I just can't help it...

Do you think I'm just being a tease? I don't mean to be. The intention is honest, really it is. I don’t mean to lead them on but I can't help it. I try not to flirt too openly. I don’t want to get a reputation and it’s not as though I’m the only one doing it. Loads of us do. Loads of us are trollops.

It’s not as though they are only chasing me either. They even want to get my friends involved but I think that is a step too far I mean I don’t want to presume that my friends aren’t already doing it anyway.

Look, I have to get my fix somehow and it’s far too dangerous to actually hit the high street anymore. I'm talking about shopping here. What else did you think? It's a serious business shopping adn it's getting harder and harder to resist. I mean wherever I turn there are sales going on, prices slashed. Blue ticket days for 72 hours only. I mean what is a girl to do?

There is a strong streak of the hunter/gatherer in me and I am a sucker for a bargain at the shops, especially clothes shops. If I go out I have to come back with something. It's just not right if I don't.

So lately I have been collecting catalogues either in the shops or on-line to assuage my craving. Graham & Green, Boden, Aspace, White Company, Crewe, Joules, Lakeland and they are all free. I get that immediate fix and then I can peruse at my leisure and it's just wonderful especially as I had to give up my annual subscriptions to all my favourite magazines in the latest round of household finance cuts.

I know my name is on every list going and I dread to think what would happen if they all decided to get together and view my shopping habits recently or lack of shopping habits to be more precise.

They have all tried so hard bombarding me with e-mails and offers and money off vouchers but I hate to admit guys I just can’t. I can’t go all the way with you I have no money to spare for the gorgeous fripperies you desperately want me to buy.

I promise though as soon as I can I will. I will succumb to your offers. I will do it but you see I have to be sure that I am getting a bargain. I have to be sure that this really is the best deal out. A never to be repeated experience.

And I have to make sure that my husband doesn’t find out….

Top 10 Tips For Better Customer Service - trust me I'm a customer!

OK now I am back on line I have a few rants that just need to burst forth for starters service, you know the one where the customer gets served, correctly, feels happy and comes back for more.

Well, where’s it gone?

I mean I don’t think I am asking too much when I say I need help in a shop.

"Excuse me could you possibly help?"

Met with blank stare.

"I’m so sorry. (Thinking that shop assistant can’t possibly have heard me) Please could you help me?"

"I ‘eard yuh." The shop assistant continues to stare at me as she chews her cud, sorry gum.

Slightly disconcerted as I watch the machinations of her mouth. "Right um do you have any semi skimmed milk?"

Shop assistant shifts from one foot to another and flops over the counter and waves her hand. "Over there."

I look over my shoulder in what I think is the right direction. And swing back to say that I have already been over there to find that she is dialling someone up on her mobile phone.

I start to speak but her hand goes up in my face.

"Hiya Shell, yeh it’s me what yer doin tonight….nah nothing much. It’s really quite at work, it’s soooooo boring."

I’d like to say this is totally made up and of course it doesn’t happen, but it’s true. It happened at my local Co-op.

You’d have thought with so many out of work and a recession and all, that people would be only too keen to help, only too keen to hang on to their customers but it is not the case. Everywhere you go there are horror stories about poor customer care. The mind boggles, what planet are these people from? They seem to be demotivated, moronic, plainly not interested and basically rude.

Or is it me? Am I getting to that stage in my life where I expect more than can possibly be given? Are my expectations too high? Come on I’m only 44, I’m not ancient. I’m far too young to be ranting like this. But don’t people realise that when you are dealing with customers you actually need to engage?

Here are my top ten tips for those dealing with customers in a shop.

1. Look smart – how you dress says a lot about you so pussy pelmets though great for parties ain’t quite the look on the frozen food aisles.
2. Be clean. Have some personal pride you know clean hair, clean hands and nails especially if you are looking after food.
3. Smile it really makes a difference in how you are treated.
4. Know your products/shop/service inside out – you don’t want to be thought of more stupid than you are.
5. Don’t gossip/answer texts/use your mobile during work – we’re paying you for a service not to listen to you mouthing off about your Ex.
6. Don’t look as if you think all customers are dumb –they may be thinking the exact same of you.
7. If you want respect give respect.
8. Don’t chew gum – you look moronic, it’s disgusting.
9. You will be surprised how well you will get treated if you yourself behave well towards your customers.
10. Remember the customer is always right especially to her face and no voicing your opinion about her to your mate at the back of the shop while she is still shopping it won’t win you any brownie points. Trust me. I’m a customer!

If suddenly there is an upward blip in the economy...

If suddenly thre is an upward blip in the economy over the next few weeks it's because I am back on-line. I noticed that there were a number of retailers in trouble over the last few weeks and I can only presume this sorry state of affairs is my fault, because I have been unable to shop. On-line that is.
I don't like shopping  as a general rule because I don't like to travel much and have the hassle of parking in ever smaller parking slots. I swear supermarkets and parking companies make them smaller and smaller each and every year so they can squeeze more and more in to make more money and of course to annoy their clients us the parking public. I say it is a false economy if you are a supermarket because an angry punter is less likely to return but I fear the parking compnaies couldn't give a toss unless that is one could say because of their lack of care your car was the one that got damaged, but I suppose they have a get out clause for that don't they? But I digress.
Shopping and the reasons I don't as a rule.
I am not good with carrying all my purchases. I get frustrated with all that packaging and having to drag my boys with me all over the place.
I spend most of my time forcing the little toads to sit still in one place and not to touch. But as soon as I say that they cannot sit still and they have to touch. There are loads of shops I don't visit as a rule because of them. Anywhere with anything breakable and anywhere with anything clean. Rules out most doesn't it.
So when I went off line my shopping drastically reduced and my tension rose in invesrse proportion. I mean I had to take the little rotters with me. Suffice to say after one minor foray I just stopped shopping and we have been living lean, as I like to say, on stuff in the freezer and the stuff we can pick. I did note that my husband began to spend more time away on trips than was usual or dare I say it necessary and the boy's teachers reported that they had hearty appetites at school....
Anyway I am happy to report everything is back to normal. It is safe for people to go back onto the A14 between Stowmarket and Bury St Edmunds as I am no longer to be seen on that road  with overlaoded car, out of control children and  wild eyed aggressive driving.  The economy will bounce back as I have an awful lot of shopping to do.
PS Just think if BT got it's act together how much more shopping could be done as according to statistics 14% of us are not  connected properly ( I fear it is much higher but until I get all the figures I will go with these) If each of us just spent £10 a week on-line that would be an extra £4,368,000,000 added to the economy.

Blogging is good for you - and I have proved it!

It's been seven days. SEVEN. LONG. DAYS. I have not blogged.
Now is this a good and healthy thing and have I put my new found time to better use? Well, Yes and No would be my answer. Yes, I am sure it is a good and healthy thing not to blog for a week but I can't say yes to actually putting my time to better use...
My desk is still cluttered, my house disorganised, my children running wild and the garden neglected or should that be running wild and the children neglected? To be honest since both are outside I fear the words are interchangeable.
Which actually bodes well for my argument that blogging is good for you  and you should shout it from the roof tops. For while I haven't actually put my spare time into being useful, ordered and housewifely, I have used it in other - how shall I say it? -  less productive ways.
I am now a seriously proficient patience player and there are few of the original 32,000 Windows FreeCell games that I have not managed to solve even if it has taken me in the small wee hours of the morning to achieve it. Luckily I have yet to find Game 11982 which I have been reliably informed is the only unsolvable one there is.
I have also spent a lot of money on stuff; stuff that I otherwise would not have had the time to look at let alone buy had I been blogging and I had to do it normally rather than the Internet which then meant that I had to actually get in the car and drive to the shops to check it all out dragging my poor beleaguered children with me.
Pity the poor shopkeepers of Bury St Edmunds when I descended last week. Touching and fingering the merchandise, asking for different colours ans sizes necessitating countless trips backwards and forwards to storerooms while my children rampaged round the shop causing palpitations in among the breakables, barging past other customers and shouting and laughing so loudly as to be heard over the canned muzak. I am sure they all breathed a sigh of relief when we finally departed. loaded to the gunnels as they say.
Based on my one week without blogging I can honestly say that blogging is good for the environment, I mean I would not have used the car to go shopping if I had been able to blog.
It is good for family relationships nay the good of the whole global community, if I had been blogging I would NEVER have subjected my children to the enforced  trauma of watching Mummy buy a new pair of jeans...and a shirt and a scarf and a pair of shoes and a pair of boots and a ..... well they wouldn't have had to do it OK. They are boys these things will have a HUGE and PROFOUND effect on their abilities to see women in a positive light.
Blogging saves you money, a lot of it. If I had been blogging we as a family would have been considerably plumper in the pocket at the start of this week.
And as for my nerves? well now that I am blogging again I feel almost human and shall bounce down the stairs to cuddle my poor neglected garden and weed my children....

Retail therapy: don't knock it

OH. MY. GOD. I have a waist! It’s brilliant. I’ve not had a waist for years and now it’s there. I can’t tell you the joy. I can actually go shopping for clothes again. You know clothes that are pretty and dare I even say it frivolous!

For years I have dreaded shopping for clothes and avoided it at all costs because invariably I would come home in tears. Every time I’d go in a shop I would see beautiful things and then try them on only for huge disappointment; those beautiful things did not look beautiful on me. It got to the stage that I just didn’t bother with things like skirts or dresses. I avoided all clothes that were short in the body as these would never cover my fat tummy and I avoided low slung jeans. Not for me the straight leg or slim fit.  Not for me a crop top or even a jumper that was not deliberately baggy. I craftily covered up my shortcomings with gillets, big jumpers and long shirts.

I dreaded the warm weather when people started to uncover. My legs certainly never got to see the light of day and as for me wearing a T-shirt please with my body! I used to say I didn’t feel the heat and would have the air con in the car at full blast so none of the Mummies at school would have a clue.

I blended into the background all 11st and 5ft 3 inches of me ashamed, saddened and ever so slightly envious of all those leggy things.  Those Size 12s and Size 10s who all looked so happy and pretty and ever so stylish.

I started to notice  my turkey neck and all those grey hairs as I became more and more critical of my looks or lack of them. And I felt old so very very old. Probably whay I decided to try ThinkingSlimmer. It has worked on my weight but although I could see it coming off I couldn’t see any changes so to speak…

So on Friday I got dressed in crumpled clothes and hid it all under a coat for my trip down to London for a lunch with work colleagues, a rare treat for me. I arrived an hour early so decided to have a look round the shops, a glutton for punishment.

I trip trapped my way to Hobbs on Regent Street, as in the distant past before children and before living in the countryside had taken its toll, Hobbs had served me well.

My heart sank a bit on entering but just as I was about to make a hasty retreat I looked at myself in the mirror and realised with a sudden horror how awful I looked. There was no way I could possibly go out to lunch looking like that!

A dilemma.

Humiliate myself in front of yet another load of unspeakably glamorous shop assistants or humiliate myself in front of my work colleagues.

I chose the former reckoning that if I did humiliate myself at least I would never ever have to confront the shop assistants ever again because the likelihood of me even setting foot again in Hobbs let alone the Regent Street store would be exceedingly slim if not impossible.

I was approached by a softly spoken lady asking if she could help me and she said it so sincerely and was so gentle that I blurted out my fears and begged her to help me. An outfit for lunch; for today.

But no short skirts above the knee…

I glanced dubiously at the serried rows of impossibly chic clothing. Rack upon rack of it and nothing looked comfortable and none of it looked remotely as if it would suit me.

I tried to enter in to the spirit of things and was offered clothes that were silent in soft grey and navy blue. No shouting these. Understated one might call them safe may be another word. And then my eye was caught by a little animal print top and a heavenly green skirt. I was expecting disaster but when I was taken into the changing room something amazing happened. I had a waist. It was really there and I didn’t look half as bad as I feared. I tried on a few more tops, things that clung to me accentuating my long forgotten form.

I ummed and awed.

Then I was shown a dress, a wrap-around animal print dress. Surely a step too far!

It felt like a bit of heaven. I stepped out of the changing room and had a look at myself in the large mirror on the shop floor. I put my hands on my hips and turned this way and that and out of the corner of my eye I spotted a fabulous bright green scarf. Grabbing it I draped it over my shoulders and took another look in the mirror. The image looked back at me and smiled and well it was perfect. I looked good. Really good.

I left the store feeling a million dollars, a lightness in my step that I had not felt in years. And do you know what: Retail therapy: don’t knock it….

The Great Food Scrap Challenge

Ohmigod just been watching the BBC’s Great British Waste Menu all about the food we waste. It is something very close to my heart as I am a useless chef but a great scrap cook. I’d like to say it’s because I am an organised and talented person but actually it’s because I am a lazy forgetful housewife who hates shopping. The number of times I just run out of food is depressing and all that’s left are the copious quantities of overgrown courgettes from the garden and eggs from the chickens plus veg and fruit of dubious origin in the back of the fridge. I kid you not but we’ve survived on just that for a whole week until the kids begged me for meat, we then killed a chicken…
The programme was great but the thoughts I took away from it were scary and I found it difficult to get my head round it. It’s all very well saying that £10bn of food is wasted every year in this country or that that families throw out 8.3 million tonnes of food waste annually. When the figures are so big it gets difficult to grasp.
The average British Household throws away £680 worth of food each year. I wanted to know what that meant so I asked Dear Charlie, who is good at numbers, in that he can work it out quicker than me (I would have got there in the end but I might not have been able to do this post for a few days…).
Now if you tack on the fact that that money is from your taxed income it actually equates to closer to £850 of your salary if you are a normal taxpayer. The average family income is some £21,500 a year. The amount of food the average family wastes equates to 4 per cent of their annual salary. Just think if you didn’t waste any food at all then you’d have an immediate “pay rise” of 4 per cent and how chuffed would you feel about that in the current economic climate!
The thing is although I loved the programme I can see why people waste food and I think it’s down to these three things:
1. People are time poor or at least feel it: how many mothers, for it is usually them, also have to hold down full time jobs? Grief! When do they get the time to shop let alone cook?
2. People don’t know how to cook, let alone shop for food: Home economics though taught in schools to a varying degree doesn’t give our children the wherewith all to understand even the basics. It is often considered a joke by pupils or something that only the ‘thickos’ do. What is so scary is that it is so crucial for everyone. And skills and recipes for frugal cooking are being lost. We are in fact losing sight of what food is really all about. To appreciate it you really do have to reconnect with the processes from growing to killing. Perhaps then we would not be so fussy about what it looks like!
3. Labelling is downright confusing. With all the media hype about food poisoning, complicated best before, use by and sell by dates it’s no wonder people just say stuff it better safe than sorry…

So I’d thought I’d share some of my top tips to stop the old wastage and save a few pennies…
1. Do a meal planner every week!
2. Forget labels and taste/smell your food to see if it’s off.
3. Use your freezer so if you have food you haven’t eaten in your fridge and it may go off pop in to freeze! Don’t forget to label your food for the freezer or you land up like me going for a lucky dip which although exciting doesn’t necessarily make you popular with the kids when you serve them garlic chicken and pears….instead of fish fingers and chips!
Here’s a couple of great websites to check out and inspire too…
http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/
http://therubbishdiet.blogspot.com/
http://www.wrap.org.uk/

Unlooked for compliments down the frozen food aisle

I think I should be paid to go shopping. I mean I provide hours of entertainment up and down the aisles with my youngest in tow. Today I was caught in the middle of “The Dam Busters” theme tune as I sped up the frozen food aisle and about to do a massive halt and turn at the top by an elegant middle aged lady in a warm woolly hat.
Her: I do love seeing you and your boys shopping.
Me: !??%$£&!”
Her: You always seem to be having so much fun and you sing a lot.
Me: Ohmygod I am so sorry. I don’t mean to do it but…
Her: No no really it always makes my day to see happy people. It’s wonderful, really.
At this stage I am not sure whether I want to laugh, cry or just wish the floor to open up and swallow me. I had no idea I had a reputation or that in fact anyone even knew me in Waitrose. It’s just as well the branch I go to is 12 miles from home.
I suppose today I was rather loud. Bog Boy had his own little ‘Flag Trolley’, as he calls it, and we were both whizzing up and down the aisles and trying to spin at the top. I don’t think you can do this in Tesco because there’s not enough room to do that but Waitrose believes in making the shop seem spacious and calm (until we turn up obviously) so the top aisle that runs across is much wider than that found at Tesco or indeed Sainsbury’s; I’m not sure about Asda or Morrison’s because I haven’t shopped in either of them for years.
Anyway, all would have been OK if Bog Boy hadn’t kept bumping into me. Now when one of those trolleys comes at you and rams into your Achilles heel you yell – loudly! He did it three times.
Despite that we shopped quite companionably chattering away and singing. He tells me what he doesn’t like and I tell him well tough it’s not for you anyway. He then tells me what he does like and I still say tough without thinking and then we have a stand off. Through a series of threats, ultimatums, distraction techniques (hence the singing) and bribery we eventually get round the store. Along the way there are a variety of one liners for the grown ups so they don’t think I am a complete lunatic. I usually get a laugh or smile but there again perhaps they do think I am a lunatic and are just doing it to placate me…
However, no one has ever said anything to me before and to say I was taken aback would be an understatement. I mean we’re British, we’re in Britain and people don’t volunteer compliments to strangers do they? So I was flummoxed, taken off guard and momentarily quiet. At that point Bog Boy joined us smiled up at the lady and promptly told her he had got a remote controlled racing car for Christmas and then told me he wanted sausages and could he eat them in the car?
I looked at the proffered package of uncooked chipolatas and said I’d need to cook them first. He handed them to me and then said he’d have crisps instead and that he wanted a drink.
Me: Oh heaven’s he’s worse than his father!
Her: Don’t worry they all are! Just remember they are apprentice men: genetically challenged!
And with a cheery wave she disappeared in the other direction to the check out till.
By this time Bog Boy was off down the cereal aisle and I had to play catch up feeling rather light headed and happy. Needless to say Bog Boy got what he wanted!