Sustained shopping

Just up the road is an organic food supermarket of the "Fresh and Wild" variety. Since my friend (no, not my only friend) no longer works there, I now feel free to make comment on the place.
Should a person enter this house of organicness, one can only feel dazed by the dreamy state of the regular shoppers, who seem to radiate social responsibility on a level which one hopes is not catching. These shoppers appear to feel safe in the knowledge that by shopping in an expensive grocers, they are doing their bit to save the world. In fact, they are a like a swarm of self righteous Sting's, from his save the rainforest days. Frightening to say the least.
As they leave, having paid prices that would make Waitrose blush (not easy), I wonder how closely they have looked at their shopping. Do they know that they have been handing their cash over to a multinational corporation, a California concern, full of concerned people with ridiculous job titles? This shop gives out an aura of being the socially responsible end of the supermarkets. This shop sells bottled water from Fiji! What are the food miles like on that? Water weighs 1kg per litre, lightweight and easy to transport it isn't. So why isn't this shop selling the stuff which comes out of the ground in this country?
You want to do good in your shopping? Buy organic if you want to, but more importantly, buy local. Go to the local farmers market if you can. If you go to Sainsbury's or Tesco's, don't buy those potatoes from Israel, they're wrecking the local environment out there and then being freighted all the way to your local shop. Buy the ones grown here. Harking back a good few years, the Buy British campaign is more poignant now than ever before. This time is about the food miles and doing good for more than just the economy. Think local.

Junk language

The English language is an ever changing and constantly evolving creature. The language we use now would be difficult for Shakespeare to grasp because so much has changed. Having said that, there are some routes which the language is testing which are frankly abhorrent. Why on earth do some people feel the need to use the word “like” all the time? For example, what does the phrase “I was, like, whatever” actually mean? It is utterly meaningless and instead of slimming down the language, as one might expect in the text message culture, it is adding unneccesary clutter to our daily speech.
This obsession with meaningless clutter is far reaching and becoming worse. We have accepted terminology for things which do not even exist. It is impossible to "pre-order" something. You either order it or you don't, it's as simple as that. The phrase “creative industries” means nothing. It seems to be used for the arts and design, but any job can be creative. The term “creative accounting” has been with us for a number of years now and may be thought of in a derogatory way, but there is no reason that accounting, along with management, agriculture and any other job cannot be creative. If you are exploring new methods and evolving your job, you are being creative. Create more, use less.