Healthy bogoffs?

1 February

This silly kitchen game is getting really silly now. Because of what happened on Tuesday, we didn’t bother getting up early for the work to start – and there was a guy ringer the doorbell at 7.55. Jan rushed up out of bed and it really made very light headed and she ended up back in bed for a couple of hours. The work took all of 30 minutes, and then he was cleaned up and gone. It wasn’t Jan who was effected either; I kept nodding off for most of the day too. This morning we did set the alarm and here it is 8.45 and no-ones here yet. Sparky and decorators are due today. We are hoping, no, Kile IS coming here for the weekend now no matter who they have got on.

What a strange dream again; this time I was in a sort of hotel place and a woman comes up to me, dips hand into my shirt pocket, takes out $5, says, ‘Five bucks, that’ll do,’ and walks off with it. I later meet up with her by chance in Dorktown bus station, grab hold of her and take my $5 back off her. Then she starts complaining that she was entitled to it as her fee for her professional review of my book, House of Pain, which seemed like blackmail to me at the time. Next thing I know I’m about to speak to and old friend and … that’s when the alarm went off.  

Somebody somewhere or t’ther has worked it out the average UK shopper is shelling out an extra £1000 because of the so-called bogoffs that most of the supermarkets have going at some time during the year. It’s all down to trying to extract as much dosh out of our bank accounts into theirs. There’s something else that they forgot to mention though, the amount of waste they produce. How many buy these special offers and then find that they can’t use everything they bought. Fresh fruit and veg is the first one I think of. For us it’s eggs; I live eggs but don’t eat them enough to get through some of the offers. Sliced and fresh meats are OK cos they can be frozen.

And yet there’s a problem normal pricing too. The instant coffee I like varies in price according to unit price. Very often the price for 50grams is higher per gram then buying 100 grams. And that’s how we work these things out, by looking at the gram price, not the unit cost. The main difficulty with that the actual size of the text in the small notice and at time, how high/low the shelf is. That makes me wonder if that is done deliberately too, anything to push to higher priced items.

We rarely buy a bogoff and when we do it’s because we know we will eat all of the items, not just a little bit of it. We don’t buy them of fresh fruit and fruit, both of which is because Jan isn’t a great lover of them, and as much as I do like them, I can’t eat loads of them. There are some items though that we do buy like that. We’ve seen tee-shirts on offer in Asda as bogoffs, and we both wear them and they do last a good whole, so that is a worthwhile buy. Some of the household and cleaning goods are also good buys as bogoffs, so it’s not all bad news.

Yet the people who did the sums on this issue and sent to government were looking primarily     at food products. But according to today’s Breakfast on BBC1, bogoffs could be banned within three weeks. The sledge hammers come’s down on everything and not just the feed items that the report was aimed at. Governments of all shades acts on various issues but yet seem to leave huge great holes in the legislation or tighten it up so much no-one can actually operate because of it.

So the junior doctors are now back at work; but has their strike actually done anything to change things? I don’t think so. It seems likely that the new conditions will be imposed on them anyway, which means they have a choice of two options. Option one is to drop their action and get on with it; option two is a different, and that is to resign on mass. It could be said by some folks that it’s easy for me to say that, I won’t be effected by it, and yes, that’s true up to a point. But I have done just that, I have walked out of a job where the conditions changed and I wasn’t happy about it. Of course I will be effected if my on-going treatments is effected by a shortage of doctors, or I should say that it will be effected even more by the shortage of doctors. However, this is an English issue only.

In my case where I did walk off on jobs, I was lucky in finding another job fairly quickly, but with doctors, that won’t be so much of an issue. There is great demand for British trained doctors abroad, and even in the rest of the UK. Not sure there’s enough demand within the UK for them all, but certainly worldwide there will be. Can you see them doing it though? No, neither cane I! That is when the moral blackmail will kick in, in an attempt to make them feel guilty for quitting and letting patients suffer. Politics eh? What a dirty game it is!

And so to today’s photo …

A grey heron.

Today’s funny …

 An applicant was being interviewed for admission to a famous medical school. "Tell me," inquired the interviewer, "where do you expect to be in ten year’s time?"
"Well, let's see," replied the student. "It's Wednesday afternoon so I guess that I'll be on the golf course by now.