The Evening Standard yesterday ran a feature on people who commute outlandish distances to London for work and pay through the nose for the privilege. Julie and Jonathan Shepherd pass through six counties on their way to the UK capital from Nottinghamshire and shell out about twenty grand between them. On principle, Julie refuses to buy a coffee on the train as she thinks she's been fleeced enough already for the ticket by East Coast Main Line. Quite how features hack Jonathan Prynn kept a straight face while he penned the following line though, I really don't know. "The couple have noticed a slow deterioration in the buffet service - they now stock Walkers rather than Tyrrells crisps."
It's hard for us to imagine the suffering that is being inflicted on these poor souls, isn't it? Only one step away from hitching a ride on an open-top freight wagon.
Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...
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