WHAT RECOVERY?

So Brown still claims we're on our way out of recession? Can me sceptical but I did work in shops over Xmas as a student. This is not the length of queue I would expect ten days before Xmas in Glasgow's largest shopping centre for Santa's grotto. Granted, it was taken on a weekday, though given it is aimed mainly at under-school-age kids, that shouldn't matter. But in saying that I was in Silverburn last Saturday at 3pm and the queue was a mere three people longer.
Certainly, when Marcel and Lots were tiny, Santa queues could take more than an hour to move into the grotto. This one patently wouldn't! I suppose the politicians think we aren't noticing these small details.

IKEA

Did I mention I got myself a little laptop table for my work? Working in the winter on my laptop hadn't been a problem but with it being such a nice summer, I was finding that sitting working in the afternoons wearing a light skirt, the air vents on the bottom of my laptop were burning my left leg! This little beanbag with a tray stuck on top has certainly done the trick. I love IKEA. They always think of everything!

NEW DYSON

Now here's something weird we discovered last week when our old Dyson broke down... I went onto the officialDyson site just to check their new ball hoover - it was way overpriced so I reluctantly started comparing non-Dysons to replace my beloved dead Dyson. By chance Thomas happened upon an ebay site selling Dysons - mainly demo models but totally refurbished, serviced and MOTed complete with 2 year guarantees at 60-65% of the official Dyson site prices - stranger still - on further investigation it turned out to be Dyson themselves running the ebay site. My new ebay Dyson is now here looking shiny and new and is so compact even Léon can use it!

ASDA JOINS THE POLY BAG MAFIA

ASDA Hollingbury
Originally uploaded by Dominic's pics

Gimme strength! ASDA has decided as of this week to join the poly bag mafia. Get this - you go in the door and they have not one but three big 'Recycle your ASDA poly bags here' bins. They have had for over a year so once a month or so I have remembered to take up all my poly bags and put them in their bin. That is supposed to make me feel I've saved the planet though we all know poly bags are less than 0.1% of the oil problem in the world. Ok I'll go along with this nonsense - it keeps the kitchen cupboard tidier. So today I take up - and I am not joking, a whole shopping trolley of bags as I am tidying out my kitchen this week. I go in the door, I post them all into their bin and I do my shopping. When I get to the checkout the operator asks Do you have your own bags with you? Well I did have but I posted them in your poly bag bin at the entrance - isn't that what it's for? Oh poly bags are an under-the-counter item now, I'm afraid she elaborated. A what???? I want a poly bag for my shopping not a porn movie! You really need to buy reusable ones at 5p each. That'll be bloody likely - the shopping is 30% dearer than last year and I just posted 200 bags in your bin so give me some of your under-the-counter free bags now! If they are going to start charging for bags but not rewarding for the ones you bring back then it doesn't add up. I am happy to recycle all my bags but my handbag is already over-full with nappies, changes of clothes etc so I sure don't want to have to carry 10 polybags everywhere I go in case I happen to need to pop into a supermarket.
I'm off to Tesco - well till they get stupid too :-(

WHY SCOTLAND CAN NEVER SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT

Wednesday 20 June, 2007
Originally uploaded by Mellie*

I was in Primark yesterday buying some pyjamas for Léon. I had noticed the last time I was in that Primark had switched from plastic to brown paper bags in an environmentally conscious move. Once the shop assistant had finished packing the pyjamas into my nice brow bag, he then filled it with other identical bags. Huh? He explained that all week in the pouring rain people had been complaining that they had got half way down Sauchiehall street before their envirobag had disintegrated leaving their new clothes in a soggy puddle at their feet, so were now trying to cover shoppers by giving them enough bags to get back to their car even on a rainy Saturday in Glasgow! So plastic may be out but each shopper is now using 3 times as many bags!

ASDA PRICE

I am less than impressed today by ASDA's deal of the week. Have a look at this bottle. Any 2 for £2. Great... except that I only bought one and it cost me... 98p. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to work that one out, does it?!

HOMEBASE

For the past year or so I have been driving past the half-built Homebase next door to Robroyston Asda every day on my way to work in Bishopbriggs. I am not a great fan of Homebase to be honest, I tend to find B&Q has a much better selection, however the fact that it is next door to a large supermarket, that I often frequent means I am going to find it useful for the odd pack of screws or piece of sandpaper even if I do stick to B&Q's larger selection for paint or beading or whatever. It opened finally on Friday and on Saturday during our DIY bonanza Thomas found we needed panel pins - an obvious thing to acquire in the new Homebase. I toddled out alone, leaving Thomas to paint the bathroom. On entering I saw two things that were going to appeal much more to Thomas than any B&Q - the first area you enter after the front door has a sign above it proclaiming 'cookshop' - Thomas is a kitchen utensil and gadget nerd (I mean he has a tool that slices fresh pineapples into rings and takes out the core simultaneously and the likes!) so he will be over the moon to check every shelf here to make sure he isn't missing anything obscure. But the second thing that will appeal to the language nerd but which I found utterly bizarre was the Gaelic signposting! Now we were in Oban over the summer, where the odd bank's name or street name appears in Gaelic under the English but that is 100 miles north of Glasgow and is probably only done to appeal to the tourists looking for that shortbread-tin Scotland that doesn't actually exist. They have the same in Irish in Dublin airport - signs like Welcome and Exit translated into Irish to appeal to the tourists but the real information signs are actually conspicuously only in English. So here I was standing in Bishopbriggs, Glasgow in a DIY store where not just entrance and exit were displayed in Gaelic, but absolutely everything - every department, every information sign - nothing was left out. But who is it for? It isn't there to fool the tourists - tourists don't go DIY shopping in the northern suburbs of Glasgow, it isn't there for Bishopbriggs' native Gaelic speaking community because there isn't a native Gaelic speaker within 200 miles of the place, it isn't even for the non-native Gaelic speaker because the chances of even one of them crossing their threshold per day is zero. So why? It must have cost money to have it all translated, it must also have cost to hang all these signs. It is truly bewildering. If it was to be useful to people using the store Polish would have been a more obvious choice with many Polish tradesmen in Glasgow at the moment. It isn't far from Sighthill either with its large foreign community so they could have tried French for the African refugees, or Arabic or even the more usual Urdu, Punjabi or Chinese but Gaelic?...weird, weird,weird!

After work today we stopped in for 5 minutes so I could show Thomas this linguistically phenomenal DIY store...his first impression? Predictably, they've spelled 'furniture' wrong! I should have guessed!