Notices by iona 🐝 (iona@social.coop), page 23

@porsupah The Island Packet is almost as good a local newspaper name as the Banbury Cake, or my personal favourite the Southport Visiter. They actually spelled it wrong in the name of the paper.

@porsupah I haven't had much time lately and my health hasn't been the best, so my garden has turned into a bit of a jungle over the past year. It's great for the bees and butterflies but it doesn't look good with all the ragwort.

Once the weather has cooled down a bit I'm going to try and clear all the nasty ragwort out of the way and clear some space for some vegetables. :)

I had to go and get more packaging materials today. We have a little local stationery shop and I can put up with him being a mardy northerner because he's bloody cheap - £6 for 100 Jiffy (actual branded) bags.

The shop that used to be Staples, whatever it's called now, charges £3 for 10.

@porsupah I used to live in a place where tomatoes grew really easily, but now I'm on a hillside with winds that whip straight in off the moors and it's difficult to grow them.

I don't even bother buying supermarket tomatoes, strawberries etc. They just don't taste of anything to me, it's like they're doing an impression of strawberries but aren't really.

@porsupah It's really sad that we have standardised on a few vegetables that are cheap and easy to grow in bulk.

Kohlrabi is another one you never see in supermarkets but is a really tasty alternative to the bland white potatoes we seem to be forced to endure these days.

@porsupah My local farm shop does that cauliflower when it's in-season. I like it, it looks like a fractal pattern.

I was racking my brains trying to work out where in the UK Fremont was! 🤔

While I am on the subject, I heard this horror yesterday on North Yorkshire's Stray FM, possibly the most middle class radio station on the planet.

"Your sofa. You've lived, laughed and loved on it. It's played its part in the conception of your children. So don't throw it away, get it restored by..."

NO. NO. THREE TIMES NO. 🤢

Radio ads with the really bad Marlon Brando impression - "we'll make you a UPVC window offer you can't refuse!"

Stop it. Stop it now.

@hollyamory I love city walks, and random exploring around cities, so I am going to go and do the bee trail and see if I can find all the city centre ones on a day when the weather's cooled down a bit. 🐝

@porsupah Where's Fremont? And didn't Safeway close down years ago? Ours turned into a Morrisons.

@tomharris Even the post office isn't great, it's about £1=€1 nowadays. Tesco (ours has a little currency desk) was offering a better rate the other week, but it's not worth the hassle and carrying big amounts of cash around when you can just use local ATMs when there nowadays.

@porsupah I don't bother with supermarket deliveries any more because I live in walking distance of a Morrisons and a Lidl, but when I did use them I found Sainsbury the best one.

Their supermarkets are hell holes, but their food deliveries had a lot less missing stuff and substitutions.

Also, I always feel ripped off when paying a fiver for Ocado delivery when their warehouse is half a mile away. Why should I pay the same as someone 50 miles away :p

@GreenandBlack I am literally never in Edinburgh, but my favourite bookshop in the world is the anarchist-feminist bookshop News from Nowhere in Liverpool. :)

@StuC I've been reducing plastic usage by reusing the little plastic bags things come in from suppliers when sending orders out to people, rather than buying little plastic bags new.

Someone had the balls to complain that the connectors they ordered were in a re-used plastic bag rather than a brand new one. I don't get people.

@tomharris Are you going to Europe? I didn't bother getting Euros before I went to Ireland this time, I checked my bank's own exchange rate and figured it's literally cheaper to just get cash out of a normal Euro ATM on arrival.

BBC Radio Manchester! You are broadcasting to one of the most interesting, diverse, culturally exciting local radio patches in the country, if not the world.

Why, then, do you persist in packing your schedules with 1970s pop and long discussions of sweets you can't buy any more? Get with the times.

@Owen_Roberts Then again, when we've spent the past 30 years improving technology to the point that we have, do we need to work eight hours a day, five days a week?

Working hours are getting longer, not shorter - a lot of places near me do 8:30am-5:30pm now with a "long lunch", knowing full well that they're based in the middle of nowhere and you'll be in the office through lunch.

In my experience, when there's work to do people do it, but there's just not that much to do in a lot of places!

@valerauko Wow, aren't you amazing

This looks fun! 🐝

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2018/jul/19/all-abuzz-bee-in-the-city-in-pictures

@valerauko Most offices are full of folk literally just killing time. In all the office jobs I've had over the years, about two hours a day at most was taken up with doing actual work tasks, and the rest was taken up with a performative "I'm so busy" routine while surreptitiously reading.