Week 160: both bland and disgusting

Monday 11 April 2022

• Heard about the Too Good To Go app. “Tinder for leftover sandwiches” would be a terrible way of describing it. (Olio, another food waste–reducing app, is maybe closer to that.)

  So I pawed at the app, paid some money, and later went along to a carvery, which I’d walked past many times previously without realising was part of a chain. There, a box (a “magic bag”) of hot food was waiting for me and another app-brandishing fellow who arrived at the same time. I hadn’t properly thought through how to transport it home, but I didn’t mind walking alongside a main road cradling a rucksack like a baby, in fact that’s as close as you can get to feeling like a hunter-gatherer these days.

  And you know what? The food was both bland and disgusting, which sounds like a complaint until you remember that’s what passes for a national cuisine here, so it’s great. The potato and stuffing were actually nice, and the meat, but not so much the sloppy bed of slop they were resting on, which included sweetcorn. Sweetcorn, I ask you. Oh well, it was fascinating to see inside the joint, the wipe-clean surfaces and the people eating miserably among the ice cream and soft drink dispensers. And I certainly won’t leave a negative review on the app.

• The death of the high street. The bag I use for carrying stuff is approaching ten years old now, and it’s disgusting. No, no carvery gravy was spilt inside the bag, and yes I know you can clean these things, and I do, but it’s still disgusting, and ten years is a good innings for a cheap bag, so time to think about a new one? I slightly fancy a Fjällräven, as in John Craven’s Fjällräven.

  So I went to some shops, and they had some bags for sale, and … pfft. It’s good that there’s such a diversity of bags, cos if they all looked the same there’d be chaos and confusion, but where are all the nice ones? I think I’ll just carry things in my hands from now on.

  A fun fact about rucksacks is that the ballroom dancer turned presenter Tony “Anton Du” Beke hates them.

• Some things watched indoors this week:

  The Souvenir. Marred by the delivery method – my first time renting something on the iTunes Music Store, and thanks to dayfuls of tiring activity/pollen blowing at me I kept falling asleep until it was a race against time to reach the end before the rental expired. As for the film itself, oh the interior design, there was a dining table and chairs I really liked.

  The Savile documentary (A British Horror Story). Quite a lot of moments of WTF. When someone tells you they’re a paedo, believe them.

  A muted cheer for the return of Have I Got News For You. I know it’s shit, and of course I disapprove of how they garnished the reputations of some disagreeable politicians, and how bad they treated Angus Deayton just for supporting some small entrepreneurs, but still we watch. There was a time when I had time for both the tightly edited and the extended A Bit More versions per week, but I’ve cut down, which is some kind of progress.

• I bet the film about Thomas Cromwell playing golf is jolly old fun, but I’ve sat through the trailer so many times now (only 0 times this week mind) ugh.

• To the theatre to see Nish Kumar, supported by the great Kemah Bob. Of the vast roomful of people who’d come to see the Quibi star, the one who sat in front of me had the largest head and ears, and good for him, all the better to see and hear the shouted opinions we all agreed with. An entertaining evening.

• Had a little job interview. 😮 The world has changed since I last applied for a job – Zoom did exist back then, but only now have we all heard of it (it used to be what you did with a Mazda?). And some of the other software involved has gotten better too – imagine that, software improving, incredible stuff.

  Anyway. I think, maybe, I don’t want to be part of any company that would have me as an employee. So is my ideal outcome to be rejected, but they later change their mind, making it clear that they feel they’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel?

• When asked about “salary expectations”, a braver soul would go “my expectation is for a salary to be mentioned in the job advert, that’s what I expect, you swines!” Because some smart people say the weaselly secretiveness is a barrier to equal pay, and just benefits cocksure negotiators. But on the other hand, they might be wrong.

• In case I was too controversial earlier, I just want to say: sweetcorn is OK really.