Yesterday I had a young Eastern European chap from Sky turn up at the door to try to sell me their wares.

At first he told me that others in the area had had trouble with Freeview reception so Sky were doing a promotion. Well I don’t have any trouble with Freeview. “Perhaps they haven’t retuned or they have old aerials”, I told him. I tried my best to look uninterested in his products. I don’t buy from door-to-door salesmen as a principle, so perhaps I should have told him that instead.

Having no luck with the Freeview reception, he instead went for the “HD TV is great” tactic but as I don’t yet have an HD telly it would be pointless to get an HD box. “But the box still works on an old TV and when you upgrade you’ll already have HD”, he countered. But when I upgrade my TV it’s going to have a Freeview HD tuner and I won’t need an HD box.

“Do you watch lots of TV?” he asked.
“No, not really”.
He agreed… “Not much on, is there?” He was trying to sell me a TV product, wasn’t he? He then went for the Sky box will record the stuff you like while you’re out, but once again we already have a PVR that does that.

So, then he asked how much I pay for internet and who I’m with, trying to sell me Sky Broadband instead. You have to give him his due; he was trying hard.

I recently moved to Zen Internet. They’re slightly more expensive than regular ISPs but they have no traffic shaping at their ISP and provide you with the fastest internet you can get for the price. They also have a 25Gb download limit with a pretty decent monitoring application from which I found I’m using around 18Gb a month, so Mr.Sky Broadband’s 10Gb limit wouldn’t be enough. I told him this. “Well, we can give you the unlimited package and for just £39 a month you get TV, telephone and broadband… just £7 more than you’re paying to BT and Zen.” Ooh, just £7 for Sky TV! But hold on, I don’t want Sky TV!!

I sent him away without a sale. Fail.

It was Halloween last night and as I live in “bungalow city”, the lair of the old and infirm, I was not expecting any Trick or Treaters. In fact, we’ve not had any Trick or Treaters since we first moved here over 6 Halloweens ago. So it came as a surprise when the door bell rang while I was sitting, wrapped up in a blanket, enjoying Strictly Come Dancing.

Caroline and I looked at each other. We’ve just started a diet, so we have a lot of spare chocolate hanging around the house at the moment and we had already made some decisions about what we might give a Trick or Treater — it pays to be ready!

I begrudgingly got up and headed to the cupboard to get the boxes of sweets. When I got to the door I could see two young girls, probably early teens, standing outside dressed in black with blackish faces. They’d made a bit of an effort at least. More than the boys who once turned up to my mother-in-law’s house who wanted a penny for the guy when their guy was just their brother in a pram. I would have liked to have seen them burning that one!

I answered the door with my best scared face on. They weren’t scary, but I thought I would humour them.

“Wahh.. what have we got here?”
“Trick or Treat?”
“Uhm…”, I thought for a minute. Shall I let them off lightly? Nahh. “Well, what will you do if I don’t give you a treat?”

This came as a shock to them. ‘Was it really necessary to think up tricks these days?’ They looked at each other. They clearly hadn’t come prepared for having to actually do tricks. They just wanted the treats. One thought quickly.

“I’ll shine my torch in your face,” she proffered as a possible scary thing. Oh no, not the Torch of Dooom!
“That’s not a very good trick, is it?” I said, knowing the Torch of Doom was clearly the Harbinger of the Apocalypse.
“Oh, er…” It was clear at this point they were getting desperate. Was it possible this mad old bloke wasn’t actually going to give them chocolate after all their ‘effort’. The quick thinker had an idea and began to crack her fingers. It was quite gross and I’d put them through enough, so I feigned disgust at the cracking and got the chocolates.

I bought a couple of big boxes of “pick-n-mix” type ‘chocolate’ sugar shape things a while back during a weak moment in a wholesalers. We hadn’t got around to eating many because they’re really quite sickly. I’m sure they’re 99% sugar and 1% colouring. I offered our the box and the ghouls’ eyes lit up. “Whoa…” I told them to take a handful and they duly did, putting their booty into the bag they were carrying just for the occasion.

I remember back in the days when the idea was to go out with bags of sugar that you threatened to throw at the occupant’s car or their windows or, if you were really mean, at them! Nowadays kids go out without a thought about the tricks; they might as well turn up at your door and say “Chocolate or not?”

Once a week I have to come to work. My boss is quite happy about me telecommuting all the week, but sometimes it’s just necessary to have some face-to-face meetings, so I always try to arrange them on a Tuesday.

However, I don’t much like travelling to work and there are a number of reasons.

Firstly, the travelling itself. I used to love driving but these days everyone else on the road appears to drive like chimps on the dodgems. People seem to drive with their “Ryanair elbows” out, barging around like they own the place. Although I find the barging annoying, it’s the fact that I actually feel a little scared on the road these days that makes me want to be at home. I feel like I have no control of my destiny out there. One slip up by some sleepy commuter and I’m history along a bunch of other people. I sometimes look at the people going along in their cars and they look very very odd. They remind me of Independence Day when all the aliens were flying around in their ships. People are weird looking creatures and they look even stranger when staring out the front of a great big metal box flying along at 70mph.

Secondly, offices suck. At least, all the offices I’ve been in. The air is cold, but not fresh: on scorching summer days like today I always bring a jumper. Only once did I have a good desk. Right now I can’t see the beautiful sun outside. There’s a wall to my left, a cubicle partition in front and behind me there’s a window with the blind closed. Not my choice to close the blind, but that of my colleague’s. He sits right next to the full-height window, so I guess it’s his prerogative. I always open it if he’s not here. The other thing I dislike about offices is that they’re noisy, but at the same time really quiet. No one here talks much. I sometimes do comedy sneezes to see if people will take any notice…. nope. Despite the silence, the whir of computers, the clatter of computer keyboards, the hum of the air con, the flollop of passing students, the bang of closing doors, the whizz of laser printers… it all adds up to quite a cacophony.

Thirdly, there’s the time issue. It takes me an hour from door to door. That means that, on the days I come in, I spend 2 hours humming along the road trying not to die.

Fourth ought to be cost, I suppose. Cars cost huge amounts of money to run. Even at £80 for a year’s insurance and doing 50mpg, it still costs a nice wad of cash. That said, I personally think that petrol should be expensive. I won’t be joining Facebook groups or signing petitions that demand cheap petrol. Petrol’s a luxury but most people seem to think it’s a necessity now. It’s only a necessity for the upkeep of a luxurious lifestyle that us westerners lead. It’s about time someone stood up and pointed out that it’s not sustainable and we can’t continue to suck the planet dry and the only way to stand up and point that out is to not reduce (or increase) prices.

Anyway, I’m very lucky that 4 days a week I can work from home. It’s a very relaxed atmosphere. As a bit of a loner, I am happy working away on my own, even if sometimes motivation can wane a little.

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The world is a confusing place. The packaging for food appears to be there for the sole purpose of confusing you and trying to make you paranoid.

Take the ‘use by’ and ‘best before’ dates printed on stuff, for example. The government’s own website says of ‘use by’:

You shouldn’t use any food or drink after the end of the ‘use by’ date shown on the label. Even if it looks and smells fine, using it after this date could put your health at risk and cause food poisoning.

It says of ‘best before’:

‘Best before’ dates are usually used on foods that last longer, such as frozen, dried or canned foods. It should be safe to eat food after the ‘best before’ date, but the food will no longer be at its best. After this date, the food might begin to lose its flavour and texture. However, you shouldn’t eat eggs after the ‘best before’ date. This is because eggs can contain salmonella bacteria, which could start to multiply after this date.

So, why on earth aren’t eggs marked with ‘use-by’ dates? Not that is matters for me, because our chickens don’t have built-in printers so I have no idea of the best before dates for our eggs.
It’s not like I take much notice of these labels anyway, whatever our beloved government says. It amused me a month or so back when I bought some half-prices beansprouts in a local grocers. The lady behind the counter said,

“They’re out of date, which is why they’re cheap”.

I said I was aware of that, and she said. “Yes, I don’t take much notice of those dates either. I just sniff it and if it smells ok, I’ll use it. I’ve used stuff nearly 4 days after the printed date.”

4 days!? I’ve used stuff 4 years after the printed date! Admittedly, it was canned, but still. I sniff it, give it an eye-balling to see if its furry, and if it’s not, it gets cooked or eaten. My stomach could do with a bit of hardening after all the chemicals its had going through it.

It horrifies me when I see people throwing out perfectly good food only hours after the use-by, best-before or which-ever date has passed. My Mum used to try to make me feel guilty by laying the “children in Africa dieing” line on me, but now I just think of all the energy, time and money that went into getting the food from some far flung country, to a local monster supermarket then into the kitchen of the fussy eater who is about to throw it away.

I hate throwing food away. It means I’ve bought too much, wasted my money and my effort in carrying it home. I usually end up with some floppy veg that came with our veg-box that never got around to being cooked, and it’s usually ok to put it on the compost, but some things you can’t; for example, I know there’s half a tub of unused greek yogurt in the fridge which is around about now developing self-awareness and will probably soon declare war on the vegetables in the lower tray.

So, the way around it is to make sure one uses all the stuff one has. I bought some low-fat (of course, I’m on a diet) cheese the other day to make some spinach and cheese ravioli. I opened it to use some in another recipe, so I have to use it soon otherwise it will join forces with the hairy greek army and there’ll be nothing left. So, it’s ravioli tonight. Except for the fact that the flour has been sitting around rather a long time and now houses a nicely flourishing colony of weevils. Sigh.

This week has been a bit of a task, really. As my car ran out of MOT last week, and I have absolutely no mechanical skills, I took it up to ‘the oracle of all mechanics’ that I call ‘Dad’. However, early this week he hurt his back so hasn’t been able to look at my car to see if it needs anything doing to it before it goes in to be examined by the inspectors – something it worries about every year!

Ok, no great problems. My parents have too many cars anyway, and they let me borrow one. Fine. But Daisy’s MOT (her car’s, of course) runs out this week too. But Dad’s still laid up. We could just send the car in and hope, fingers crossed, that nothing needs doing and based on last year’s advisory slip I’m sure some expensive things will need doing on both cars.

But even if we decided to do that we couldn’t because her car refused to move yesterday. So from a two-car couple we suddenly end up with one borrowed one. I put Daisy’s battery (her car’s, of course) on charge all last night but this morning it made no difference; it’s dead, Jim. So despite forking out £25-odd for a charger and water refill for the old battery yesterday, looks like I’m in for a £30-odd new battery cost today.

Tcsh, no wonder January is supposed to be the poorest and most depressing month!

Now, I’m really into all this eco stuff; I like to buy eco-friendly, organic produce and I like to shop ethically. However, I really hate the way that companies are starting to jump on this bandwagon in the same way they jumped on the internet when they realised it might make them a bit of extra cash.

There’s a company called Cooperative Insurance that are advertising on TV at the moment to get you to buy eco-friendly car-insurance (already sounds a bit suspect doesn’t it?). The idea is that they give money to charities that plant trees for you to offset the carbon that your car emits during driving. But firstly they only say they will offset 20%, not all of it, they only use an average mileage of some random car somewhere, and well, quite frankly it’s all a crock of shit. Although their website has a little star with “at no cost to you” written by it, the fact that their car insurance is almost double the price I normally pay for car insurance certainly doesn’t seem “at no cost” to me.

I reckon the idea is that they charge you so much for car insurance that you decide to use your bike; now that’s green.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4630892.stm

I am flabbergasted at this; Some Catholic group has asked for the Davinci Code film to be given an adult rating because children should be protected from what it calls “insidious” lies about Catholicism.

“Any adult can distinguish reality from fiction. But you cannot expect a child to make proper judgements.”

Absolutely! So it seems incredible to me that they would then have us teach our children in school all about Jesus and how he was killed but came alive again, then disappeared up into the sky and so on and so forth. Why is one fiction worse than any other?

I’ve been watching Richard Dawkins’ show on Channel 4 recently called ‘The Root of All Evil?’ which is, basically, him preaching atheism; and about time someone did too. It’s really quite a convincing show (albeit somewhat confrontational and blunt) about why we should all be atheists and not agnostic (or even religious, for that matter).

Now, I’m atheist, and so be it; I really don’t mind if other people decided to believe in a God – whatever. But when they outwardly attempt to control how we are allowed to see the world (by, for example, dissallowing certain groups into cinemas to see a film) it really drives me around the bend. Leave us alone to make up our own minds, damnit!