Six Disputable Truths

1. Pre-mixed doubles taste horrible

I was ill recently with a stomach bug and found myself struggling through the work day, so I decided to get some fresh air, or as fresh air as it’s possible to get within the City. I needed to send some letters, so made my way to a Post Office counter in the Spar mini-market on Moorgate. Though handy, it’s not really equipped to deal with the number of people wanting to send things during their lunch break, and so the queues in there are often painfully long. Helpfully, to counter this, they have set up an extra till which you can use if you have three items or less to post, the aim being to get quick transactions out of the shop quickly. To get there you have to queue alongside the chilled drinks cabinets, which, bearing in mind that I was alternately shivering and nauseous, wasn’t a part of the shop that I was especially pleased to be standing near.

My gaze alighted upon something I’d never seen before, and which made me feel even more crook than I was before – pre-mixed doubles cocktails. On face value, this is quite a brave innovation, especially in these torrid days of binge-drinking, but not necessarily one that should be applauded.

The very concept of buying a pre-mixed drink should be abhorrent to anyone who actually enjoys making cocktails, where a considerable amount of passion, energy and often experimentation is put into making the perfect drink; to buy it pre-mixed defeats the object entirely, but I suppose is entirely in keeping with the ‘get it now’ culture in which we live. In any case, the drinks on sale in this range were made with the cheapest sort of alternatives to high quality spirits you can imagine, the types of bottles you see behind the bar on package holidays or the own-brands you see in supermarkets. For example, the vodka and tonic bottle was made with a brand of vodka nobody would have ever heard of, but it was labelled with a Russian-sounding name to lend some degree of authenticity to it; similarly the whiskey and dry ginger had the name of a Scottish distillery that I’m sure can’t exist (MacPisshead or something like that), again designed to evoke a sense of genuine provenance. Only Beefeater, surely one of the least inspiring gins available, was a recognisable brand, but that says a lot about Beefeater – can you imagine Tanqueray or Bombay Sapphire attaching themselves to such a ghastly product?

The following week, with my health restored, I found myself at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham to watch Kings of Leon. It is a pre-concert ritual that my wife will order a Bacardi and Diet Coke; fine, except that at the NIA they don’t serve spirits by measure, and to my horror I found that they only sold the very same brand of mixed doubles that I’d seen in Spar the week before. She ordered one anyway, an imaginatively named ‘White Rum And Coke’ – I’m not even sure they’d bothered to invent a suitably Jamaican-influenced brand here – and one sip was all it took to confirm what I thought would be the case – it tasted horrible. She grimaced, swallowed grimly and uttered a disappointed ‘Yuck,’ before offloading it on to me.

And it really was disgusting. The white rum tasted faintly of chemicals, whereas the mixer was flat and over-sweet, like the Panda Coke from my youth. All I can say is that if you find yourself faced with pre-mixed drinks over nothing at all, go for the latter. Save the money and put it towards a decent cocktails book, an ice-cube tray and a Boston shaker. Your taste buds and liver will appreciate it far more.

2. How long is forever?

At first, that enquiry looks quite a deep one, one upon which you could ruminate and ponder and come up with many differing answers. But, dear reader, there is no need, for I have the answer for you already.

The answer to the question is eighty hours.

I know this to be true because the squeaky-voiced shop assistant at the Molton Brown store at the Royal Exchange said so. And who am I to doubt her?

I was buying a candle for my wife (more accurately, I was buying a ‘candella’ according to the box, but I sense that may be a made-up word; merely describing it as a candle would somehow undermine its additional qualities, I guess), a great big, heavy thing in a glass vase, which set me back nearly £50. I typically feel a bit of an idiot in these types of shops, and this wasn’t aided by my card being declined, but mostly I just want to pay my money and get the hell out of there. Not so on this day – the aforementioned and wizened shop assistant started talking to me and telling me how nice the candle was while she was gift-wrapping it, and I was powerless but to listen.

She proceeded to tell me that the burn time of the candle was eighty hours, and without any sense of irony, told me that this ‘Basically means it will last forever.’ All of which is quite depressing. I had visions of the sun taking many more millennia to implode, but it seems that popular wisdom and scientific theory got it wrong; there is no such thing as infinity, and forever is just eighty hours long. I’m reluctant to let my wife light the damn thing in case she puts in motion the end of our days.

3. Dark forces are at work at eBay

I’ve been an eBay user for many years. I have an untainted feedback rating as both a seller and a buyer, and I’ll always try and sell something before handing it into the charity shop – yes, I really am that mean-spirited, and I don’t even feel compelled to apologise. But for some time I have suspected something a teensy bit fishy about eBay.

Being ever more the precious commodity, I have barely any time to stick unwanted items on eBay these days. But when I do, a very curious pattern emerges, which has given rise to my belief that something is afoot.

What happens is that I list a couple of items just to get back into the swing of using eBay again, and invariably those items will sell. The following week, I’ll try and sell some more things, and they will also sell. Buoyed by this success and my burgeoning PayPal account balance, I’ll then go hell for leather the following week and list about ten or fifteen things and… none of them sell at all.

I therefore believe that eBay plants phoney sellers who buy up your items until you decide to load on a high number of items; they then expose your item to the general eBay public, collect their listing fees from you and allow none of your items to sell. Bastards.

4. Pregnant women on the Tube do predictable things

My wife having been pregnant twice, I have developed a sense of how pregnant women think. I appreciate that this is something of a bold statement for a mere male to make, but it’s true. Especially the second time around, you develop an understanding of what your partner is thinking; for example, she looks pensive, you ask what’s wrong, she says ‘Nothing,’ and you know she’s lying, so you ask her again and she tells you that she’s worried about the birth, how she’s going to cope etc. That sort of thing.

I was stood on the Tube the other day and saw a pregnant woman sat nearby. At Angel, another pregnant woman got on. I watched as the first woman instinctively started rubbing her bump, and also looking to see how far gone the other woman was. The other woman, when the first woman had started looking elsewhere, also checked out the size of her bump, mentally working out how advanced she was compared to her. They then take it in turns to look for signs of stress or fatigue in the other’s face, as if trying to gauge whether they’re coping better than she is, looking panicked, calm or otherwise.

At Angel, a woman got on the train with a buggy. Somewhat predictably, both women scanned the face of the mother, I’d guess for some sort of positive signal that having a child isn’t actually as stressful as they perhaps fear it might be. They then turn their attentions to the child. Is he well-behaved? Screaming blue murder? Causing his mother to tear her hair out? This lady got off at Kings Cross and both pregnant women went back to stroking their respective bumps ruminatively.

5. People in queues are rude

Or, more accurately, people in queues who’ve never worked behind a counter are rude. I queued up at my local rail station last night to get my season ticket re-printed, having put it next to my BlackBerry for about two minutes, thus erasing it.

There were no more than three people behind me when I was stood at the head of the queue, and things were moving quite quickly. Like most places, like banks or Post Offices, at our station we have a display that announces which cashier is free. A woman moved away from the till position where she was buying a ticket, so I waited patiently for the display to call me forward to the now-vacant till position.

I swear I was stood there for no more than ten seconds when a woman behind me said ‘Excuse me,’ and, with a face like thunder, pointed toward the free till position, motioning me to get a move on. I grunted a sarcastic thanks and tut-tutted my way to the till, almost feeling the need to apologise to the cashier.

Earlier in my career, I worked behind the counter of one of the busiest branches of the bank I work for and so I have some appreciation of what it’s like. One of the things that used to annoy me most was customers coming up to your till before you’ve called them. The few seconds between finishing with one customer and serving the next can be absolutely invaluable for catching a breath, putting away the paperwork from the previous customer or taking a sip from a glass of water. Having worked in that environment, I have the ultimate sympathy and wish everyone could afford the cashier the same courtesy that I’m able to.

6. Products made by Worlds Apart are rubbish

For our eldest daughter’s second birthday, we bought her a pop-up In The Night Garden gazebo, made by Cornish-based firm Worlds Apart. For the same birthday, continuing the Night Garden theme, my parents bought her a pop-up Ninky Nonk. (Apologies to those not familiar with the specifics of Night Garden; trust me, you’re not missing much.)

We’re familiar with the supposedly award-winning products of Worlds Apart, since we bought a pop-up tent made by them a few years ago which fitted neatly into our smallest suitcase. It simply pops up into the shape it should when you take it out of its bag, and a few twists and folds returns it into the bag. Easy, simple and innovative.

The Night Garden stuff less so. The Ninky Nonk included several different parts, each modelled on carriages of the annoying train from the TV programme. I swear that none of them have ever gone back up to their folded state. As for the Gazebo, don’t even get me started. You need a team of builders or structural engineers to erect that. Twice I’ve thrown the pieces back in the shed in a rage, and only once have I successfully built it; when I did it took twenty minutes and then it rained, or Seren said she didn’t like it; one of the two.

I thought the Gazebo was the worst thing made by Worlds Apart we’d bought. That was until we purchased the Upsy Daisy / Iggle Piggle ‘alarm clock’. I use the inverted commas, because it doesn’t exactly behave like any alarm clock I’ve ever owned.

Basically, it’s designed to train your children when night stops and day starts. During the day the clock face shows Upsy Daisy whereas at night Iggle Piggle comes out and a night light comes on. Sounds perfect, were it not for a few flaws.

Firstly, this ‘clock’ has no hands. Yep, that’s right. A clock with no hands. Instead, you have to set the time using a little marker on the outside edge of the clock face, and as there’s only one you have to guess that you have pointed it at the right time (it does have numerals, which I suppose is a good thing). Similarly, you have to set the alarm with a single marker, except that this marker – designed to look like the Pinky Ponk from Night Garden – is quite wide, and so you don’t really know if it’s pointing at the desired time or not. Not great so far.

The worst thing, apart from the fact that it somehow requires four batteries (what alarm clock do you know that needs four batteries?) is that it is an abysmal timekeeper. The alarm seems to go off at a totally different time each day with no predictability at all. Given that the primary purpose of this alarm clock is to train your child to wake up at the same time each day, that seems like a major flaw to me. It seems to have a mind of its own, and I don’t know how many times we’ve heard Seren from her bedroom saying ‘Look mummy, Upsy Daisy’s come out!’ twenty minutes before it should have done.

Take my advice, buy a traditional alarm clock and while you’re at it, join me in boycotting products from Worlds Apart.