SadOldTosser

It is with great pleasure that I announce the 2008 Taplow Potato Awards.

Categories include :

Biggest

Best Chipper

Most Photogenic

Specialist 

Eco-Friendly

Best for Vodka (new this year)

and Other

All entrants must have either been grown, bought or consumed in Taplow apart from in the Other category, which is open to allcomers, including the Red Rooster.

At 00:57 this morning a monumental earthquake struck England. Early reports suggested a Richter Scale vibration of 5.2 and an epicentre near a farmer’s market. However, the force of the quake must have been much greater and I believe the epicentre was near Taplow. As I noticed the first unsettling motion I cracked a poorly phrased and rather obvious joke to my wife. Within seconds the quake had got so bad that the bedroom window had been flung open and I found myself skimming the conservatory roof before colliding with the bird table.

 A map

 2

 1

Congratulations have to go to all the Chelsea fans that stayed at Wembley to cheer their team off the pitch.

I absolutely love all those lovely blogs that appear when I click on the In Food link on the main page. I love the splendid photography, the beautiful words and, above all, the humility of the posters. I wish I was as good. Here’s my new bread which I’m going to send to Esther Rantzid so that she, and millions of others, can laugh.

“Ever wondered what it’s like to be in charge of motorway signs?”

“Ready to take on the responsibility of ensuring smooth traffic flow?”

“Do you have a passion for traffic management?”

I sort of answered no to all of these questions, but as I wasn’t going to get the chance to go to PC World again for a while, I bought it!

I’m in practice mode level 1 at the moment, which means I’m in charge of one sign on a small stretch of the M4 between Junction 5 and 6. As you can see, I’ve just pressed the 40 button. In active mode you get to see the motorway itself, and the effects of any changes you make in signage on the traffic. The aim of the game, apparently, is to not be mentioned in a national radio traffic report for as long as possible.

Anyway, here’s the screenshot.

Sainsburys sells Rooster potatoes, so I buy them for my wife. One of the reasons she hates me, though, is the fact that I buy too many potatoes. I’ll say that again. I buy too many potatoes. I bought a bag today as I’m cooking a celebratory Shepherds Pie, which I’m cooking tonight and we’ll share tomorrow, when she gets back from ORK. (It will be left in the garden and then reheated).

I’m not using today’s bag, though, as I found an unopened bag that was one day past its sell by date in the potato section, which is quite an important part of the house. I’d usually throw the old bag out in these circumstances, because we have massive arguments about this, but as she’s not here I decided to cave in quickly and use the old ones.

 They’ve got things coming out of them………………………..

I promised an occasional series of various manky bits of my body. After missing some flat leaf parsley on Thursday my wife told me, quite simply, “You want someone to look at that!” So, in honour of my little sister, who made a richly rewarding hobby out of ruining my dinner by helping mum with the mincer, here’s my index finger.

At least if FSX is at all realistic. I recently purchased this game but thought it juvenile to attempt to recreate the near disaster at Heathrow so I flew to Madrid airport in a Learjet instead. After touching down (Oh yes, here’s my theory BTW… Willie Walsh replaced all the BA pilots with his old mates from Aer Lingus and the one that was flying the plane used to fly into Cork - Thunk, Thunk, Thud) I was greeted with this announcement from the Air Traffic Controller.

It sounds like this.  

I invented two great new supermarket related phrases today.

1) Every little helps.

2) Don’t get mad. Get even. 

The above would work but even my head couldn’t support a bag as big as that full of shopping so I’m busy designing a new kind of basket. One I can take into Sainsburys. (A bit like Alan Partridge and his special plate for the carvery)

The rule is simple. To qualify as a basket it needs a handle. Here’s the first design draft.

I hate nothing more than supermarkets. Except Waitrose and the Tesco in Douglas Village, Cork, where I wander round muttering to all and sundry how much better it is than it used to be.

What gets my goat as much as anything is the ingenious ways that some people manage to get around the “Basket Only” rule. Now,  my take on this rule is twofold.

1. It’s no point limiting people to a specific number of items because a lot of people can’t count anymore, so you’d have to make the number something that the average Saiunsbury in Taplow shopper could  cope with, like, for example, one.

1. The basket only rule, therefore, isn’t really there to speed your way through the tills. The baskets at Sainsbury are large enough to hold lots of items, so it can’t be that. No. It’s to encourage people to use baskets rather than use trolleys which, as we know, are always in the way. Always. The less trolleys in use in a shop, the quicker you can do your shopping. Fucking trolley pushing scum.

One way I’ve seen some people get round this rule is to seemly ignore it. This can be done without causing too much anger and distress to me if there’s a very small queue, but the other day I saw a woman showing blatant disregard to the law place herself in the queue with a small trolley containing a horde of small items. Some of the items were so small (and the trolley was packed) that they were actually squeezed through the holes in the trolley, which only slowed things further. I tried not to let it bother me, but it did until she fixed me with a “What are you looking at?” sort of stare, at which point I bottled it and left the queue pretending I’d forgotten something, which indeed I had as my basket was empty.

My favourite method so far is the classic putting a basket in the trolley and wheeling the basket around the supermarket option. This really is ingenious as it not only doesn’t break the rule, as such, and you’d lose an argument over it if you were mad enough to get involved (unless it was  a very old lady), but it also really winds me up. And that’s why they do it.

I think, rather than just having a rule, they should explain why the rule is there in the first place and then I could smirk at the cheats and point at the sign above the till.