Currently, our largest local(ish) Sainsbury’s store is undergoing a major refurbishment – a project which looks like it’s going to roughly double the size of the store.

Not that you’d know it from the Sainsbury’s  information page about the Longwater store.

You’d think that information like “we’re refitting this store” would be useful – and positively easy to add to a webpage, wouldn’t you? But no, no mention of it.

As it is, the improvements mean that the main carpark has been reduced to (at most) half its previous size, along with being completely replanned. But that’s OK, because there’s a big simple overflow carpark over the other side of the access road.

Except – um – there’s not. Because in a fit of total planning genius, they’ve also ripped that up to re-plan it and generally fuck about with it.

So of that 694 spaces listed on the information page ( 647 normal spaces, 22 disabled and 22 ‘parent-and-child’) there’s about 250 left. Of course, all the disabled and ‘parent-and-child’ ones are kept available, it’s just the other ones that’ve been epically reduced.

So fuck you, Sainsburys.

In general, when I buy books or other odds and sods, my first port of call is usually Amazon.

It’s not the cheapest – although I’m not always looking to save pence on these things anyway – but I find that in general if I want something, it’s going to be available through Amazon.

I also pay for the Amazon Prime – £50 a year, and next-day deliveries for the year. Looking back, I made 31 orders in the last twelve months, and didn’t pay postage and packing on any of them. That works out as £1.61 per order for next-day delivery. Amazon charge £4.95 for Express “get it tomorrow” delivery. On 31 orders, that would be near as dammit £155 just on delivery. (Admittedly if it weren’t for Prime I’d be using normal postage for the most part, but you know what I mean)

Needless to say, I’m renewing my Prime subscription. It’s paid for itself a couple of times over.

On Saturday, the Js and I went out to the Olive Branch in Marsden, which they’d been to before and highly recommended.

The place is/was lovely, and the food was really good. Well worth the visit if you’re in the area.

There was one aspect that was really disappointing, though – and that was the vegetarian options. Both of the Js are veggie, and they’d said that the Olive Branch usually had a good selection.  On this occasion though, the option was pasta. Fair enough, it’s “Ribbons of pasta, sauteed with mushrooms, garlic & sundried tomato, goats cheese & pine nuts“, but all the same, it’s pasta.

I think it’s still tremendously disappointing to go out to a restaurant and only see one or two fairly desultory veggie options. It just shows a complete lack of imagination and/or interest in the veggie market – and there’s a lot of vegetarians out there.

Even more importantly, if Herself had come along as well, she’d not have been able to eat anything, as she’s a) veggie and b) wheat-intolerant. Now sure, the Olive Branch says that you can let them know about food allergies/issues when ordering, but by then it’s a bit sodding late in some cases.

Doing good vegetarian options doesn’t take much – even a vegetarian stir-fry with some nice spices and a sauce is easily doable – and there are plenty of options out there. I just don’t know why the options aren’t more imaginative. Sure, not everyone is going to run a business like Greens in Didsbury, Manchester which is entirely vegetarian, but any decent chef could get some inspiration from the ideas there, or in any other veggie cookbook.

Last night was the day I took Herself and Others down to London. I’d already worked all day (as usual) so it was always going to be a late one.

As it turned out, I got everyone down to central London (Kings Cross / St Pancras) in two hours flat, dropping them off at 9:50.

By that time I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch, but wasn’t massively hungry, so just headed back up, thinking that if I got hungry I could stop at the services near Stanstead airport. (Birchanger Green, not that it means much) It was 10:45 by the time I got there, and by that point I was hungry enough that I could’ve eaten a scabby donkey between two pieces of bread. (Which is, of course, why I was even considering something from Motorway Services)

Only it turns out that Birchanger Green pretty much shuts at 10:30.

• Burger King – closed, cleaned up, and one lowly person wiping the surfaces.
• KFC – closed, deserted
• Waitrose – closed, deserted, barriers in front of the doors
• “Eat In” – open, a poxy range of crap (and overpriced) sandwiches, with a queue of people that outnumbered the sandwiches available.
• Shop – closed, barriered off.

And that was it. Nothing else. I assume it stays open for people in dire need of a piss, and that’s about it.

Bear in mind, Birchanger Green is the only services on the entire M11. And it shuts at half-ten.

Call me naïve, but I always thought services were supposed to be open super-long hours – if not 24-hours. That impression appears to have been wrong.

But I wonder how much business Birchanger Green loses by closing at half-ten ? The car-park was at least a third full when I got there. You’d think that being open ’til half eleven or midnight would make sense – particularly when they’re the only one in god knows how many miles.

Very strange.

For some reason these anti-depressants also seem to be turning me into some kind of  altruistic do-gooder. Pretty scary stuff.

Mind you, in this case I’m pretty sure I’d have dealt with it regardless, but there we go.

Anyway, in this particular instance I was at the till in the local Sainsbury’s, and behind me was an old couple, one in a wheelchair with one of the disabled trolley things on the front. They were having serious issues with getting the stuff from the trolley onto the till belt, so I offered to help them. It embarassed the woman a bit I think, to be seen as “needing assistance”, but still I did help, and got it all done with them.

The bit that pissed me off though is that this particular till was the one where the till “supervisor” stands, and at the time there were three members of Sainsbury’s staff at that position, along with the useless sack of shit known as a security guard. All three of the staff had looked at the old couple, seen they were having problems, and ignored them. Cue the red mist.

Once I was done, I got the till supervisor over, and really gave him a bollocking. I don’t know if it’ll have any effect, but I think it got through to him pretty clearly that I was deeply pissed off, that it was incredible for three staff (plus a useless lump) to watch that couple and do nothing, and for it to end up with another customer helping them out instead of the staff doing it.

So following on from yesterday’s discovery of a flat tyre, I booked in (and paid in advance) through eTyres.co.uk to get it fixed at home. eTyres offer their service at home, which is ideal when you’ve got a flat.

However, the motto of this entire story is that if you’re going to have a puncture and use eTyres, don’t do it on a weekend. Despite being able to book and order online, for some fuckforsaken reason they can’t organise things ’til the Monday morning. And at that point they’ve also got to deal with all the people who’ve booked on the Saturday.

I did try to change the tyre myself so I could get down to the local tyre place, but the wheelnuts were on so tight I couldn’t even move the sodding things. Insurance-wise I was going to be lowest of the low priority calls, and they couldn’t even give me a time expectation. So all told that left me pretty much at the mercy of eTyres.

Having made the booking online yesterday evening, they finally arrived at 5.30. Yep, a whole day. So much for the speed of booking via the internet etc. etc.

In the end they’ve done a decent job, and for a fairly decent price. Not as great as they make out in their marketing, but not bad.

But if you need a swift service that’ll actually get the job done, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend eTyres to anyone.