Tuesday 3 November 2015

Fine Words Butter No Electrics


Another image from our usual weekend walks into Chipping Sodbury:


One of our neighbours in Old Sodbury is a retired electrical contractor. He has an office on the High Street in Chipping Sodbury, and if you peer into the window it's like a snapshot of the 1950s. It's a veritable museum of antiquated electrical items. Even the computers are from the 1980s.

We were watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittinstall waging a war on waste on TV last night. His target for last night's program was parsnips and the tremendous waste caused by supermarkets buying only the most beautiful ones from producers.

His aim is to get supermarkets to relax their overly stringent quality rules and allow the knobbly, less attractive produce to be sold. However, if you start monkeying around with the supply and demand curves there's going to be blood on the carpet at some stage. A sudden and massive oversupply - which is what would happen - will have a dramatic impact on prices and a lot of people are going to lose their livelihoods, I wonder if he's really studied the consequences.

Off to my pre-redundancy "consultation meeting" this morning in London. I have a few proposals to put to the company which may produce a partial result and end up with me working part-time, leaving me free to do some consulting.


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