Limited Addition

The much-vaunted fall in educational standards isn't all bad, I discovered on Saturday.

In my local cheese shop I ordered some (very ripe) Brie de Meaux and some mature Manchego, costing around £7.40 and £4.30 respectively.
The girl at the till entered the two amounts, but must have left the previous transaction open because the bill added up to around £29. To her credit, she did notice that it was wrong so tried again, this time adding up to £40.

Giving up on technology, she decided to just add the two amounts in her head. A sensible plan I thought, except that in her method of adding up she started from the left and not the right: "7 and 4 makes 11, 4 and ...".

Needless to say, and I hope you'll forgive the mixed metaphor, she got into a bit of a pickle, which she impressively resolved with a flourish. "This is too difficult - can we just call it a tenner?".

Everyone's a winner.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A mug's game

I'm whispering, because I don't want the administrators to hear; before I left zavvi I 'liberated' one of the mugs from the kitchen. I figure it might become a collectors, piece one day. I imagine turning on Antiques' Roadshow to see some expert on ceramics saying:

"This is a remarkable find. zavvi was an entertainment retailer around 2007-2008 but they were only around for about 18 months. There were only a small number of zavvi mugs produced, and - I do believe you've struck gold here - I think this is from the kitchen on the south side, so it's even more of a collector's piece since it would have been used by the eCommerce team. It's probably worth around £10,000 today."

Anyway, the thing is that I've found myself unable to drink from it. Bad karma. It reminds me too much of the painful last few weeks at zavvi. So I've decided that when I find my next job I'm going to make that coffee and use that mug. Until then, I'll keep it under wraps just in case I get a call from a bbc producer.

And while I'm on the subject of coffee, has there ever been a better smell than that of freshly ground coffee? I went to Martyns in Muswell Hill yesterday to pick up my favourite mix of colombian and java, and the aroma from my bag on the way home was just fantastic.

Now look hair...

There's a new hairdressers opening at the bottom of Muswell Hill. They've been fitting it out over the last couple of weeks, and they're almost finished. In fact the only thing still to be done is peeling the back off the window stickers with their name.

Sadly, as I passed it yesterday I noticed that unless they run it through a final spell check it's going to be called ELYTE STILES...