Capital of the Marches

Rustic feasting

December 20th, 2008 • Peter • 1 comment • Related • Filed Under

Out here among the honeyed hillocks and mistletoed meadows, we like our seasonal office parties, too, you know.

My son Archie has been working in a cake-making place – a ‘home’ not a factory, I guess, since the cakes are home-made – and of a high order, mostly finding their way from deep Salop to Fortnum & Mason, Piccadilly. He has just enjoyed a Christmas dinner with eleven female cake-making colleagues in a rustic functio-pub  near Bridgnorth, where several disparate groups were celebrating the Winter Solstice. Archie’s cake party was flanked by a festive gang of primary school teachers, and a group of cattle artificial inseminators (I wonder what they talked about?). 

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Winners in the Credit Crunch

December 8th, 2008 • Peter • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

Books, it’s often said, sell better in a recession – I imagine because reading is about the most cost-effective, convenient way to entertain yourself. £8 worth of paperback should always last several times longer than £8 worth of movie, with the best pictures in the book-reader’s head. As a writer who lives on royalties, I hope the maxim holds true this time round. But the most obvious winner currently emerging is the sale of condoms, up some 10%, with ‘sexual enhancers’ up 25%. Less predictably, Ocado, the home delivery service for Waitrose, have seen sales up by 60%. Food & sex, always reassuring in troubled times.

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