Thread 5 - TalkExiles: "The Planet Goes On Being Round"

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of previous lifeboat threads (thread 4).

Gather here all ye refugees from the JTT Flat Earth Society, welcome to the reassuringly oblate spheroid of MN! Ye all already know the answers to the questions "How the heck do I format my post?" "Why can't I edit my typos?" "What do those acronyms mean?" and most importantly, "Where is everybody that I used to know?"

So really we're all here just to chat randomly.

This was Lidl. Not saying those things may not be available in Tesco, Morrisons etc. But not in Laldi.

At least they had some parsnips, so that gives a job for this afternoon.

I got leeks (for St David's Day) from the local Coop today. They had very little else in the way of non-sad-looking veg, though.

The ex-owner of the old gaff has bid it farewell, the new regime starts tomorrow, apparently. I wonder if it's all a bit pointless though.

We get our weekly fruitnveg box from the local shop down t'road, where possible everything is sourced as nearby as possible. This means we haven't really noticed the supermarket Great Veg Shortage because we tend to bypass that section.

Not a lot of interesting fresh veg available this time of year, of course. It's been mainly sprout sticks or red cabbage for weeks. But the grocer also always manages to include a few tomatoes and peppers, and sometimes aubergine, cucumbers (god knows where he gets them).

@bignosebignose, that's interesting. I wonder what will happen there now, but am not tempted to go back any time soon.

We don't have a local grocer but there is a market twice a week so I shall take a look there. They are usually very well stocked, but haven't been for a while and would quite like a fix of 'Pahnd for a pahnd!' being bellowed at me.

bignosebignose · Today 16:10

The ex-owner of the old gaff has bid it farewell, the new regime starts tomorrow, apparently.

Really? I went there few times, the week I joined MN, but not since.

To be fair, it was realised pretty soon after the schism that it was untenable to have a site in the hands of one person and he has done the decent thing in handing it across to a team of people to take over. There has been some expectation that verboten subjects might be broached again once that is complete and he still won't want any part of that so he's done all the handover work and quietly bowed out. A bit sad all in all.

On the bright side, it's great here.

That's amazing. So weird that we're just as much an island and subject to all the same international pressures - war, weather etc - but there's plenty of everything. I think I would find that kind of shortage deeply discombobulating - I wouldn't go so far as to say I've got back to normal post-Covid and the lockdowns but I'm on the road. That would not help.

I keep reading this thread title as "TaxExiles..."

Maybe Rishi will hit us so hard we'll have to emigrate.

@mach2 ... I keep reading this thread title as "TaxExiles..."

Arf! I do that too, every day. If only!

I shop online (getting my mum out of the house is a major palaver and definitely not worth it just to go to the supermarket) so haven’t noticed the vegetable shortages. Most stuff comes from Ocado but I also get stuff from Abel and Cole.

I make batches of soup for lunch so it was just a happy accident that today’s soup was leek and cannellini bean. The bunch of daffs brought in from the garden was in honour of St David’s day though.

I felt indecently triumphant when I found tomatoes, cucumbers AND eggs in my Sainsbury's Local today. And then wondered WTF was going on for that to be in any way remarkable in the 6th largest economy in the world.

Maybe we all need to start carrying those infinitely expandable knitted string bags that all worldwide grannies used to have. In the Soviet Union, in the worst bare-shelves years, they were known as "Perhaps bags"...

Arf! I always have a foldable "just-in-case" bag tucked into my handbag, and MrGonners keeps one in his coat pocket. But the weird thing at the moment is that online delivery orders seem to produce better results than a visit to the shops.

LOLage at Perhaps Bags. MrsBN being from That Eastern Europe, I must ask her if they had similar. I know they certainly had bare shelves aplenty and then sudden random treats, like a few hundred boxes of prawn crackers turning up and nobody knowing what they were but buying them anyway. (The uncooked ones.)

I first went to Russia when it was in the process of becoming not-the-USSR. Everyone had buggered off from the collective farms, and the railway workers had, in rapid succession, discovered the concepts of (a) not being paid and (b) going on strike. So supplies were erratic. On our first morning we were woken by the family briskly outlining the tourism plan for the day 'But first, we must go to the supermarket. They have tomatoes.'

We knew a bit about the shortages so, assuming they'd not been able to get tomatoes for a while, were happy to make that the first stop.

We'd slightly misunderstood the situation. It wasn't a case of the previously-empty tomato space on the shelf having been filled. The supermarket had tomatoes.

Only tomatoes.

The next day, the supermarket had bread and dried fish. Not a tomato in sight.

That's exactly the prawn crackers story I was told. Empty shop, then a load of those turned up and sold out, rinse and repeat for some other edible thing.

It amuses me that we're being told in the UK that the shortages are the same everywhere because of the weather and Ukraine. Of course, the weather has been a part of the shortages but the reason we haven't seen a tomato in a while is because of Brexit. Well, also because of the energy hike. We have plenty of farmers here who produce tomatoes et al in humungous polytunnels but they can't afford to heat them. Basically back in June 2016 we fucked yourselves mightily and what's happening now is part of that.

Yeah, one of those polytunnels guys was on the TV news tonight.

In less political news, cold here today, v cold. I went to the cinema to see Women Talking and it seemed good but I did keep nodding off so I can't really say whether it's worth watching or not. Rooney Mara was definitely good. She was so still and compelling. I was disappointed in Clare Foy's performance. It felt too over the top. The ending was very moving thobut and I liked hearing Daydream Believer not once but twice.

Three post weirdo. Snoop doesn't want to see Cocaine Bear so I'll be seeing that by myself.

I first heard about the bear in question on the My Favourite Murder podcast a few years back and then enjoyed this short animated video of the conversation on YouTube

This is the trailer for the film. It looks like all kinds of utter nonsense but hugely enjoyable nonsense. Also, the late Ray Liotta.

Looks like the best film evah! 😆

I remember walking past a very long queue in Moscow when I went to the Soviet Union. Several blocks on, it turned out that the queue was for oranges. I’m not sure there were enough for everyone in the queue.

I thought the shortages were due to our own feckless inability to grow vegetables in our non-existent gardens. To quote Lee Anderson today:

‘"My mum and dad really struggled," he said. "I come from poverty… but my dad had a garden.
My dad was a coal miner who worked seven days a week, my mother was a factory worker. At the weekend, my dad did his garden and we had vegetables in there top to bottom, and in the bottom we had chickens and rabbits and ducks.

That was our food bank, we had nowhere else to go, we provided for ourselves."’