“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Fair enough.
But calling the SMO anti-imperialist is taking the piss, given that it's pure imperialism.
Only Western imperialism is bad, remember?
I think (think) he's being tongue in cheek.
But yes, to some people "imperialist" is simply a synonym for Western. Same as "Nazi" to many Russians is just a synonym for Europeans who are military enemies of Russia.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Interesting. I wonder what the strike rate is in terms of enjoyment or good/bad - 7/10? 8/10? And what if you have a dp and want to give everyone the same wine for example.
I can't be doing with the faff or uncertainty. Plus if you want diversity then you find plenty within the Old World regions with imo more reliability. But as I said it sounds like a fun approach and if you are enjoying it then I would never gainsay the pleasure it gives you.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
I did raise a wry smile when, faced with increased demand for Tef from the west (health influencers branding it the new Quinoa!) - the Ethiopian government banned its export.
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Probably not for a while…
Yeah Simien and Bale mountains are ace. But your diesel freezes overnight because they don't put the antifreeze in.
The ultra well-travelled PB demographic revealing itself again.
Ethiopia was on the list of possibles for this summer as my son demanded somewhere more exotic than our planned trip to the Basque country, but we've ended up opting for Georgia.
I’ve actually been to the Danakil Depression. It looks like this
Not sure I could ever enjoy travelling there unless guaranteed air conditioned sleeping quarters.
Weirdly enough it's tolerable, if not pleasant. You sleep outdoors on raised metal stages. The nights get just about cool enough. There are no mosquitoes - no bugs at all. It's too dry. You go to sleep with the stars above - and they are incredible
The food is largely out of tins, with some local meat. But it's fine. You're in one of the most jaw-dropping places on earth. The one destination where the overnight heat is tiring is at the foot of Erta Ale volcano. Might not go below 30C all night. Yuk
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
It's going to be next to impossible to serve the Hebrides on equal terms to Herts without gobs of taxpayer subsidy.
Which is why it should not be a business run for profit but a service provided under strict state regulation. If you want to run a delivery service then you are forced to deliver everywhere in the UK for the same price. As it used to be. If you don't, as a courier company, want to subsidise the more costly bits of the service from the very handsome profits made in the rest of the country then you can lose the whole lot.
On parcel delivery, I remember being ridiculed right here on PB several years ago for suggesting that having one van come down the street to deliver all of the parcels was more efficient than having six vans come down and deliver a few of the parcels each.
A privatised system, with competition, is so much better, I was told.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Surprised the vivino doesn't list the units/alc content on all the wines. I had somehow assumed that was a legal thing here. It's nice to know just from a 'is this a cheeky mid-week evening bottle? Or would that be very unwise?'.
I do look at the alcohol by volume as I don't like wines over 14%. But I would lobby the government to rescind the requirement to put calories on restaurant menus.
Kills the evening stone dead to see that your chosen main course is actually 1,457kcals.
I dilute anything (red) above 14%. Sacrilege these days but in the past it was quite normal to do so. A strong 14.5% red diluted to 13% or 12.5% remains intense enough but the fruit expresses itself better and you lose the burning sensation in the throat. It also goes further.
It's a ruse by the Laithwaites of this world to offer a lot of very high alcohol reds which can mask all kinds of imperfections in the wine itself.
I have used Laithwaites forever , ie as Bordeux Direct many moons ago, never had issues with their wine , even the 15% ones but 14% is the sweet spot for me. Not so keen on the wishy washy watery ones.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Fair enough.
But calling the SMO anti-imperialist is taking the piss, given that it's pure imperialism.
Only Western imperialism is bad, remember?
Argggh - forgot that... Oh bugger. And I sent the invasion fleet to India and everything now....
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Fair enough.
But calling the SMO anti-imperialist is taking the piss, given that it's pure imperialism.
And calling a grotesque war of aggression "SMO" isn't just taking the piss, it is pure twattery.
Even Putin has admitted he's at war, though they persist with the euphemism. Shades of "einsatzgruppen".
Speaking of the SMO it was interesting to see one T Blair say how he thought that Putin should have been given a seat at the "top table" 20-odd years ago.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
It's going to be next to impossible to serve the Hebrides on equal terms to Herts without gobs of taxpayer subsidy.
Well, you could legislate uniform price and delivery to all postcodes in the UK.
The problem, as I've mentioned before, is what do you do about sub-national delivery organisations? Declare them illegal? Seems a bit hard on the bike messenger guys....
Speaking of the SMO it was interesting to see one T Blair say how he thought that Putin should have been given a seat at the "top table" 20-odd years ago.
Well there was a case for trying to get Russia to be a constructive part of a peaceful world order. Doubt he'd be saying that now.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
I did raise a wry smile when, faced with increased demand for Tef from the west (health influencers branding it the new Quinoa!) - the Ethiopian government banned its export.
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Probably not for a while…
Yeah Simien and Bale mountains are ace. But your diesel freezes overnight because they don't put the antifreeze in.
The ultra well-travelled PB demographic revealing itself again.
Ethiopia was on the list of possibles for this summer as my son demanded somewhere more exotic than our planned trip to the Basque country, but we've ended up opting for Georgia.
I’ve actually been to the Danakil Depression. It looks like this
Not sure I could ever enjoy travelling there unless guaranteed air conditioned sleeping quarters.
Cannot say it has encouraged me to ever want to go there.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
I did raise a wry smile when, faced with increased demand for Tef from the west (health influencers branding it the new Quinoa!) - the Ethiopian government banned its export.
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Probably not for a while…
Yeah Simien and Bale mountains are ace. But your diesel freezes overnight because they don't put the antifreeze in.
The ultra well-travelled PB demographic revealing itself again.
Ethiopia was on the list of possibles for this summer as my son demanded somewhere more exotic than our planned trip to the Basque country, but we've ended up opting for Georgia.
I’ve actually been to the Danakil Depression. It looks like this
Not sure I could ever enjoy travelling there unless guaranteed air conditioned sleeping quarters.
Weirdly enough it's tolerable, if not pleasant. You sleep outdoors on raised metal stages. The nights get just about cool enough. There are no mosquitoes - no bugs at all. It's too dry. You go to sleep with the stars above - and they are incredible
The food is largely out of tins, with some local meat. But it's fine. You're in one of the most jaw-dropping places on earth. The one destination where the overnight heat is tiring is at the foot of Erta Ale volcano. Might not go below 30C all night. Yuk
But then at the top is the lava lake
Is that a ring I see glinting down the bottom there?
Speaking of the SMO it was interesting to see one T Blair say how he thought that Putin should have been given a seat at the "top table" 20-odd years ago.
Well there was a case for trying to get Russia to be a constructive part of a peaceful world order. Doubt he'd be saying that now.
No indeed. But a point made earlier last year was that after the wall came down Putin had wanted to join NATO and was roundly rebuffed.
I wonder where we would be now had NATO acted differently back then.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
I don't really understand what you are missing out on if the postal system is bad?
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
"Closely associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt's successful presidential campaign in 1932, the song gained prominence after a spontaneous decision by Roosevelt's advisers to play it at the 1932 Democratic National Convention: after a dirge-like version of Roosevelt's favorite song "Anchors Aweigh" had been repeated over and over, without enthusiasm, a participant reportedly shouted: "FOR GOD'S SAKE, HAVE THEM PLAY SOMETHING ELSE", which caused the band to play the new song, drawing cheers and applause, and subsequently becoming the Democratic Party's "unofficial theme song for years to come."
"The song is also associated with the Repeal of Prohibition, which occurred shortly after Roosevelt's election where there were signs saying "Happy days are beer again" and so on."
SSI - Note that FDR was Assistant Navy Secretary during WW1 and that "Anchors Away" is the football fight song of US Naval Academy.
Version that I recall, was that the person who said to "play something else" was FDR's master strategist Louis Howe, who was listening to convention proceedings in Roosevelt's hotel suite.
Anyway "Happy Days Are Here Again" was an inspired choice for 1932 campaign, as it encapsulated Roosevelt's positive, upbeat message of hope, in contrast to Hoovers continued doom & gloom.
On topic. Yes. They made the wrong call. Sunak position is a massive vote lower in the long run, but just short poll drops for now, it’s the long term damage being done to Sunak’s government brand that is the problem for the Tory’s here - the struggle on incomes goes on longer than inflation falls, the impact of this on all votes not just GE ones is where Sunak’s awful hard line stance on these popular strikes is letting the Tory’s down. The voters don’t want a hard line, they want to see talks, they want to see a government who can negotiate well and everyone settle on something fair and reasonable in the middle, and strike pain and crisis come to an end.
Boris would have been better at managing this cost of living crisis and associated strikes than out of touch greenhorn Sunak.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Interesting. I wonder what the strike rate is in terms of enjoyment or good/bad - 7/10? 8/10? And what if you have a dp and want to give everyone the same wine for example.
I can't be doing with the faff or uncertainty. Plus if you want diversity then you find plenty within the Old World regions with imo more reliability. But as I said it sounds like a fun approach and if you are enjoying it then I would never gainsay the pleasure it gives you.
I buy mixed cases selected personally from Naked Wines as well. As per Leon I enjoy it , sometimes hit and miss but makes it very interesting and usually they match the reviews.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
Why is there fucking litter and rubbish everywhere? Even Russia looked cleaner when I was there last month. Blyat.
Plus nobody ever picks up the phone. Just auto-direct to web and 'chat' where conversations go to die. And the post - forget about it. I'm finding it hard to get anything done.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
I don't really understand what you are missing out on if the postal system is bad?
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
The issue is parcels. Which is a growing business. Not letters, which is a doomed business.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Interesting. I wonder what the strike rate is in terms of enjoyment or good/bad - 7/10? 8/10? And what if you have a dp and want to give everyone the same wine for example.
I can't be doing with the faff or uncertainty. Plus if you want diversity then you find plenty within the Old World regions with imo more reliability. But as I said it sounds like a fun approach and if you are enjoying it then I would never gainsay the pleasure it gives you.
I buy mixed cases selected personally from Naked Wines as well. As per Leon I enjoy it , sometimes hit and miss but makes it very interesting and usually they match the reviews.
As I said good for you. If I like a wine I like to have a case or two of it and I can't be doing with the odd bottle here and there. Plus "sometimes hit and miss" for the amount I drink (a lot less and more discerningly than years ago) is a huge waste of money.
On topic. Yes. They made the wrong call. Sunak position is a massive vote lower in the long run, but just short poll drops for now, it’s the long term damage being done to Sunak’s government brand that is the problem for the Tory’s here - the struggle on incomes goes on longer than inflation falls, the impact of this on all votes not just GE ones is where Sunak’s awful hard line stance on these popular strikes is letting the Tory down. The voters don’t want a hard line, they want to see talks, they want to see a government who can negotiate well and everyone settle on something fair and reasonable in the middle, and strike pain and crisis come to an end.
Boris would have been better at managing this cost of living crisis and associated strikes than out of touch greenhorn Sunak.
I don't know if they want a society with domestic labour-cost inflation of 10%, though.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Oh, interesting point of view. Would it be less "boring on here" if we also (along with one Putin apologist) we added some apologists for other murderous war criminals? How about a few Mussolini apologists? Perhaps a few that might offer a defence of Pol Pot or present day deniers of the Holocaust? Why not invite in some defenders of the Rwandan genocide or the massacre at Srebrenica?
Perhaps all those type of people will think themselves to be very independent in their thinking. Most sentient human beings will just regard them as complete twats.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
Why is there fucking litter and rubbish everywhere? Even Russia looked cleaner when I was there last month. Blyat.
Because 1% of car drivers are shits who throw it out the car window. Always looks bad this time of year as the hedges and verges have either died back or been cut back, exposing the plastic harvest beneath.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Oh, interesting point of view. Would it be less "boring on here" if we also (along with one Putin apologist) we added some apologists for other murderous war criminals? How about a few Mussolini apologists? Perhaps a few that might offer a defence of Pol Pot or present day deniers of the Holocaust? Why not invite in some defenders of the Rwandan genocide or the massacre at Srebrenica?
Perhaps all those type of people will think themselves to be very independent in their thinking. Most sentient human beings will just regard them as complete twats.
Already is the case. Plenty of British Empire apologists.
"With the help of DNA evidence, investigators confirmed in December that GW950m, the suspected perpetrator in more than a dozen other killings, was their wolf.
It seems that even before Dolly met her end, GW950m had already been heading for a firing squad."
This is why the whole rewilding movement scares me. Dangerous wild animals should be left in zoos and abroad where they belong, and not reintroduced to dear old blighty.
Where's your sense of adventure and excitement?
With cars getting ever safer, kids need a bit of danger on their walk to school. What better way to introduce it than via wandering wolves?
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Interesting. I wonder what the strike rate is in terms of enjoyment or good/bad - 7/10? 8/10? And what if you have a dp and want to give everyone the same wine for example.
I can't be doing with the faff or uncertainty. Plus if you want diversity then you find plenty within the Old World regions with imo more reliability. But as I said it sounds like a fun approach and if you are enjoying it then I would never gainsay the pleasure it gives you.
I buy mixed cases selected personally from Naked Wines as well. As per Leon I enjoy it , sometimes hit and miss but makes it very interesting and usually they match the reviews.
As I said good for you. If I like a wine I like to have a case or two of it and I can't be doing with the odd bottle here and there. Plus "sometimes hit and miss" for the amount I drink (a lot less and more discerningly than years ago) is a huge waste of money.
Yes, I don't end to go for just one of each most of the time. With Laithwaites if I don't like it I just phone and get a replacement, don't abuse it or do it often mind you. Ones I like I then buy by the case.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
I don't really understand what you are missing out on if the postal system is bad?
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
I am missing out on a reliable service to deliver letters and parcels to me in a timely manner both for personal and business use. Just like tens of millions of other people. Several million of whom still don't have any access to online services - and many of those live in exactly the remote areas that the courier services charge an arm and a leg to deliver to.
As an aside. If you live in Westhill, 6 miles from Aberdeen city centre, you officially live in Highlands and Islands and will pay up to 10 times the normal rate for deliveries with some courier firms. For this reason many smaller companies simply will not deliver to those areas.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
I did raise a wry smile when, faced with increased demand for Tef from the west (health influencers branding it the new Quinoa!) - the Ethiopian government banned its export.
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Probably not for a while…
Yeah Simien and Bale mountains are ace. But your diesel freezes overnight because they don't put the antifreeze in.
The ultra well-travelled PB demographic revealing itself again.
Ethiopia was on the list of possibles for this summer as my son demanded somewhere more exotic than our planned trip to the Basque country, but we've ended up opting for Georgia.
I’ve actually been to the Danakil Depression. It looks like this
Not sure I could ever enjoy travelling there unless guaranteed air conditioned sleeping quarters.
Weirdly enough it's tolerable, if not pleasant. You sleep outdoors on raised metal stages. The nights get just about cool enough. There are no mosquitoes - no bugs at all. It's too dry. You go to sleep with the stars above - and they are incredible
The food is largely out of tins, with some local meat. But it's fine. You're in one of the most jaw-dropping places on earth. The one destination where the overnight heat is tiring is at the foot of Erta Ale volcano. Might not go below 30C all night. Yuk
But then at the top is the lava lake
Is that a ring I see glinting down the bottom there?
Probably quite hard to retrieve if so. That lava lake is hundreds of metres wide. Maybe a km when really active (it is always active in some way). The heat it gives off is stunning
That corner of Ethiopia is in my top five most astonishing, compelling places I have ever been. It's not as dangerous as everyone says (sure, it is risky, but tourists go there unharmed all the time)
What's more, it is cheap, Once you are in Ethiopia a local tour op will take you all over the Danakil and Afar for £500a head. Sadly, flights to Addis from the UK are more problematic at the moment
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
Taking the wider view, one of the big mysteries about the current political environment is how the Tories - and the wider right - came to see what should be the pride of our nation - the NHS, the BBC, the Royal Mail, our judiciary, our internationally respected civil service, the National Trust - as the enemy within? What precisely is it that the ‘Conservative’ Party intends to conserve?
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Oh, interesting point of view. Would it be less "boring on here" if we also (along with one Putin apologist) we added some apologists for other murderous war criminals? How about a few Mussolini apologists? Perhaps a few that might offer a defence of Pol Pot or present day deniers of the Holocaust? Why not invite in some defenders of the Rwandan genocide or the massacre at Srebrenica?
Perhaps all those type of people will think themselves to be very independent in their thinking. Most sentient human beings will just regard them as complete twats.
Already is the case. Plenty of British Empire apologists.
Well, if the Russian invasion of Ukraine isn't Imperialistic, then the British Empire wasn't Imperialistic either.
Indeed, it was probably anti-Imperialistic according to the view above.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Exactly, hence we retain Royal Mail and the universal service obligation. Even Amazon use Royal Mail's rural infrastructure
It would be great if vanilla could have a live topic summary or word cloud under each PB thread to accompany the actual thread title. For example now it might read “Putin SMO; wine selection; rural postal services; Sunak”.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Fair enough.
But calling the SMO anti-imperialist is taking the piss, given that it's pure imperialism.
And calling a grotesque war of aggression "SMO" isn't just taking the piss, it is pure twattery.
Even Putin has admitted he's at war, though they persist with the euphemism. Shades of "einsatzgruppen".
We are not at war with Egypt. We are in armed conflict.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Oh, interesting point of view. Would it be less "boring on here" if we also (along with one Putin apologist) we added some apologists for other murderous war criminals? How about a few Mussolini apologists? Perhaps a few that might offer a defence of Pol Pot or present day deniers of the Holocaust? Why not invite in some defenders of the Rwandan genocide or the massacre at Srebrenica?
Perhaps all those type of people will think themselves to be very independent in their thinking. Most sentient human beings will just regard them as complete twats.
Already is the case. Plenty of British Empire apologists.
Oh right, are you suggesting we shouldn't be critical of Putin, now, in 2023 because we once had an Empire that we gave up in the middle part of the last century? Is that what you are saying?
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
It also wouldn't deal with the fact that about 1/6 of the land area of the UK would still be paying far more for deliveries even if only to a village centre.
"With the help of DNA evidence, investigators confirmed in December that GW950m, the suspected perpetrator in more than a dozen other killings, was their wolf.
It seems that even before Dolly met her end, GW950m had already been heading for a firing squad."
This is why the whole rewilding movement scares me. Dangerous wild animals should be left in zoos and abroad where they belong, and not reintroduced to dear old blighty.
Where's your sense of adventure and excitement?
With cars getting ever safer, kids need a bit of danger on their walk to school. What better way to introduce it than via wandering wolves?
According to various documentaries, a waif/child weighing nothing can fight off monsters/adult attackers by doing some funky looking kicks and not-quite-punches.
Hoban 'Wash' Washburn: Start with the part where Jayne gets knocked out by a 90-pound girl 'cause... I don't think that's ever getting old.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
I don't really understand what you are missing out on if the postal system is bad?
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
The issue is parcels. Which is a growing business. Not letters, which is a doomed business.
Parcels are a different business to letters. Parcels come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and weights, whereas letters were pretty much standardised to a very limited range.
It's a different business, and it's not one where I see the need to treat it as critical national infrastructure in the way you would the water and sewerage system, or the letters post was in the days before email (or arguably phone).
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
Taking the wider view, one of the big mysteries about the current political environment is how the Tories - and the wider right - came to see what should be the pride of our nation - the NHS, the BBC, the Royal Mail, our judiciary, our internationally respected civil service, the National Trust - as the enemy within? What precisely is it that the ‘Conservative’ Party intends to conserve?
The only one of those to be privatised, the Royal Mail, was done by Vince Cable, an ideological classical liberal like BartholomewRoberts when he was Business Secretary.
None of those have been privatised by a Conservative Cabinet Minister, the National Trust is a charity and the aim of conservatives there like with the BBC and civil service and judiciary is to ensure they don't become too Woke
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
Our daughter phoned today to say her sister in laws partner died at 6.00am today in Glan Clwyd following a bowel cancer operation on the 22nd December
Apparently he contracted sepsis, had a heart attack early today, and died
It must be remembered that this is under Labour NHS and this group has been under special measures for months
When are all politicians going to get together and agree how to deal with this crisis as it will not be resolved without cooperation across the UK
It can't be resolved without a fundamental change to the NHS. Unfortunately in this country the NHS is a religion and as such can never be challenged or changed.
It strikes me that referring to the NHS as a religion has become a bit of a religion itself on this forum.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Fair enough.
But calling the SMO anti-imperialist is taking the piss, given that it's pure imperialism.
And calling a grotesque war of aggression "SMO" isn't just taking the piss, it is pure twattery.
Even Putin has admitted he's at war, though they persist with the euphemism. Shades of "einsatzgruppen".
We are not at war with Egypt. We are in armed conflict.
Anthony Eden.
A lot of that during the Falklands too. It was very much a “conflict” in the British press.
The other non-war terminology we’ve grown accustomed to since the 1990s is “air strikes”. To be fair this was generally a factually correct description.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Royal Mail used to make a decent chunk of change selling their address/postcode database to 3rd parties. Not sure if that's still the case, but it was something they put a lot of effort into.
Shocking how one person's lies can cause so much misery to a town. It appears that Barrow isn't in fact home to a grooming gang, just a sad fantasist and a lot of people willing and ready to sign up to a witch hunt.
Our daughter phoned today to say her sister in laws partner died at 6.00am today in Glan Clwyd following a bowel cancer operation on the 22nd December
Apparently he contracted sepsis, had a heart attack early today, and died
It must be remembered that this is under Labour NHS and this group has been under special measures for months
When are all politicians going to get together and agree how to deal with this crisis as it will not be resolved without cooperation across the UK
It can't be resolved without a fundamental change to the NHS. Unfortunately in this country the NHS is a religion and as such can never be challenged or changed.
It strikes me that referring to the NHS as a religion has become a bit of a religion itself on this forum.
I liked that comment because it is funny. The NHS is definitely a religion though. Praise it's uber-bureaucratic credentials!
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Fair enough.
But calling the SMO anti-imperialist is taking the piss, given that it's pure imperialism.
And calling a grotesque war of aggression "SMO" isn't just taking the piss, it is pure twattery.
Even Putin has admitted he's at war, though they persist with the euphemism. Shades of "einsatzgruppen".
We are not at war with Egypt. We are in armed conflict.
Anthony Eden.
A lot of that during the Falklands too. It was very much a “conflict” in the British press.
The other non-war terminology we’ve grown accustomed to since the 1990s is “air strikes”. To be fair this was generally a factually correct description.
On the terminology front, the other day a mate of mine commanding an armoured regiment reminded/informed me that we don't have an army any more. We have a defence force (<100,000 personnel). Not sure if that is the case (he said it was officially bumped up by the reserves); googling I can't find anything to support it. Not great for morale, that said, as he said that the army/defence force/whatever doesn't have the kit to do anything much these days.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Shocking how one person's lies can cause so much misery to a town. It appears that Barrow isn't in fact home to a grooming gang, just a sad fantasist and a lot of people willing and ready to sign up to a witch hunt.
And we are back to the issue that "listening" to all reports of crimes should not mean "Unquestioningly believe every report with absolutely no checks or questions".
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
I mentioned I think we may see a Ukrainian counteroffensive starting this weekend due to forecast freezing weather and firm frozen ground, especially in Donbas.
It still looks on. A week of sub zero maxima and very cold nights starting on Saturday.
Add to this an increasing number of large scale rocket attacks on Russian troop concentrations and ammo dumps, and apparently some build up of UAF around Kremmina.
Our daughter phoned today to say her sister in laws partner died at 6.00am today in Glan Clwyd following a bowel cancer operation on the 22nd December
Apparently he contracted sepsis, had a heart attack early today, and died
It must be remembered that this is under Labour NHS and this group has been under special measures for months
When are all politicians going to get together and agree how to deal with this crisis as it will not be resolved without cooperation across the UK
It can't be resolved without a fundamental change to the NHS. Unfortunately in this country the NHS is a religion and as such can never be challenged or changed.
It strikes me that referring to the NHS as a religion has become a bit of a religion itself on this forum.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
I don't really understand what you are missing out on if the postal system is bad?
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
I am missing out on a reliable service to deliver letters and parcels to me in a timely manner both for personal and business use. Just like tens of millions of other people. Several million of whom still don't have any access to online services - and many of those live in exactly the remote areas that the courier services charge an arm and a leg to deliver to.
As an aside. If you live in Westhill, 6 miles from Aberdeen city centre, you officially live in Highlands and Islands and will pay up to 10 times the normal rate for deliveries with some courier firms. For this reason many smaller companies simply will not deliver to those areas.
But what sort of information is still being sent to you by post that you can't get by email?
People who live only six miles from Aberdeen can mostly cycle* in to Aberdeen to pick their stuff up - as I'm sure they do for most of their groceries, clothes, etc.
Lots of businesses organise their own logistics, either in house or with companies set up to provide a cheap/efficient/reliable/fast service, depending on the business priority. I don't see why this requires a state service.
Back in the day there would have been people who couldn't read or write, and so couldn't take advantage of the new national post system. Mostly they would find someone who was literate to help them with that, rather than to insist that the old means of communication - of town criers, and bards, etc - were retained for their benefit.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
I don't really understand what you are missing out on if the postal system is bad?
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
The issue is parcels. Which is a growing business. Not letters, which is a doomed business.
Hence go to a sorting office nowadays and the machines are ripping through the letters while the majority of the space is taken up by pallets of packets.
The anachronism is that Royal Mail deals with packets while its Parcelforce subsidiary handles parcels. I doubt anyone who hasn’t worked for the company knows the difference.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
A question. A relative runs a business supplying materials for the construction industry on a same day courier basis in London. Your site is out of concrete sawing blades - get them in an hour, rather than send a guy in a van etc...
He naturally uses couriers who are local to the areas he covers, who specialise in on spec rapid delivery.
How would you differentiate, if at all, for such businesses?
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Interesting. I wonder what the strike rate is in terms of enjoyment or good/bad - 7/10? 8/10? And what if you have a dp and want to give everyone the same wine for example.
I can't be doing with the faff or uncertainty. Plus if you want diversity then you find plenty within the Old World regions with imo more reliability. But as I said it sounds like a fun approach and if you are enjoying it then I would never gainsay the pleasure it gives you.
I buy mixed cases selected personally from Naked Wines as well. As per Leon I enjoy it , sometimes hit and miss but makes it very interesting and usually they match the reviews.
As I said good for you. If I like a wine I like to have a case or two of it and I can't be doing with the odd bottle here and there. Plus "sometimes hit and miss" for the amount I drink (a lot less and more discerningly than years ago) is a huge waste of money.
The big divide between middle-aged wine drinkers is between whose who merely seek familiarity and those who seek variety.
Our daughter phoned today to say her sister in laws partner died at 6.00am today in Glan Clwyd following a bowel cancer operation on the 22nd December
Apparently he contracted sepsis, had a heart attack early today, and died
It must be remembered that this is under Labour NHS and this group has been under special measures for months
When are all politicians going to get together and agree how to deal with this crisis as it will not be resolved without cooperation across the UK
It can't be resolved without a fundamental change to the NHS. Unfortunately in this country the NHS is a religion and as such can never be challenged or changed.
It strikes me that referring to the NHS as a religion has become a bit of a religion itself on this forum.
The NHS is quite frequently changed as well.
Perhaps it is time for someone to nail Ninety-five Theses to the door of Great Ormond Street (or similar)?
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
I don't really understand what you are missing out on if the postal system is bad?
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
I am missing out on a reliable service to deliver letters and parcels to me in a timely manner both for personal and business use. Just like tens of millions of other people. Several million of whom still don't have any access to online services - and many of those live in exactly the remote areas that the courier services charge an arm and a leg to deliver to.
As an aside. If you live in Westhill, 6 miles from Aberdeen city centre, you officially live in Highlands and Islands and will pay up to 10 times the normal rate for deliveries with some courier firms. For this reason many smaller companies simply will not deliver to those areas.
But what sort of information is still being sent to you by post that you can't get by email?
People who live only six miles from Aberdeen can mostly cycle* in to Aberdeen to pick their stuff up - as I'm sure they do for most of their groceries, clothes, etc.
Lots of businesses organise their own logistics, either in house or with companies set up to provide a cheap/efficient/reliable/fast service, depending on the business priority. I don't see why this requires a state service.
Back in the day there would have been people who couldn't read or write, and so couldn't take advantage of the new national post system. Mostly they would find someone who was literate to help them with that, rather than to insist that the old means of communication - of town criers, and bards, etc - were retained for their benefit.
* Or drive, I guess.
If the universal service Royal Mail provides is scrapped it would cost triple the price or more to deliver parcels to remote rural areas compared to the inner city. It is vital for rural areas, another reason why I am a conservative not a classical liberal
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
I don't get why they don't just copy them? There is a funny Dutch guy who reviews the cycle provision in Edinburgh and the poor man needs therapy.
I actually take some perverse delight in how bad the cycling provision is around me. One of my favourites is a 'cycle lane' that lasts about 50 yards then just... stops. There is a sign in the middle of the street opposite with a picture of a bike and an arrow pointing left. Which just takes you down a side street to... nowhere in particular.
Though I have been a bit sad to see new roadworks happening and as close to zero cycling taken into account. A whole new road bridge was put in recently and the only bike aspect is a little gap in the middle with an arrow that suggests if you're on a bike and feel like swerving through the traffic to get there - you can f*ck right off in that direction.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
A question. A relative runs a business supplying materials for the construction industry on a same day courier basis in London. Your site is out of concrete sawing blades - get them in an hour, rather than send a guy in a van etc...
He naturally uses couriers who are local to the areas he covers, who specialise in on spec rapid delivery.
How would you differentiate, if at all, for such businesses?
Simple If you company offers delivery services beyond x% of the country - it needs to provide the service to the entire country.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
I don't really understand what you are missing out on if the postal system is bad?
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
I am missing out on a reliable service to deliver letters and parcels to me in a timely manner both for personal and business use. Just like tens of millions of other people. Several million of whom still don't have any access to online services - and many of those live in exactly the remote areas that the courier services charge an arm and a leg to deliver to.
As an aside. If you live in Westhill, 6 miles from Aberdeen city centre, you officially live in Highlands and Islands and will pay up to 10 times the normal rate for deliveries with some courier firms. For this reason many smaller companies simply will not deliver to those areas.
But what sort of information is still being sent to you by post that you can't get by email?
People who live only six miles from Aberdeen can mostly cycle* in to Aberdeen to pick their stuff up - as I'm sure they do for most of their groceries, clothes, etc.
Lots of businesses organise their own logistics, either in house or with companies set up to provide a cheap/efficient/reliable/fast service, depending on the business priority. I don't see why this requires a state service.
Back in the day there would have been people who couldn't read or write, and so couldn't take advantage of the new national post system. Mostly they would find someone who was literate to help them with that, rather than to insist that the old means of communication - of town criers, and bards, etc - were retained for their benefit.
* Or drive, I guess.
This is utter tosh. So you are saying that people occupying around 1/6th of the land area of the UK should not have access to the same delivery services at the same cost as the rest of us? That those people should be denied the ability to order from tens of thousands of small businesses who refuse to accept orders from those parts of the country because of the delivery postage costs?
It should be a legal requirement that whoever is doing national deliveries is made to charge the same amount where-ever they are delivering to within the British Isles. If they choose not to do that then they should not be allowed to operate. Cherry picking the most profitable parts of the delivery system and leaving large numbers of people without any effective system is something that should be prevented by regulation. Force companies to operate responsibly or not at all.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Oh, interesting point of view. Would it be less "boring on here" if we also (along with one Putin apologist) we added some apologists for other murderous war criminals? How about a few Mussolini apologists? Perhaps a few that might offer a defence of Pol Pot or present day deniers of the Holocaust? Why not invite in some defenders of the Rwandan genocide or the massacre at Srebrenica?
Perhaps all those type of people will think themselves to be very independent in their thinking. Most sentient human beings will just regard them as complete twats.
Already is the case. Plenty of British Empire apologists.
Oh right, are you suggesting we shouldn't be critical of Putin, now, in 2023 because we once had an Empire that we gave up in the middle part of the last century? Is that what you are saying?
No. I am saying that you asked for war crime defenders, but that you already have them.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Interesting. I wonder what the strike rate is in terms of enjoyment or good/bad - 7/10? 8/10? And what if you have a dp and want to give everyone the same wine for example.
I can't be doing with the faff or uncertainty. Plus if you want diversity then you find plenty within the Old World regions with imo more reliability. But as I said it sounds like a fun approach and if you are enjoying it then I would never gainsay the pleasure it gives you.
I buy mixed cases selected personally from Naked Wines as well. As per Leon I enjoy it , sometimes hit and miss but makes it very interesting and usually they match the reviews.
As I said good for you. If I like a wine I like to have a case or two of it and I can't be doing with the odd bottle here and there. Plus "sometimes hit and miss" for the amount I drink (a lot less and more discerningly than years ago) is a huge waste of money.
The big divide between middle-aged wine drinkers is between whose who merely seek familiarity and those who seek variety.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
Taking the wider view, one of the big mysteries about the current political environment is how the Tories - and the wider right - came to see what should be the pride of our nation - the NHS, the BBC, the Royal Mail, our judiciary, our internationally respected civil service, the National Trust - as the enemy within? What precisely is it that the ‘Conservative’ Party intends to conserve?
Very precisely why One Nation Tories may find that voting Labour next time is the nearest thing to hand (though not very near) to voting conservative.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
An H R Owen for every town and village.
I was referring to the delivery companies not the retailers. As I think you well knew.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
Taking the wider view, one of the big mysteries about the current political environment is how the Tories - and the wider right - came to see what should be the pride of our nation - the NHS, the BBC, the Royal Mail, our judiciary, our internationally respected civil service, the National Trust - as the enemy within? What precisely is it that the ‘Conservative’ Party intends to conserve?
The only one of those to be privatised, the Royal Mail, was done by Vince Cable, an ideological classical liberal like BartholomewRoberts when he was Business Secretary.
None of those have been privatised by a Conservative Cabinet Minister, the National Trust is a charity and the aim of conservatives there like with the BBC and civil service and judiciary is to ensure they don't become too Woke
All good except for the absence of an answer to the question.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Oh, interesting point of view. Would it be less "boring on here" if we also (along with one Putin apologist) we added some apologists for other murderous war criminals? How about a few Mussolini apologists? Perhaps a few that might offer a defence of Pol Pot or present day deniers of the Holocaust? Why not invite in some defenders of the Rwandan genocide or the massacre at Srebrenica?
Perhaps all those type of people will think themselves to be very independent in their thinking. Most sentient human beings will just regard them as complete twats.
Already is the case. Plenty of British Empire apologists.
Well, if the Russian invasion of Ukraine isn't Imperialistic, then the British Empire wasn't Imperialistic either.
Indeed, it was probably anti-Imperialistic according to the view above.
I imagine that the opinion being characterised above is that the United States is the global hegemon, therefore anything strengthening the US-led world order is imperialistic, and vice versa, even if it involves instances of oppression. If you believe that, then the British Empire was the hegemon of its time, and so the EIC was imperialistic.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
Taking the wider view, one of the big mysteries about the current political environment is how the Tories - and the wider right - came to see what should be the pride of our nation - the NHS, the BBC, the Royal Mail, our judiciary, our internationally respected civil service, the National Trust - as the enemy within? What precisely is it that the ‘Conservative’ Party intends to conserve?
In reference to an earlier discussion, I find it useful to distinguish between the private realm and the public sphere.
In the private realm, loads of people are leading very prosperous lives. Posh restaurants are heaving, expensive cars are everywhere, expensive holidays are de rigueur, people pay large sums to watch football, cricket, music or whatever, and many people have money to burn. We are a rich country (albeit with too many poor people).
By contrast, the public sphere is severely dilapidated. Streets are dirty and unkempt, many public services are in disarray, and councils (in particular) and other public authorities don't have the money to make significant improvements. The public sphere is a total mess.
I'd like to see a political party make a serious pitch for restoring civic pride; to restore the balance between the public and the private. A slightly old-fashioned concept, perhaps. But wouldn't it be great if we could be really proud of the public sphere: proud of our neighbourhoods (streets, pavements, parks, graffiti-free buildings and so on), and proud of the services (buses, trains, hospitals, care for the elderly and so on) that we all rely on?
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
A question. A relative runs a business supplying materials for the construction industry on a same day courier basis in London. Your site is out of concrete sawing blades - get them in an hour, rather than send a guy in a van etc...
He naturally uses couriers who are local to the areas he covers, who specialise in on spec rapid delivery.
How would you differentiate, if at all, for such businesses?
Simple If you company offers delivery services beyond x% of the country - it needs to provide the service to the entire country.
Then you would rapidly find that services would be setup that carefully do x%-0.00000000001% of the country.
Our daughter phoned today to say her sister in laws partner died at 6.00am today in Glan Clwyd following a bowel cancer operation on the 22nd December
Apparently he contracted sepsis, had a heart attack early today, and died
It must be remembered that this is under Labour NHS and this group has been under special measures for months
When are all politicians going to get together and agree how to deal with this crisis as it will not be resolved without cooperation across the UK
It can't be resolved without a fundamental change to the NHS. Unfortunately in this country the NHS is a religion and as such can never be challenged or changed.
It strikes me that referring to the NHS as a religion has become a bit of a religion itself on this forum.
The problem is that the issue that needs to be fixed is social care - and because that is run by local authorities (who don't have the funding to run a proper service) the issue is shunted down to the previous stage (blocked hospital beds).
This has been an issue for 10+ years but it's now going to be impossible to fix because Truss removed the tax revenue (NI) that was supposed to provide the funds to fix some of it.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
Just to point out there is a world of difference between Ethiopian and Georgian wines. The firmer are no doubt very pleasant but very low volume novelties. The latter is the oldest wine making country in the world and a global viticultural giant.
20th largest producer in the world, growing in double digits per year and with huge variety and (mainly) high quality as well as dozens of indigenous varieties.
There’s actually a fully functioning Georgian winery as an annex of Plumpton viticulture college. It’s part of the degree curriculum.
This is significantly better than before Sunak took over (when it was -84!) but with just 27% of 2019 Tory voters saying the Government is doing well on this issue, you can see why the 20 point polling deficits sustain. https://twitter.com/JMagosh/status/1610313959625863168/photo/1
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
A book shop in Cork is selling books wrapped in brown paper with only their first sentence to tell one from the other.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
A question. A relative runs a business supplying materials for the construction industry on a same day courier basis in London. Your site is out of concrete sawing blades - get them in an hour, rather than send a guy in a van etc...
He naturally uses couriers who are local to the areas he covers, who specialise in on spec rapid delivery.
How would you differentiate, if at all, for such businesses?
Simple If you company offers delivery services beyond x% of the country - it needs to provide the service to the entire country.
Then you would rapidly find that services would be setup that carefully do x%-0.00000000001% of the country.
So you set the percentage so low that it's not an issue - say 10% or so. That's enough to allow your relative to run services exclusively in London but not enough to allow DPD and co to escape the new rules.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Oh, interesting point of view. Would it be less "boring on here" if we also (along with one Putin apologist) we added some apologists for other murderous war criminals? How about a few Mussolini apologists? Perhaps a few that might offer a defence of Pol Pot or present day deniers of the Holocaust? Why not invite in some defenders of the Rwandan genocide or the massacre at Srebrenica?
Perhaps all those type of people will think themselves to be very independent in their thinking. Most sentient human beings will just regard them as complete twats.
Already is the case. Plenty of British Empire apologists.
Well, if the Russian invasion of Ukraine isn't Imperialistic, then the British Empire wasn't Imperialistic either.
Indeed, it was probably anti-Imperialistic according to the view above.
I imagine that the opinion being characterised above is that the United States is the global hegemon, therefore anything strengthening the US-led world order is imperialistic, and vice versa, even if it involves instances of oppression. If you believe that, then the British Empire was the hegemon of its time, and so the EIC was imperialistic.
So the moment that the British Empire wasn't a hegemon.....? Definitely behind the USSR after 1945, for example.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
By duff I mean "disappointing" - not corked or oxidised
I am clearly a risk taker and explorer by nature, and trying new wines is a small subset of that character trait... But you also make a fair point that this is relative to how much you drink. I get through a bottle a night, almost unfailingly. If i have a rubbish bottle I bin it there and then and have another
If you drink more rarely then I guess you want to be really sure it will be good?
But I think we have exhausted this debate, for now. You know what you like and stick to it, and it makes you happy, and fair enough!
ABBA Voyage doing its best to infuriate Lozza Fox and Nige:
"Please do not wear so-called ‘Afro’ wigs These wigs are culturally insensitive and not appropriate to be worn as fancy dress. If any guests are wearing this style of wig they will be respectfully asked to remove them as a condition of entry to the arena."
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
Just to point out there is a world of difference between Ethiopian and Georgian wines. The firmer are no doubt very pleasant but very low volume novelties. The latter is the oldest wine making country in the world and a global viticultural giant.
20th largest producer in the world, growing in double digits per year and with huge variety and (mainly) high quality as well as dozens of indigenous varieties.
There’s actually a fully functioning Georgian winery as an annex of Plumpton viticulture college. It’s part of the degree curriculum.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
Taking the wider view, one of the big mysteries about the current political environment is how the Tories - and the wider right - came to see what should be the pride of our nation - the NHS, the BBC, the Royal Mail, our judiciary, our internationally respected civil service, the National Trust - as the enemy within? What precisely is it that the ‘Conservative’ Party intends to conserve?
The only one of those to be privatised, the Royal Mail, was done by Vince Cable, an ideological classical liberal like BartholomewRoberts when he was Business Secretary.
None of those have been privatised by a Conservative Cabinet Minister, the National Trust is a charity and the aim of conservatives there like with the BBC and civil service and judiciary is to ensure they don't become too Woke
All good except for the absence of an answer to the question.
The answer is the Tory Party has conserved all of them, even Royal Mail was privatised by a Liberal Democrat not a Tory
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
A question. A relative runs a business supplying materials for the construction industry on a same day courier basis in London. Your site is out of concrete sawing blades - get them in an hour, rather than send a guy in a van etc...
He naturally uses couriers who are local to the areas he covers, who specialise in on spec rapid delivery.
How would you differentiate, if at all, for such businesses?
Simple If you company offers delivery services beyond x% of the country - it needs to provide the service to the entire country.
Then you would rapidly find that services would be setup that carefully do x%-0.00000000001% of the country.
So you set the percentage so low that it's not an issue - say 10% or so. That's enough to allow your relative to run services exclusively in London but not enough to allow DPD and co to escape the new rules.
Then you'll find a lot of couriers covering 9.9999999% of the country. One DPD subsidiary per county, perhaps.
In reference to an earlier discussion, I find it useful to distinguish between the private realm and the public sphere.
In the private realm, loads of people are leading very prosperous lives. Posh restaurants are heaving, expensive cars are everywhere, expensive holidays are de rigueur, people pay large sums to watch football, cricket, music or whatever, and many people have money to burn. We are a rich country (albeit with too many poor people).
By contrast, the public sphere is severely dilapidated. Streets are dirty and unkempt, many public services are in disarray, and councils (in particular) and other public authorities don't have the money to make significant improvements. The public sphere is a total mess.
I'd like to see a political party make a serious pitch for restoring civic pride; to restore the balance between the public and the private. A slightly old-fashioned concept, perhaps. But wouldn't it be great if we could be really proud of the public sphere: proud of our neighbourhoods (streets, pavements, parks, graffiti-free buildings and so on), and proud of the services (buses, trains, hospitals, care for the elderly and so on) that we all rely on?
Absolutely. Probably a topic left right and centre can all agree on.
As someone pointed out upthread provincial France does it extremely well.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Interesting. I wonder what the strike rate is in terms of enjoyment or good/bad - 7/10? 8/10? And what if you have a dp and want to give everyone the same wine for example.
I can't be doing with the faff or uncertainty. Plus if you want diversity then you find plenty within the Old World regions with imo more reliability. But as I said it sounds like a fun approach and if you are enjoying it then I would never gainsay the pleasure it gives you.
I buy mixed cases selected personally from Naked Wines as well. As per Leon I enjoy it , sometimes hit and miss but makes it very interesting and usually they match the reviews.
As I said good for you. If I like a wine I like to have a case or two of it and I can't be doing with the odd bottle here and there. Plus "sometimes hit and miss" for the amount I drink (a lot less and more discerningly than years ago) is a huge waste of money.
The big divide between middle-aged wine drinkers is between whose who merely seek familiarity and those who seek variety.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
We've had a couple of "What the hell is this?" moments with our veg box over the years.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
Just to point out there is a world of difference between Ethiopian and Georgian wines. The firmer are no doubt very pleasant but very low volume novelties. The latter is the oldest wine making country in the world and a global viticultural giant.
20th largest producer in the world, growing in double digits per year and with huge variety and (mainly) high quality as well as dozens of indigenous varieties.
There’s actually a fully functioning Georgian winery as an annex of Plumpton viticulture college. It’s part of the degree curriculum.
Thank you for the correction/elaboration.
And is their national grape the pzytziskia?
The two biggest ones are Saperavi for red and Rkatsiteli for white.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
We certainly should be doing more to support our rural areas. Many villages don't even have a village shop now, let alone a pub or post office. Some don't even have a church either, or at least one with services more than once a month.
The universal service is one of the few things we have that ensures people living in rural areas get the same service as those living in cities and big towns, with parcels delivered at the same cost
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
By duff I mean "disappointing" - not corked or oxidised
I am clearly a risk taker and explorer by nature, and trying new wines is a small subset of that character trait... But you also make a fair point that this is relative to how much you drink. I get through a bottle a night, almost unfailingly. If i have a rubbish bottle I bin it there and then and have another
If you drink more rarely then I guess you want to be really sure it will be good?
But I think we have exhausted this debate, for now. You know what you like and stick to it, and it makes you happy, and fair enough!
Yes I think that is right. And as I said, getting rid of up to a bottle a night seems quite wasteful but again you are right each to their own. Long may you continue to explore. Until you acquiesce and end up with 85% claret and white burgundy like the rest of us.
Comments
But yes, to some people "imperialist" is simply a synonym for Western. Same as "Nazi" to many Russians is just a synonym for Europeans who are military enemies of Russia.
I can't be doing with the faff or uncertainty. Plus if you want diversity then you find plenty within the Old World regions with imo more reliability. But as I said it sounds like a fun approach and if you are enjoying it then I would never gainsay the pleasure it gives you.
The food is largely out of tins, with some local meat. But it's fine. You're in one of the most jaw-dropping places on earth. The one destination where the overnight heat is tiring is at the foot of Erta Ale volcano. Might not go below 30C all night. Yuk
But then at the top is the lava lake
A privatised system, with competition, is so much better, I was told.
The problem, as I've mentioned before, is what do you do about sub-national delivery organisations? Declare them illegal? Seems a bit hard on the bike messenger guys....
UnHerd"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ujMKUrYlM4
Doubt he'd be saying that now.
I wonder where we would be now had NATO acted differently back then.
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Days_Are_Here_Again
"Closely associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt's successful presidential campaign in 1932, the song gained prominence after a spontaneous decision by Roosevelt's advisers to play it at the 1932 Democratic National Convention: after a dirge-like version of Roosevelt's favorite song "Anchors Aweigh" had been repeated over and over, without enthusiasm, a participant reportedly shouted: "FOR GOD'S SAKE, HAVE THEM PLAY SOMETHING ELSE", which caused the band to play the new song, drawing cheers and applause, and subsequently becoming the Democratic Party's "unofficial theme song for years to come."
"The song is also associated with the Repeal of Prohibition, which occurred shortly after Roosevelt's election where there were signs saying "Happy days are beer again" and so on."
SSI - Note that FDR was Assistant Navy Secretary during WW1 and that "Anchors Away" is the football fight song of US Naval Academy.
Version that I recall, was that the person who said to "play something else" was FDR's master strategist Louis Howe, who was listening to convention proceedings in Roosevelt's hotel suite.
Anyway "Happy Days Are Here Again" was an inspired choice for 1932 campaign, as it encapsulated Roosevelt's positive, upbeat message of hope, in contrast to Hoovers continued doom & gloom.
Boris would have been better at managing this cost of living crisis and associated strikes than out of touch greenhorn Sunak.
Perhaps all those type of people will think themselves to be very independent in their thinking. Most sentient human beings will just regard them as complete twats.
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
With cars getting ever safer, kids need a bit of danger on their walk to school. What better way to introduce it than via wandering wolves?
As an aside. If you live in Westhill, 6 miles from Aberdeen city centre, you officially live in Highlands and Islands and will pay up to 10 times the normal rate for deliveries with some courier firms. For this reason many smaller companies simply will not deliver to those areas.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
That corner of Ethiopia is in my top five most astonishing, compelling places I have ever been. It's not as dangerous as everyone says (sure, it is risky, but tourists go there unharmed all the time)
What's more, it is cheap, Once you are in Ethiopia a local tour op will take you all over the Danakil and Afar for £500a head. Sadly, flights to Addis from the UK are more problematic at the moment
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
Indeed, it was probably anti-Imperialistic according to the view above.
Anthony Eden.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?525065-1/opening-118th-congress-election-house-speaker
Hoban 'Wash' Washburn: Start with the part where Jayne gets knocked out by a 90-pound girl 'cause... I don't think that's ever getting old.
It's a different business, and it's not one where I see the need to treat it as critical national infrastructure in the way you would the water and sewerage system, or the letters post was in the days before email (or arguably phone).
None of those have been privatised by a Conservative Cabinet Minister, the National Trust is a charity and the aim of conservatives there like with the BBC and civil service and judiciary is to ensure they don't become too Woke
The other non-war terminology we’ve grown accustomed to since the 1990s is “air strikes”. To be fair this was generally a factually correct description.
Shocking how one person's lies can cause so much misery to a town. It appears that Barrow isn't in fact home to a grooming gang, just a sad fantasist and a lot of people willing and ready to sign up to a witch hunt.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
It still looks on. A week of sub zero maxima and very cold nights starting on Saturday.
Add to this an increasing number of large scale rocket attacks on Russian troop concentrations and ammo dumps, and apparently some build up of UAF around Kremmina.
Time will tell.
People who live only six miles from Aberdeen can mostly cycle* in to Aberdeen to pick their stuff up - as I'm sure they do for most of their groceries, clothes, etc.
Lots of businesses organise their own logistics, either in house or with companies set up to provide a cheap/efficient/reliable/fast service, depending on the business priority. I don't see why this requires a state service.
Back in the day there would have been people who couldn't read or write, and so couldn't take advantage of the new national post system. Mostly they would find someone who was literate to help them with that, rather than to insist that the old means of communication - of town criers, and bards, etc - were retained for their benefit.
* Or drive, I guess.
The anachronism is that Royal Mail deals with packets while its Parcelforce subsidiary handles parcels. I doubt anyone who hasn’t worked for the company knows the difference.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
He naturally uses couriers who are local to the areas he covers, who specialise in on spec rapid delivery.
How would you differentiate, if at all, for such businesses?
But it's a particularly grim start to the year for Tesla - down 13% to its lowest sine Aug 2020. Elon Musk's company has lost 75% of its market value in barely over a year. https://twitter.com/ReutersJamie/status/1610316321148878856/photo/1
parcels to remote rural areas compared to the inner city. It is vital for rural areas, another reason why I am a conservative not a classical liberal
Though I have been a bit sad to see new roadworks happening and as close to zero cycling taken into account. A whole new road bridge was put in recently and the only bike aspect is a little gap in the middle with an arrow that suggests if you're on a bike and feel like swerving through the traffic to get there - you can f*ck right off in that direction.
It should be a legal requirement that whoever is doing national deliveries is made to charge the same amount where-ever they are delivering to within the British Isles. If they choose not to do that then they should not be allowed to operate. Cherry picking the most profitable parts of the delivery system and leaving large numbers of people without any effective system is something that should be prevented by regulation. Force companies to operate responsibly or not at all.
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
The clip on this page gives some indication of how fucking amazing the show is.
https://abbavoyage.com/theconcert/
In the private realm, loads of people are leading very prosperous lives. Posh restaurants are heaving, expensive cars are everywhere, expensive holidays are de rigueur, people pay large sums to watch football, cricket, music or whatever, and many people have money to burn. We are a rich country (albeit with too many poor people).
By contrast, the public sphere is severely dilapidated. Streets are dirty and unkempt, many public services are in disarray, and councils (in particular) and other public authorities don't have the money to make significant improvements. The public sphere is a total mess.
I'd like to see a political party make a serious pitch for restoring civic pride; to restore the balance between the public and the private. A slightly old-fashioned concept, perhaps. But wouldn't it be great if we could be really proud of the public sphere: proud of our neighbourhoods (streets, pavements, parks, graffiti-free buildings and so on), and proud of the services (buses, trains, hospitals, care for the elderly and so on) that we all rely on?
This has been an issue for 10+ years but it's now going to be impossible to fix because Truss removed the tax revenue (NI) that was supposed to provide the funds to fix some of it.
20th largest producer in the world, growing in double digits per year and with huge variety and (mainly) high quality as well as dozens of indigenous varieties.
There’s actually a fully functioning Georgian winery as an annex of Plumpton viticulture college. It’s part of the degree curriculum.
Well: 15%
Badly: 77%
Net: -62
This is significantly better than before Sunak took over (when it was -84!) but with just 27% of 2019 Tory voters saying the Government is doing well on this issue, you can see why the 20 point polling deficits sustain. https://twitter.com/JMagosh/status/1610313959625863168/photo/1
I am clearly a risk taker and explorer by nature, and trying new wines is a small subset of that character trait... But you also make a fair point that this is relative to how much you drink. I get through a bottle a night, almost unfailingly. If i have a rubbish bottle I bin it there and then and have another
If you drink more rarely then I guess you want to be really sure it will be good?
But I think we have exhausted this debate, for now. You know what you like and stick to it, and it makes you happy, and fair enough!
"Please do not wear so-called ‘Afro’ wigs
These wigs are culturally insensitive and not appropriate to be worn as fancy dress. If any guests are wearing this style of wig they will be respectfully asked to remove them as a condition of entry to the arena."
And is their national grape the pzytziskia?
As someone pointed out upthread provincial France does it extremely well.
The universal service is one of the few things we have that ensures people living in rural areas get the same service as those living in cities and big towns, with parcels delivered at the same cost
Westminster VI (2-3 Jan):
Labour 47% (+1)
Conservative 27% (-2)
Liberal Democrat 12% (+3)
Reform UK 5% (-2)
SNP 4% (+1)
Green 3% (-2)
Other 1% (-1)
Changes +/- 11 Dec
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-2-3-january-2023 https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1610320080713179138/photo/1