That horse has bolted

I fear I may be trying to jump onto a long departed bandwagon here, given that the storm over the Tesco debacle has been raging for a good few weeks now.  A more with it blogger would have taken straight to her computer to pound out a few pages of outraged diatribe the minute the news broke but not I!  This is mostly because I like to see whether something is really truly worthy of my consideration before I blog about it.  At first I thought that this was just going to illicit a few hysterical headlines and some horse gags before finally dying down and disappearing but I was wrong.

Not only are we still talking (and laughing) about it all; yet more food related screw ups are coming to light.  It now transpires that Findus is amongst the brands whose ready meals are thought to contain horsemeat.  This is one of those scenarios that I wish I was surprised by but I’m not.  The fact that big corporations pack their ready meals with just about anything, package it and then sell it onto an unsuspecting public really does not amaze me in the slightest.  Sure, we have laws that are supposed to protect the consumer by discouraging these kinds of shenanigans but when did the law ever stop big corporations from doing anything.  If recent times have taught us anything it is that the law does not apply to you if you are rich and powerful enough.  And Tescos is both very rich and very powerful.  When it comes down to it the only thing that these companies truly care about is making a profit and as long as they are still doing that then everything else is of secondary importance.  I very much doubt that this horse meat fiasco will have made that much of an impact on Tesco’s profit margins because people do still need to eat, however pissed off they may be that what they thought was a juicy beef burger is actually Black Beauty slathered in BBQ sauce. 

The only bit of the whole episode that took me by surprise was the outrage.  Apparently, people were perfectly at ease with tucking into cows and pigs but were practically hysterical once they realised that they may have inadvertently eaten a cute little horse.  Why?  Surely if you are perfectly at ease with gorging on the flesh of one animal, eating another animal wouldn’t be that much different.  At least, the principle is still the same.  The animal was once alive and now it isn’t because it is on your plate glistening in all its gravified goodness....yum.  Plus, I’m assuming that many of those who purchased and ate the offending products didn’t actually realised that they had been duped since a large proportion of those would have purchased said products multiple times.

Then it dawned on me.  It is not necessarily people being squeamish about eating horses (well, ok it largely is); it is more about the fact that people thought that they were getting one thing when they were actually getting something different.  If they have been fooled once then how many times and with how many other products has this happened?  What else is in our food that we don’t know about?  Cats, frog’s eyeballs, dinosaur bollocks?  Who the hell knows? It is Tesco’s after all.  There could literally be anything in your gourmet microwavable spaghetti bolognaise.  It genuinely doesn’t bare thinking about.  Plus, it is an issue of trust.  Nobody likes being lied to, especially if those lies are about things that we are buying and potentially feeding our families. 

I’m just hoping that Tesco’s don’t establish a used car arm of their business because God only knows what they’d try and sell you; hearses masquerading as people carriers, pushbikes with no wheels, etc.  You just never know what they will think up next (and you probably wouldn’t want to) but hey, that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?  It could be the start of a whole new dinner party game: guess what’s in your burger!  

Love is in the air

I really didn’t want to dedicate an entire blog post to this mushy nonsense but tradition and a bizarre sense of obligation has forced me to do just that.  Anyone who has not been fortunate to live in a cave without Internet access and/ or other connections to the outside world will have noted that International Make Singletons Everywhere Feel Bad Day (otherwise known as Valentine’s Day) is almost upon us.  For the less commercially enslaved readers among you, Valentine’s Day is that special time of year where we all forget to nag our partners about the gigantic pile of washing up that they have still not done and the toenails they have left wallowing in the bath.  Instead our nagging endeavours turn to hints about overly expensive meals in “intimate” Italian restaurants and “romantic” Valentine’s breaks in some country manor house.  We approach the day with rising anticipation and a sense of certain expectation; surely, this time he or she will have pushed the boat out and have planned something really special.  You know they have been avoiding the whole thing BUT that is just so that they don’t give away the surprise.  You have booked the whole weekend off work and told anyone who cares enough to pretend to listen of your impending Valentine’s treat.

Then the day comes round.  You awake to no breakfast in bed.  Indeed, your partner is still grunting and snoring next to you whilst whispering something lewd about Kate Middleton/ Prince Harry/ Russell Crowe/ Harriet Harman/ John Prescott/ Anne Hathaway (delete as appropriate) and licking their lips.  Naturally, you go downstairs expecting that they have somehow miraculously smuggled in your surprise the previous night and have left it somewhere obvious for you to find.  Like a child on Christmas morning, you dash downstairs unsure and excited about what you might find.  A mad dash around the house reveals nothing.  Not a sausage.  Only a headless mouse (at least Tiddles has remembered) and a puddle of cat piss next to the fridge.  You turn from this feline trail of destruction to see your dishevelled looking partner squinting at you through eyes full of sleep and fresh morning sunlight.  Outraged you demand whether they even know what day it is.  Nonplussed, they reply that it is Friday and run off to get ready for work.  Almost hysterical you yell after the that it is Valentines Day and demand to know why it is that everybody else’s partner ALWAYS does something romantic and yet they always forget to.  You then follow said partner to the bottom of the stairs where you proceed to list the various wonderful things that friends’ partners have done for them for Valentines Day.  Every intimate meal, every surprise holiday gets a mention.  All the while your partner seems way too preoccupied with where they have left their shoes/skirt/belt/handbag, which just gets you more enraged.  By the time you have said your goodbyes you are wondering how you can ever admit this embarrassment to your friends and colleagues, who will now think you are a complete failure because your partner couldn’t even be bothered to show how much they love you by wasting their money on a piece of card sporting a pair of smooching teddies and a vomit inducing verse.  Woe is you.  The fact that they have spent the past year holding back your hair as you vomit after consuming your bodyweight in tequila and listening to you as you pour out your latest workplace drama pales in significance next to the absence of a creepy looking teddy holding an embossed love heart. Because when it comes to relationships, it is the small manufactured things that count.

Later on that evening you return home to find a battered looking bouquet of roses and a large soppy card with the 99p price tag still attached.  You peek inside just to see a generic soppy verse that has been seen by countless other people that very same day and your partner’s name at the bottom.  Still, you are not happy.  They did this only because you nagged them to do it and even then, it was done in a rush and with very little thought.  It was done purely to placate you and to give them an easier life.  Just look at the state of the flowers! 

I have spent so much of my adult life hating things like Valentines Day.  I celebrated it a couple of times when I was a teenager and had my first boyfriend but that was before I realised how stupid the whole thing was.  I understand the whole thing about wanting to tell somebody that you love them but why does that have to be done on an allocated day and why does it have to involve buying them random tat and insisting that they do the same in return?  If you genuinely love somebody, why do you need an allocated day to remind you to spend time with them?  Surely, it means more when somebody does something because they want to rather than because they know that you will expect them to. I don’t know, maybe I am just being a tad naïve here but I’m not really sure how a person’s willingness to contribute towards Hallmark’s profits and their feelings towards their partners are linked.  

For those of you who have reached the end of this post and are still wondering whether I will be celebrating this pointless waste of a day: the answer is a resounding NO.  The only time I will ever celebrate valentines day is if I end up owning a business that manufactures cards and random tat.