A net gain

I know - that's a really crap pun, but I got my fishing nets back. The guilty party had, it seems, simply slung them into the garden behind ours but they were near enough behind a shed (ironically enough) so I didn't see them until they were moved. I went round to get them this evening and it turns out the house owner is the same kind soul who, when they spotted the shed being broken into first time round, rang Plod and told them where to catch a tea leaf red-handed. Which they did.

However, this chap told me this evening that the police couldn't actually prosecute him. "Why not?" I asked, a not unreasonable question given that he was caught bang to rights. Apparently, despite the fact that this chap saw it happen and the police caught the light-fingered git with the stolen bike, they could not prosecute because there was only one witness. I was utterly astounded: What the hell is the point of having a court system when it won't prosecute because the crime wasn't witnessed by two priests, a JP and several sober citizens of good standing? It's absolutely ludicrous. This means that anyone can burgle, rob and generally be a pain in the arse and it won't matter if someone sees them or even if Plod catch them with their ill-gotten gains because you won't get prosecuted if only one person saw you. Completely crackers.

So, after being banged up for Christmas (some small justice at least as it meant he couldn't go and pinch some poor kids Christmas present to exchange for a small amount of skag cut with oven cleaner) he was turfed out onto the streets to carry on being an anti-social menace. Don't you just love how the law really works to protect us from criminal activity? It's no wonder so many coppers now have well-read blogs because it's the only way they can vent their total frustration with a system ill-prepared to cope with any actual crime fighting and entirely centred around being culturally aware, being able to spot a diversity (whatever that is) and generating vast amounts of paper in order to prove that crime rates are falling thanks to the latest government fiddle. I mean initiative.

Marvellous. Well, thank you and goodnight.

Listening to: The Rakes - 22 Grand Job

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Why should I put up with this?

I have just come back from a weekend away and after a long but comfortable drive I had had it in mind to write something about cars and such like. Sadly, when I got home I found out that our shed has been broken into for the second time in 3 months. Somehow, I no longer feel like talking about cars.

Several things, apart from the obvious, piss me off about this. For a kick off, there are several other sheds in the gardens around mine, all of them just as accessible as mine and probably with more stuff in them so why was mine targeted? Not that I'd wish it on my neighbours but why mine? To get to it you have to walk down a muddy alley way between the backs of two rows of houses and it's the last (and most exposed) shed of the lot so why pick it?

Next up, there is a window in the shed so you can see that the only things in it are some old tiles, a cheap mower and my old fishing gear so again, why bother breaking in? There is nothing worth stealing.

Thirdly, I live in a nice area. It's not a slum or rough in any way. In fact it's quite cosmopolitan with a range of people from students to pensioners covering professionals, families and so on. Where are these scumbags coming from? It's true that Bath has a lot of skag heads about but this is a pretty low-crime area.

The other things that annoy me about this: My housemates were in all night last night so the prick who did it did so with no regard to being caught. There is no point telling the Police because whilst I'm sure they'll come round and we'll get a crime number, there's not a lot they can really do about it unless we catch the fucker in the act and even then we have to rely on them getting here in time (although they did last time and caught the scrote red-handed so much kudos to my local constabulary for that. Sadly, he probably got a mild ticking off by the magistrate and told not to do it again and I strongly suspect that in fact it was the same contemptuous little turd who came back this time). The only thing this feckless shit actually succeeded in doing was to throw our cheapo mower out onto the lawn, break the door, rip a corner column from a set of cheap wooden shelves in the shed and throw it into the back alley and, it would appear, steal my net bag. This bag contained my landing and keep nets for fishing and frankly, they smell a bit rough, are covered in crap and are worth precisely fuck all so exactly what was the point of this other than mindless vandalism?

Whoever it was did drop their cigarette lighter but I don't think Old Bill are likely to want to fingerprint it. I am sick and tired of the ignorant attitude of these miserable, parasitic arseholes who know full well that they can do as they please and get away with it and it is the law abiding portion of society who, as usual, suffer. If I caught whoever it was at it, I would quite frankly beat them senseless because I have a relatively short fuse for this sort of thing and I would not hesitate to exact my revenge but of course then I'd be the one getting locked up (although I imagine that I could argue that I felt threatened and had used reasonable force to defend myself but it is a system that is totally stacked in favour of the thieving cretin. Perhaps if we were actually allowed to give these turds the hiding they so richly deserve they might think twice about doing it in the first place. Who knows?)

I'm sure there are plenty of liberals, social workers and other feeble minded morons who would say that it wasn't the perp's fault and it was all down to their upbringing. Well that's bullshit. You have to completely retarded to not know that stealing is wrong and illegal and they know full well what they're doing. This liberal mumbo-jumbo horseshit that says we should be nice to criminals has been proven not to work because we have more petty crime than ever before. Thieving pikeys know only too well that the criminal justice system will do no more than give them a bit of a telling off and that even if they do get sentenced to a week in jail, or whatever ludicrous sentence is handed out, it'll be a doddle. They'll have access to TV, porn, pool tables, gyms, the lot, all paid for by John Q Taxpayer, so we get arse fucked twice: Once when they steal, vandalise and otherwise harass us and then a second time when they live the life of Riley at our expense in a holiday camp.

Now, I am just livid and the worst thing is I know that there is not a damn thing I can do about it. Why should I go out and work my arse off, as I have done for years, so that I can enjoy the fruits of my labours only to have some rat boy, who is no doubt doing very nicely out of the benefits system once again at our expense, come and steal and vandalise my stuff and for me to have no recourse whatsoever? Can you tell me how it is that that seems like a fair system? Can anyone explain why it is that I should have to stand by and watch as petty thieves, junkies and junior yobs run riot without any respect for anyone or anything especially the rule of law or a fear of the consequences? No, thought not.

For me, our current government embodies everything I hate and despise about this country with it's slimy, lying, ineffectual policies and the total inability to actually do something positive for the vast majority of law abiding ordinary citizens. I used to vote Tory in the nineties but then once Major was outed I stopped because what was left was an assortment of half-arsed idiots who I wouldn't have trusted to sit on the toilet the right way round. I moved to the Lib Dems but then Paddy Ashdown left and they became a joke party who might as well have their underpants on their heads because they certainly couldn't muster up enough gumption to make a decent fist of running the country, or indeed any policies that made any sense.

So where does that leave me? I suppose, given my rant here about idiotic liberal policies and leftist social workers I should be heading back to the right of centre (quite some way right of centre in terms of the criminal justice system) but I can't bring myself to vote Tory again. David Cameron? Please, the man is nothing more than a chinless, braying ex-public school yahoo with nary a decent idea in his head. The Tories have this notion that if they have younger cabinet members then somehow it makes them more relevant and electable, but the idea of George Osborne and Oliver Letwin having any kind of power scares me silly because they're just as smarmy, moronic and self-interested as Cameron and indeed the Blair government.

No, I think what this country needs is a return to real fire and brimstone politicians who mean what they say, do what they say they're going to do and don't fanny about with these idiotic bureaucratic measures that just cripple our public services and the country in general. While I have never been a fan of the left nor of the unions I would have voted for Labour with John Smith at the helm without hesitation because the man was a direct thinker and had a no-bullshit approach to politics. Politics doesn't need the smarm and the media whoring - it needs integrity and common bloody sense.

It's worth remembering that left wing governments have done some good things in the past (there have also been some which were diabolical and made a mess of the country but that applies to the right as well). The NHS is one example that springs to mind, and once upon a time, they would have been just as tough on criminals as the right wing governments. Why on earth do we have to be driven by bleeding heart liberals now? Screw the Human Rights Act - if you commit a criminal act worthy of serious punishment then you have suspended any entitlement you might have had to anything more than the basic requirements of life because in committing a crime, you have most likely denied the rights of someone else. Get used to it. Not that I'd advocate a return to Victorian conditions but TV's in cells? Sorry but why should I pay to provide that? I would happily pay for effective drug rehabilitation schemes, education and the like but if you won't play ball then you should be shackled into a chain gang and made to break rocks and then locked into your cell whenever you're not breaking rocks. As for anyone caught with drugs in jail or smuggling them in or distributing them, they should be immediately placed in solitary for a long time because they have no right to fuck up someone else's chances of being rehabilitated.

Prison is about two things: Punishment and rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is not achieved by being soft. It is achieved by being strict, instilling discipline, respect and pride. Getting someone off drugs and getting them some education and maybe training so that they can become a useful member of society - that's rehabilitation, but pandering to the whims of recidivist scum is not punishment. Nor are the pitiful sentences handed out these days.

Anyway, I could go on about this for a very long time now that I'm fired up, and indeed I already have but it would be rather pointless - I have have put my point across now and would only be raking over the coals of many other columnists who are better writers than I or who are directly involved with criminal justice such as David Copperfield (who has both those bases covered), so I'll pack it in before I become too bitter or start foaming at the mouth.

Until next time readers (all three of you: Big up to Amanda, Andy and Rob).

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Giggletasticmungus!

Right now I'm far too busy being excited about my shiny new (well, newish) car to rant about anything or be serious so instead, might I direct you to a very funny website instead? I will just say that if you're easily offended or even slightly more hardened to naughty words than that, you might just find Cunts Corner a bit much. But it's fucking funny. No, really - it usually makes me laugh out loud and that's no mean feat I can tell you.

I'd forgotten allabout this site until the other day and I can't for the life of me remember what brought it to mind, but it was originally shown to me by an ex-girlfriend (who turned out to be a right mentalist, by the way) and it just gets better and better.

Enjoy!

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And now for something...

...a bit different. My regular readers (all three of you) have been subjected to some quite lengthy rants of late so here's a short post for you.

I think this is called karma.

Some amusing guff from someone who, it is safe to say, is not a PS3 fan.

And finally, if you're a cat lover, you will probably find yourself secretly admitting to yourself that you really are like this.

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It's not my fault.

For quite some time now I've been reading the Coppers Blog which, in case you're not aware, is written by a serving British police constable under the nom de plume of PC David Copperfield. I can't remember where I found out about it (probably The Register or something like that) but it struck a chord instantly. Maybe it was the fact that at last there was some evidence that there was still some common sense left at the front line of policing as opposed to the vacuous political posturing that oozes from the upper echelons of the police force, or maybe it was that I share many of views on crime and punishment, chief amongst which is the belief that prison should be a punishment and therefore a discouragement to recidivate. Whatever, I have always found him to be an excellent writer and I now follow his blog closely and I am reading the collected works of the blog in his book, Wasting Police Time.

One recurring theme, however, is the tendency towards a victim culture in the UK and today has probably seen the best set of examples that I can remember in the news. The base stories cover health issues, violence and yobbish behaviour, premium rate telephone 'scams' and I'm sure there was one other but I think three is enough for now.

Let start with the health story that a woman who weighs 42 stone (yes, thats 42 stone or 588lbs or 267.3kg if you prefer - more than a quarter of a metric tonne). She and her family had a moral duty to do something about this problem much, much earlier than now and yet they did not. Now she and they are trying to devolve all responsibility onto the health care system with an "It's not my faultW attitude. How is it not your fault? You don't get to be 42 stone by magic, it takes time and you're quite likely to notice that you can no longer walk. Which also means that her family are just as guilty because if she can't move then where is the supply of food coming from? Hmmm...let me think. Not only that, but the best part of £60,000 of public money was spent on an attempt to help her lose weight by attending the Priory clinic for three months, and indeed she did, but afterwards, she claims she received no support. Somehow I doubt that. I used to smoke. It's an addiction and pretty serious one at that, but it was no ones fault but my own that I had it and I did not expect everyone else to do the leg work in getting me off the fags. I had to do it myself because it was my personal responsibility to do so, but this kind of reasoning seems to have passed these people by.

But to cap it all, and what rankles most, is that a quick Google search shows that this woman has engaged the services of a publicist by the name of Jonathan Hartley. Why the hell does she need a publicist? My take would be that she's eaten herself into a corner, doesn't want to die (naturally enough) but frankly can't be bothered to accept the help available, believing instead that there is some sort of magic wand the NHS could wave if they so chose but that they are withholding it and that by hiring a publicist it will shame the NHS into using it. Absolutely absurd. And that's without mentioning the rather crass opportunism by the publicist who claims to have 'worked tirelessly', which I doubt very much indeed.

So, that's number one. Let's look at the next case study. It's the case of one Toni Comer, 20, of Sheffield. Here is someone who is gets utterly legless, ejected from a club for being aggressive and then resists arrest after she vandalises a doorman's car in revenge. Sorry, but if you're violent and aggressive and try to resist arrest vigorously like this then you have to expect the police to get a bit physical in order to subdue you (and she was apparently trying to turn the copper into a eunuch. Personally, I'd have done the same in his shoes and made damn sure she was cuffed ASAP by whatever method was necessary).

Somehow, she feels she is the innocent party in all this and was subject to police brutality. Not my fault guv, oh no. So it wasn't you who got steaming drunk, was violent and maliciously damaged a car then? Must have been someone else the magistrate found guilty, clearly. Worse still is that because the girl has mixed race parentage, a local race relations campaigner has stepped up claiming that this was an example of racism in the police. To be quite honest, when I saw the girl interviewed I would have said she looked a bit Mediterranean if anything but in a dark alley like the one this took place in, I doubt she looked much different from the next pissed up 20 year old townie trog. However, this simpleton race relations manager proceeded to liken the incident to the shameful Rodney King episode in LA in 1991. Quite apart from the very real possibility that this man had just slandered the officer on national television, it was an unhelpful and baseless accusation as he has no evidence for this whatsoever. If she had white parents would this fuss be here now? What if the officer was female? What if the officer was black? I doubt we would have half as much fuss about it.

And lastly we have something which relates to the story that all the British terrestrial channels have now suspended premium rate phone-ins after complaints and criticisms at the way they have been organised and run. BBC Radio One's evening news show, Newsbeat, featured a brief interview with a man whose phone bill ran to over £9,000. He seemed shocked that he was expected to pay this, claiming that the phone company should have cut him off rather than let him rack up a bill this size. I'm sorry, since when did it become your phone company's responsibility to stop you being a gullible moron and dialling premium rate numbers? Why should they be held responsible for your inability to think that you might not be able to afford to make thousands of calls to numbers which charge anything up to 60 or 70 pence each time you call? I have a vision of the man in my head and I'm guessing he doesn't work and watches daytime TV and is so monumentally thick that I'm surprised he hasn't forgotten how to breathe. Although I could be wrong. You'd have to be pretty bone headed not to see and hear the warnings about how much these phone-ins cost and that they charge you regardless of whether or not you get through.

Come on people. In all these cases YOU WERE AT FAULT. You cannot shift the blame elsewhere and claim it was all someone else's fault, you must accept responsibility for your actions, you spineless creatures. When will this country stop encouraging a cult of the victim by pandering to these idiotic liberal ideals that suggest that there's always some other reason for peoples actions and we shouldn't judge them? Yes we bloody well should! Just because health care is free it doesn't mean we can abuse it by not caring about our health until the last minute then accusing the NHS of not sorting out our problems for us. Our streets are crawling with plebs who know full well that if they want to commit some sort of crime then they are more or less free to dos o. the police are drowning in bureaucracy, the courts will let them off and in no time they'll be aback on the streets again free to do as they please.

Punishment should be there to discourage. Hard labour is something that would discourage. Being banged up with no home comforts would discourage. Being allowed to smoke where you want, when you want, have porn brought to you, watch TV and play pool is not a punishment, it's just something that tides over the boredom until you get out, and until prison is a suitable punishment and whilst we have these 'bleeding heart' liberals and social worker lefties insisting that they're all really nice people underneath (instead of the malignant sociopaths most of the rest of us know them to be) we will not have an effective criminal justice system. And, until we manage to instill a sense of social conscience back into people,we will also have more and more people complaining that the world has done them wrong and none of it is their fault and that everyone else should have done something about it. Well, sorry but you have no sympathy from me and I suspect the same goes for a pretty sizable amount of the general public. Grow up, take responsibility for yourself and stop wingeing. Then we might just take you seriously. After all, remember the boy who cried wolf? One day it really might not be your fault or a rogue copper really might go to town on you and who will believe you then?

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Corporations don't learn from mistakes...

...they just pretend they do. A few years ago, Sainsburys was doing very nicely. It had always been viewed as a slightly more superior supermarket than Tesco (although perhaps not quite as upmarket as Waitrose and, to some extent, Marks & Spencer) and all was rosy as the traditionally middle class market that Sainsburys attracted was affluent and willing to spend on premium products. But then it all started to go wrong. An incredibly stupid decision by Sainsburys back in November 2000 to outsource their IT to a large firm (Accenture) backfired when a new stock control system was a total disaster and left the shelves bare. I'm not going to talk about the evils of outsourcing, a triumph of hope over experience which many companies continue to do in the foolish belief that they really will get a better service for less money, because that could take up an entire book. No, I'm going to talk about how Sainsburys have tried to recover from the effects of this catastrophically stupid decision.

Obviously, after dropping such a huge bollock that they had to post their first ever loss, the first thing a big company has to do is blame someone and fire them and then hope like buggery that whoever they employ next manages to turn things around. Mind you, at least the next incumbent didn't have to worry about IT as the CEO, Justin King, announced a campaigned entitled Getting The Basics Right, the core of which was to hire an extra 3,000 shelf stackers. Since that time, there have been rumblings now and again about issues at Sainsburys: Losing market share, subsequent loss of revenue and so on and I can tell you why.

First off, I'll say that once upon a time I was a Tesco devotee. This is probably because I grew up in an are which Tesco had stitched up from top to bottom to the exclusion of any other big supermarkets (north Cambridge, if you're interested) and I, like many of my peers at school, had a Saturday job there. And it was pretty good too - the money was better than average, I enjoyed what I did, we got paid holiday and there was a good, subsidised canteen. However, after graduating and moving to south Birmingham I discovered that there was no easily accessible Tesco in my area (at least not a decent sized one) so I started to shop at Sainsburys. This was 1998 and I had been shopping at Sainsburys for the last year of my degree so I wasn't too bothered about where I got my food from so long as it wasn't Safeway (full of dole bludgers) or Kwik Save (so pikey, even the local winos wouldn't go in for cheap tramp juice).

When, a few years later, I moved to the South West (east Bristol), I had another choice to make. There was a giant Asda hypermarket more or less on the doorstep or I could drive a few miles to the nearest Sainsburys (again, no Tesco within a sensible distance although there are several decent sized ones in Bristol itself). Given that Asda was inhabited by obese, shuffling, dead-eyed chavs wearing velour leisure wear with inappropriate slogans like 'Active' or 'Sexy' plastered across their corpulent arses, Sainsburys was an instant winner. But I started to notice the supply issues soon after (not surprising as it was about this time that the board realised they just performed the impressively moronic trick of making a very large amount of money disappear into the pockets of incompetent and cretinous consultancy firms for next to fuck all result at the other end). This was all the more surprising since this particular store was almost literally within shouting distance (and by that I mean no more than half a mile) from a huge Sainsburys distribution centre and yet the shelves were regularly empty. After the embarrassing admissions, the sacrificial offering of the head of supply chain and lots of promises, I, like many others I guess, assumed that all would soon be well.

But no. Three years on and all is still not well. I have no idea if the company really did employ another 3,000 shelf stackers or not, but all the shelf stackers in the world will not help if you do not have the right products being delivered at the right time. Generally speaking I do my supermarket shopping on the way home from work as the store is only a short detour from my normal route home, so I'm usually there at about 6pm on a Monday or Tuesday. I can almost guarantee that I won't get several items because I shop at this time. I have been in on a normal Tuesday evening before now and there has been not one piece of fresh chicken on the shelves, no whole milk of any kind (and I personally prefer organic - something which I will come back to shortly). There's no point in looking for fresh bread and more often than not there will be at least one or two other items I intend to get that I can't. If this were the day or two before Christmas or Easter then perhaps it would be understandable, if not acceptable, as people do seem to buy obscenely large amount of food before these holidays and it must be tricky keeping the shelves full when the products are more or less taken straight off the pallets by the customers. But it isn't: This is an ordinary week night, so why is it that I can't get basic products like chicken, milk and fresh bread? The few staff that do seem to be around (maybe they didn't hire 3,000 extra staff after all) are all utterly gormless, disinterested and generally useless.

I mentioned organic milk for a reason. I prefer it to the rather bland homogenised pap that most people seem happy to buy but my beef here is that Sainsburys never, ever, have organic milk that isn't short dated. Tesco do. Asda do. even Morrisons do, so why the bloody hell can't Sainsburys manage it? And it's not just in my area. My sister, who lives in Northern Ireland, buys organic milk because it contains higher levels of Omega 3 fatty acids which is apparently good for the brain development of kids and she, her child minder and one of my cousins have all said, independently of each other, that they find the same problem with Sainsburys over there and they have to go to Tesco or Marks and Spencer's instead.

As if this wasn't enough there's then the issue of these new self-checkouts (maybe I should have been more wary of a Sainsburys IT project?). I have seen and used them in Tesco and Asda as well and they seem to be fine there, apart from the fact that most of the people who queue up in front of me to use them are the kind of morons who have problems with an on-off switch, so quite why they think they can operate one of these is a mystery. All they achieve is to slow down the whole process as they dither, generally make a hash of things or try and stuff their debit card into the receipt slot. The Only reason I use them is because it means I don't have to converse with a spotty, slack-jawed checkout monkey who stares at the keypad as I try to type in my PIN surreptitiously. However, Good old J Sainsbury & Co have taken things one step further.

Yesterday, a busy Saturday morning, two of the four checkouts were out of order. After waiting for the usual assortment of old people, students paying with shrapnel and dribbling idiots to clear off, it was my turn. First, I had to obtain a bag from the carelessly thrown stack on top of the machine, there because the assistant couldn't be arsed to put them in the packing area holders like they're supposed to. So, when I got one and put it on the holders so it would stay open, the machine instantly complained that there was an unexpected item in the packing area and sulkily refused to do anything more. I was sorely tempted to give it another unexpected item, only this time it would have been my size twelve boot at high speed. Instead, I kept my cool, the assistant finally pressed some sort of button and it graciously let me scan my shopping.

I found that: There was more than one kind of new potatoes in the system but only one kind had a picture. When it was selected however, it would ask me how many I had which clearly wasn't right. It seems that the right button was a cryptically named one with no image on it. Obviously. It whinged that I hadn't scanned things properly and that items weren't found. But best of all was the last item. I had bought a 9 roll pack (plus 3 free!) of Andrex which clearly isn't going to fit in a carrier bag or my rucksack, me having walked since it was a nice day I'm doing my bit to reduce my car usage. It scanned fine and there is an option on screen you can press to 'skip bagging', evidently for items such as this so that the till doesn't complain that it expected something in the bagging area but didn't see it (although this mystifies me: Why does it matter? If you've scanned it, you're paying for it so why should it complain if it doesn't go into the bagging area? Surely it is much more sensible to complain if something appears which wasn't scanned). Anyhoo, I pressed 'skip bagging' and proceeded to get my wallet out to pay when a big message flashed up on screen telling me that I needed store approval to skip bagging, despite already having skipped bagging for heavy items which were going in the rucksack without any complaint whatsoever. Store approval. For me to not try and put 12 rolls of bum rag in a carrier bag. Are you serious?

Apparently so. It would not let me pay until some operator had come over and said yes, that's OK. This is absolutely absurd. Why in the name of all that is sensible do I need to permission to not bag some bog roll? What's worse is that when I turned to the operator to get this done, she was deep in converstaion with two colleagues and a customer who had bought the wrong cream to make a cake with. It took three of them to try and decide that soured cream was defintiely the wrong choice and that she'd need something else. "No shit? Now could one of you mouth breathers come and press this damn button so I can get the hell out of here."* It would seem not as they then had to have a debate about which is the right cream while I stood there rapidly approaching the point when I am likely to chin someone, waiting to pay and with the queue getting bigger and bigger. Eventually some pustulant youth came over and grudginly stabbed a pudgy finger at some pictograms and swiped a dog-eared card which allowed me to pay and get the hell out of there.

So, the great 'mystery' as to why Sainsburys are losing custom can be summed up pretty simply: Poor service, poor availability of goods and unhelpful, surly and generally stupid staff. But it can't be hard to do; after all, Asda, Tesco, Morrisons and the rest manage all right and their staff are probably no better paid and have to wear equally repugnant uniforms and yet they mange to be helpful and they and their managers keep the shelves stocked with the right products. Sadly, I have little choice but to use Sainsburys, although I try and buy meat and veg from an excellent farm shop near my office and at weekends I try to make an effort to go to Waitrose who are by far and away the best quality supermarket with the best social conscience, if a little pricey. I also try and use farmers markets (the meat and veg is better from markets and small shops as supermarket veg is grown for shelf life, not flavour, and the meat is grown for big margins, not real quality). Until the day Sainsburys really grab the nettle and tackle these problems systematically and sensibly, they will continue to lose favour with the public. Maybe with talk of a takeover (after all, they are ripe for it) things will improve. I hope so because it would be a shame to lose such a big and once proud player.

Sorry this has turned out to be so long a post - I had no idea it would be such a diatribe, but supermarkets constantly irritate me and although I am doing what I can to give my business to alternative providers which helps cut down on the choke hold supermarkets have on the producers, I still have to use them from time to time so I think I have a right to expect decent service from them and I am therefore quite passionate about it. Anyway, if you've had particularly bad or good experiences with Sainsburys or any other chain, let me know (keep it clean please - no libellous stuff).

Listening to: Wes Straub - Insistence

* I didn't really say that, but I wanted to.

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