home (see Why I Hate Supermarkets), so I went to the Co-op to get the lot. This proved more difficult than it ought have. Having never been there from here, the only way I knew to get there was via other places totally out of the way, so I took a devious route to the Co-op, by which I mean that it deviated wildly from the correct route, but I didn’t mind; I rather enjoy walking. Once there, I found the products on the shelves failed to match up with the prices on the shelves. Where the shelf boasted of its “CP SKLS CHKN BREAST FILLET, 500g, £2.59″, the actual product was only 260g of chicken, priced at £3.59. Needless to say, I did not purchase this item. Having picked up some other chicken, various types of bread, and some butter — well, Utterly Butterly — well, “CO-OP Buttery” — and some other items, I paid and left. Unfortunately, due to my terrible sense of direction (some of these things are my fault…) and the near-identical local churches (…but other things are not), I took one wrong turn and ended up at the wrong end of Cardigan road. Irritatingly, had I turned the other way, this road would have dropped me a short walk from my house, and I think that’s quite good by my standards. Perhaps I should have said I enjoy walking up to a point. I can’t tell you just how long it was until I eventually passed the Co-op again in the other direction, but it was long enough for my fingers to go tingly and for me to devise a cunning way to carry the bags and relieve the pressure using only objects I had to hand. (I wrapped my wallet around the handles. Try it; it works.) When I got onto the turning on my road, one of the handles snapped. Bafflingly it was the lighter bag (though luckily too, for the heavy bag had the eggs in it). When I got back I fell asleep.

And all this in the heatwave, you understand.

Fitting a Lampshade

When I got to this house, I had an uplighter-style lampshade in my room. This had been bent and effectively destroyed by a Crook sometime last year (and judging by the scorch-mark on the bulb, early last year). I decided to replace it. I ripped it apart, removed it, and replaced the bulb fairly easily, but the bare bulb annoyed me. I had to get a new one, and I found one at Wilkinson’s. It didn’t have a price label, but never mind.

I got it home and tried to install it. Unfortunately (from a lampshade point of view) my room is very tall. This means that anything other than another uplighter shade would have no real effect or purpose. It also meant that if I stood on the chair I could barely reach the fitting hanging by a very short wire from my ceiling. The fact that this was an uplighter meant that I had to stand on tiptoes, on a chair, arms outstretched, and, when I finally got the fitting on straight, screw in the fitting in the few seconds between starting, and losing balance and collapsing onto my bed. And then I tried to put the bulb in, only to discover that it did not fit and I would have to bend two pieces of metal to fit it in, and bear in mind that now I’ve installed this thing, I can just barely reach them. There is a school of thought, of course, that holds that I should have checked that before I put it up, but I hold out that it should not be necessary to check something so obvious. It is a lampshade. Lightbulbs should fit inside it. This is extremely simple stuff, which I so fully expect lampshade designers to understand that it didn’t even occur to me that they might not. Besides, the instructions simply read “Turn of power at switch. Straighten the gimbal,” whatever that is, “Attach to the ceiling fitting.”

It still doesn’t hang straight.

Watching a Video Tape

This should be fun. It should mean inserting the tape, rewinding it, pressing play, and enjoying yourself. Wrong. The first problem was that there was no video. When this was fetched from another room, I noticed the VCR had also vanished. When this too had been retrieved and set up, the television broke and refused to stay on for longer than a few seconds. A new television was found, though it was a quarter of the size and a quarter of that would become letterbox, and set up. Of course, the new TV had no VCR channel, so we decided to use SCART, until we realised that in a stroke of engineering madness Lee’s VCR boasts two SCART inputs, and no SCART outputs at all. This meant tuning the TV, but the remote was too remote. When it was found, and the batteries replaced, it promptly failed to work, and may yet turn out to be entirely the wrong remote. I decided then to retune the VCR’s RF output to match the TV, which is an altogether rather strange way of doing these things. But it would work, if only we could see the video’s output to use the menu. We had a paradox on our hands. So we reconnected the broken TV, and in the sporadic moments when it was working returned the VCR. And it worked. We were able to watch the video. Except that the new TV is either out of tune, broken, or both, since the colours were all very wrong.

But hey, at least I saw it. It was Trainspotting, and I recommend you watch it. But not here.

The post of village idiot is traditionally not a well disputed one. Traditionally, there is one villager so far ahead of the field that he frequently doesn’t realise he’s the village idiot. This, I have decided, is largely because villages are so pathetically small. We live in Leeds, and in a city this size there are more than enough idiots to go around, and one of the joys of moving house is meeting all the new idiots who pollute the new area. We were mercifully free of idiots at the last house, though we naturally had our fair share of skutters.

sku·tte`r pr. skú-tah, n. Young moron, who has convinced themselves that they are black drug lords who live in the ghetto, when in fact they are demonstrably children, usually white, who live with reasonably well-off suburban families. They like to amuse themselves with vandalism and the absurd notion that fewer than three of them would be required to overpower even the lankiest adult. The term traces its origins to Lizzy.

Around here there seem to be fewer skutters, but a good deal more idiots, particularly drunk ones. Of course, everywhere has some drunk idiots. They mostly do no harm except to annoy their friends (believe me, I know – they always tell me the next morning) but some of them believe in being sociable. I was in the Oak on Monday, with Jen, Helen and Emma, when we were approached by a man so drunk that he will henceforth be referred to simply as Crazy Old Man. He said things to us, most of which we couldn’t understand, we laughed politely until he left. After Michael and Irvine arrived, he came back, with something square in a bag. He took it out, and Jennifer, who had not yet worked out when to quit, asked him what it was. “It’s a bomb,” he said. It turned out to be his and hers matching watches, which Crazy Old Man said he’d bought at Dewsbury market for $200, which is strange because Dewsbury is a short bus ride away, and to our knowledge does not have an independent currency. Eventually he left to pester some other locals. We went outside to the beer garden (or beer car park as it is more accurately known). Crazy Old Man found us after a while, when more of our friends had turned up. Aiden, he decided, was Boris Becker. In his world, I was locked up. Note that he didn’t say I should be locked up; he was quite happy to sit in the unsecured car park claiming I was in prison. Then he decided to try and set me up with Jennifer, as she sat next to me texting her boyfriend. She told him she was my sister, and that seemed to satisfy him. Perhaps I should also mention that all this time he was hitting rather hard on Helen and Rohini and while Helen had the sense to be disgusted, Rohini seemed disturbingly up for it. This may be because Crazy Old Man had told her he was a millionaire, and he did look like he had a fair bit of money. But at least Crazy Old Man talked to people who actually exist, which puts him several steps ahead of the idiots here.

We have two who hang around the house. The first, being the tramp who takes our garbage, got a mention last month, so I won’t credit him with much space here. The other is a man who several times has been seen in front of our house, wearing a short beard, a big, thick, ill fitting coat which manages to look both waterproof and absolutely soaking at once, and a hat of the style popularised by Kyle Broflovski. The whole outfit is in a particularly horrid shade of green, and he has a collection of friends who he like to talk to, who also hang around our house. Unfortunately, I am unable to tell you how they dress, because they are entirely imaginary.

However, it doesn’t end there. While those are the only regular idiots, we live opposite a busy bus stop, so we only have to sit and wait for the idiots to come to us. As we got onto the bus a couple of weeks ago we were joined by a man talking to nobody at all (apparently including imaginary people). Very little of what he said was language, and less still lucid. Among the random mumblings we caught the name of a sea and a football score. It takes a fair dose of contrivance to connect the two.

But those are passive idiots. Forty days and forty nights of peace did seem a bit of a blessing, and true to form, last night we had our first attempted break-in. Now, it wasn’t hard for them to get in, because the window was open, but his explanation, when Adam turned on the light and said “can I help you?” that he “was trying to close [our] window and do [us] a favour. Someone could break in, you know,” was not particularly satisfactory in itself, and coupled with his earlier comment of “shit, we’ll have to come back later,” and the fact his shoulders were inside our house it lacked even a modicum believability.

Now, the pedantic of you will no doubt have shouted by now “well don’t leave the fucking window open then,” but there is a good reason why it was open, which will be explained shortly. Meanwhile Lee, on two occasions this week, has complained that the other members of the house set the shower too cold. Even if he is completely incapable of simply turning it up before using it, it is a thoroughly unreasonable complaint for two important reasons:

1. Lee likes the shower hotter than anyone I have ever met.
2. We are currently in the middle of a record breaking heatwave (hence the open window earlier).

The trouble is, though, that Lee, like a lot of people, actually likes the heat. I will term these people thermophiles, because it means “heat lovers”, and also because a thermophile is a tiny creature that lives by sulphurous sea vents and is thought to be one of the earliest and most primitive forms of life, and I like to associate people with brainless sea slime when I mock them. Thermophiles have strange opinions, such as “hotter is better”. They are the sort of people who will pay money to go to a foreign country with a better (read “oppressively hot”) climate, and then lay around all day because it’s too hot to do anything. And they’ll come back with a reel of photos of them sat in their room, the view from their room, them sat by the pool, and if they’re feeling adventurous, the view from the pool. And they’ll have had the time of their lives. Lee for example said it wasn’t too hot the other day. I held out that it was to hot. It later turned out that “the other day” had been, on average, the hottest day in Britain since records began. If that isn’t too hot for you, then just perhaps Britain is not where you should be living. He countered my argument by telling me you can never have too much sun. This might explain why Lee is currently at university revising to retake his astrophysics exam. The sun is a gigantic nuclear furnace more than a million times the size of Earth, at a temperature hot enough to evaporate metals. It emits deadly rays in all directions from every point on its surface. It is plainly entirely possible to have far too much of this, in much the same way that oxygen is nice to breath and metabolise food with, but would happily kill you were there much more of it around. I am a firm believer that the sort of temperatures we have had lately do nothing but make you sweat, ruin your complexion, stop you wanting to move anywhere, and kill the odd old person. That’s not nice weather; that’s the ‘flu. You thermophiles like to have the ‘flu. You must be mad.

Since Britain has one of the worst records in Europe for road traffic accidents, it is only natural that the government want to do something about it. Furthermore, since the government is a large organisation, it is only natural that they will make a complete mess of it. First, they introduced a theory test. Since this test was almost easy enough for trained chimps to pass (indeed, the only person I ever saw fail was after I took mine, he got into the lift, shouted “dammit, I’ve failed again,” and proceeded to press for entirely the wrong floor but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that) their next step was to add an extra bit onto it.

Unfortunately, a little research into what causes accidents in the first place might be in order, and the shocking truth is that most road traffic accidents are caused either by pedestrians, or by people who already own a driving license. Consequently, increasing the price and difficulty of the driving test is only going to annoy students, a pursuit which also seems to be rather high on the government’s agenda this term. A better solution would be to make the test easier, more standardised, and compulsory every five years or so. This would force people to stay in good habits (such as indicating sometimes). After that, the police should move all their speed cameras to places where people actually speed and cause accidents, from their current position wherever they think they’ll make most money.

Once these steps are complete, the morons who drive to fast must be targeted directly. Garages should have to report the registration plate to the police of any front-wheel-drive car they are asked to fit a rear spoiler onto, or any car they are asked to fit an exhaust extension onto (I mean the ones which leave a tiny bottleneck and then balloon out to the size of a dustbin lid solely in order to make noise). Then, the police arrest the customer, the car is taken away for police auction, and the money they used to pay for the modifications would be spent moving speed cameras to sensible locations near junctions. It is my opinion that people who deliberately modify their cars in order to make them demonstrably worse are the sort of people who should not own cars, in much the same way that the sort of people who most want to own guns are the sort of people least suited to do so.

Most internet sites which make the mistake of actually trying to operate at a profit have one means of doing this, namely, showing people adverts. This, of course, is all well and good, but some little content is usually more agreeable to the general viewing public. Unfortunately, content is often either difficult or expensive to produce, whereas adverts are handed to you on a plate, and companies are frequently willing to pay you to show them to people. Bearing this in mind, most sites have tried to steer the advert-to-content ratio as high as they think people will tolerate. This frequently involves having a banner at the top of the site, with a list of adverts down each side, and an additional banner at the bottom. The content is then squeezed into the middle of this little frame, and often obscured by another advert you have to manually remove. This is accompannied by a pop-up and a pop-under advert, at least one of which will endeavour to fill your screen completely. Another particularly evil trick they use is to hide the pop-up offscreen somewhere, where it will sit and pop-up more windows whenever it likes.

Ideally, the ultimate aim of any such website would be to host esssentially a page of adverts, and have people flock to look at them, show all their friends, and pay for the privelidge. Nobody has yet managed this, but one company has come disturbingly close. Outwar.com encourages people to play their evil little game, the rules of which are very simple: You get points for showing people our webpages whether they want you to or not. Each webpage contains more than a dozen adverts. Once conned into visiting, the theory is that the unwitting visitor will want a piece of the action themselves, and start conning all their friends into looking at a dozen more adverts. This then earns points for both morons, and the points are very good things to have, because the player with the most points after a month of this wins a fabulously crappy prize. In many ways, Outwar is the online equivalent of the Borg, and probably the most irritating and invasive (and therefore evil) website on the internet.

In theory, of course, one could make a less-than-whopping $200 a month on Outwar, but to do that you would have to con thousands of people every month, and win every game. To my mind, you could make more money in less time by getting a real job, or maybe by taking Outwar to its next logical step, and just begging on the street.

Another good way to make money these days is by suing people and taking theirs, and one might reasonably expect that a good place to start is with people who have just described your website as invasive and evil. However, I gather there is something I can do called “taking the fifth” which is not a baseball term, but in fact means I don’t have to talk to them until they give me immunity, at which point I am legally obliged to fess up everything I did, but they aren’t actually allowed to touch me for it. Alternatively, I can go for the first amendment, which protects my freedom of speech, (or would were I in America). The Constitution is generally agreed to be a rather wonderful piece of paper which protects all Americans from all the other Americans, but there are two things which bother me about it. The first is that if they can keep amending it, then what is the point in having it, and the second is that if they keep having to amend it (once just to undo an earlier change), how bad must it have been in the first place? The original constitution must have read “this document protects your right to sit in a small damp box and be randomly stabbed with the pointy bits of stationery equipment”. God bless America.

Lots of people dislike supermarkets, with very legitimate reasons involving local traders, big piles of money, and poor produce. Not me, though. I just hate the whole supermarket experience. Almost everything about them could have been designed to irritate me. In Netto, for example, you have to pick up a basket before you go through the mono-directional turnstyle, or else you are left stood between the dog food and the detergent feeling slightly like the player at the end of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game who neglected to pick up the toothbrush in the very first room and consequently cannot complete the gmae. Most supermarkets place the fresh produce near the entrance to give a nicer feeling, but Netto, for reasons known only to themselves, choose to stock bleach and plastic garden furniture here. You are then doomed to wander around the aisles for much longer than you thought you would have to, because they have arbitrarily rearranged everything. This, I have been reliably informed, is to force you to spend longer wandering the aisles and therefore more likely to spot something else to buy you didn’t know you wanted (frequently because you didn’t). When you actually find the product you are looking for — say, butter — you are faced with a wall of hundreds of near-identical brands of essentially the same product. (In the case of washing powders, they are frequently literally the same product, with several different brandings.) You will find several brands of butter, several more of margarine, and more still of low-fat fake butter. (In fact, they are still mostly made of fat, but it’s all relative.) These will range from the gramattically apalling but nonetheless catchy Utterly Butterly, to the overly verbose I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, and that’s not including the ‘own-brands’. All supermarkets now have their own form of these products, and the irony of mass-producing fake I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter has not escaped me. Genuine names of supermarket brand butter substitutes include You’d Butter Believe It, and the almost libelous Better By Far. In fact, the only thing I find hard to believe about any of these products is that they are on the shelves at all, and not in a courtroom marked ‘Exhibit B’.

Asda, of course, were actually sued by McVitie’s over the chocolate and wafer Puffin Bars, which McVitie’s quite rightly pointed out were the approximate confectionary equivalent of a fake Rolex. This means that legally there is now a precedent against the supermarkets, and any further cases ought to me more or less open and shut. What I fail to understand, though, is that after that case, not only did supermarkets continue to churn out products which look identical to other, superior products from well known brands (such as Doctor Pop, whose logo is strikingly similar to that of another popular soft drink, namely, perhaps suprisingly, Cherry Coke), but the manufacturers of said products did not sue them. I would. Personally, if I manufactured a yoghurt with a folding corner full of fruity sweetness, and a supermarket made a cheaper version which looked much the same, I would be upset. I wouldn’t like the idea that I had gone to the effort of establishing my brand and they were parasitically stealing what ought to be my profits. I particularly wouldn’t like them to then place large billboards in their supermarket with a picture of our respective products, and adorn theirs with a large tick and the phrase “The Obvious Choice”. This is a trick I have seen Morison’s use before now.

In theory, of course, having a wider selection of products is a good thing, but it often makes me feel like statistically there is now almost no chance that I will select the best one available, and I don’t like that. I also don’t like the brightly-coloured artificial geniality of the whole experience. For example, there uis a notice above the exit in the Morison’s in Leeds city centre bearing the legend “Polite Notice: Please do not take your shopping out of the supermarket without first remembering to pay for it”.

And then the pain starts. You have to somehow get your new belongings home. If you own a car, this is not too traumatic an experience, but otherwise, you will probably lose most of the blood vessels in your hands to the bunched up plastic handles, regardless of how short a walk it is.