Tesco Cards? You'll Be Rolling In The Aisle

Buying a birthday card used to be a pleasurable experience. A visit to the card shop would present the customer with a wide range of cards for all occasions - birthdays, marriages, deaths and anything else that one might consider worthy of celebrations or condolences. Cards would be funny, sometimes clever, sometimes corny. Sincere thoughts might be found alongside more dubious messages. There are fewer card shops around today as the big supermarkets continue their inexorable rise to retail denomination. So,yesterday, in search of a birthday card for my daughter's partner Duncan I found myself in Tesco. The card aisle should be given an x rating. Rows of cards offered me the opportunity to insult poor Duncan by suggesting he was old,flatulent,balding or alcoholic (or often a combination of all four) or to amuse him with jokes that Roy Chubby Brown might consider too near the knuckle. Duncan is a scuba diver so my eyes were drawn to a card depicting a diver in full diving gear only to find a crude joke about cunnilingus no less. Another depicted an old man hiding his genitals in a popcorn bucket he was about to share with an old woman(so original - a joke made in Diner in 1982) and one hilariously made a connection between a girl and a crab.I don't want to sound like disgusted of Tunbridge Wells - I can laugh at any joke if it's funny - but sorry Tesco, your (huge) card selection stinks. And if you are reading this Duncan, don't worry I left the superstore empty handed - you aren't old, flatulent balding or alcoholic.

As the saga of the lack of internet rumbles on for yet another day, yesterday turned out not to be "today" as Freezone had hoped and I finally gave up and on 29th September we should be back up and running with Be There who have been recommended to us by our friendly IT Crowd at Mainframe Computer Services. We have managed with a dial up connection for the past week but it's painfully slow and means that we haven't been able to send emails with attachments of any size and downloading orders from web based ordering systems has been extremely difficult. If you run a business you might learn from our experience. Imagine how you would manage without broadband for a day. Now think about three weeks. Doesn't bear thinking about does it? If it happened to us it could happen to you so maybe the insurance of a second broadband line and provider would make business sense. That's what we're going to do and a few hundred pounds a year is not much for peace of mind.

We're off down to London tomorrow to celebrate my birthday. We've got a busy weekend ahead of us and are going to a matinee performance of The Railway Children at Waterloo Station theatre and then a dinner with Paul and Josephine at the Dorchester Grill. We're staying at the County Hall Park Plaza (above). I mention all of this as each of these bookings was made after following recommendations on the internet. Trip Advisor members rank the Park Plaza 44 out of 1058 London Hotels, 1654 Top Table members have given the Dorchester Grill a massive average score of 8.6 out of ten and The Railway Children has glowing reviews on many websites. So when it's working like it is here at home (thanks BT), broadband is now perhaps life's most important and most useful tool.

As we are travelling by train I'll have plenty of time for the Saturday papers. I've started buying the Times on Saturday as well as the Guardian as the Times has a superb quick crossword that will guarantee to keep me quiet for the journey. I've never been into cryptic crosswords but these puzzles are really entertaining with the challenge not being whether or not you can finish them but how long it takes to do so. This is one area where the internet can't beat printed media.


And where would the internet be without YouTube? Here's a little film for the weekend.

Samsung have done it yet again.
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