My Lords, Ladies, gentlemen and uncategorised people that aren’t covered in the first three, prepare to be astonished! Prepare to be amazed! Prepare to gaze upon something new in wonderment and with awe! We have something to announce and it’s big news. Here we go.
When we opened the 7 Reasons Emporium, we got all the products designed and ready and then we realised that we had nowhere to sell them and the shop got put together as a bit of an afterthought. We tried to make it work as a part of our website’s theme (and failed) so we had to build a new site for it and we modified an existing theme to make it work. Neither of the team were thrilled with the look or functionality of this theme and, as people that pride themselves on their eye(s) for design and general web savviness, that hurt.
We realised that we had to redesign the Emporium for the sake of our own self-respect. It got to the stage that we didn’t like to look at even. We weren’t sure when we were going to be able to fit a redesign in (we’ve only just redone the main website) but then one of the team (we won’t mention which one) had a brilliant idea. “Jon”, he said, “I’ve found the time to redesign our emporium. I’ve calculated that we waste at least six hours every day just lying in the dark*. Let’s use those wasted hours to set up a new site and build a new emporium.” So that’s what we’ve been doing for the last ten days or so.
Now, the 7 Reasons Emporium 2.0 is here. It’s new, it’s shiny, it’s got stuff that moves, it looks absolutely bloody lovely and it’s got giant lemons. We’re so happy with it that we grin like idiots whenever we look at it and feel dizzy whenever we stand up**. We’d like to encourage you to visit it, to click on things and to generally gaze at it (and buy stuff). We’re even offering 10% off the price of all t-shirts this weekend to celebrate the relaunch. We’d love to hear your feedback and product ideas, which can be directed to this email address. We hope you enjoy the new emporium,
Marks and Spencer have a Dine in for £10 meal deal in which you select a main course, a side-dish, a dessert course and a bottle of wine and pay only ten pounds for them. Other supermarkets have similar deals but I don’t shop at them, so I’m only qualified to write about my abject hatred of the M&S meal deal, which seems to be aimed solely at people who dine together in even numbers. Anyway, here are 7 Reasons that I loathe it. With every fibre of my being.
Grrr.
1. They’ve Got It Surrounded. It’s the weekend and there they all are. The throng. A grey horde of people aged over fifty-five standing four-deep, apparently transfixed, around the Dine in for £10 (But Only If There Are Precisely 2.0 Of You And Absolutely No Singletons Or Children Welcome) display. Some of them are actually viewing the food, picking it up and inspecting it, but many are not. A lot of these people seem not to have any involvement in the decision over what to eat at all, but there they stand, in the way of anyone else who might conceivably want to see the food. My wife, for example, will want to see the food. As will other customers so, if you’re not actively looking at the food, why not step away from the food? Hello! Hello! We want to see the food! Actually, I can already see the food – as all people over the age of fifty-five are tiny – but I can never get within nine feet of it for fear of damaging the doddering Lilliputians as I lumber through the waist-high mass of grey to get to the growers choice salad bag. Get out of the way! Other people want to see the food!
2. It’s A Compromise. Putting together a meal from the Dine in for £10 menu is a study in the art of compromise. And compromise is an abomination. Did Churchill compromise? Rarely. Did Neville Chamberlain compromise? Yes. Ergo, compromise is abominable and speaks with a Birmingham accent. So when my wife and I put together a meal from the Dine in for £10 menu it becomes a power-struggle that even the UN would back away interceding in (we don’t have any oil, for one thing). I approach the menu searching for the most interesting and tasty thing there, and my wife approaches it searching for the most insipidly dull and bland thing that they have which, in turn, causes me to become angry and refuse to compromise further on any of the other courses or the wine (just imagine Hitler food-shopping or, if you shop at the same branch of M&S as me, look for the angry giant bellowing “Who the hell has fish and chips with a side dish of rosemary new potatoes?!”). So in the end, neither of us get the meal we want. I can’t really blame M&S for this, it’s my own fault. If I wanted to eat nice, tasty, well balanced meals I should have followed Simon Cowell’s example and married myself.
3. It’s Discriminatory. I’m not a single person but, between bouts of not being single, I have been. I remember it well; a time when I would always find things exactly where I left them and had much more space in bed. But single people today need that extra space in bed because they are required to eat twice as much as people in couples to take advantage of the Dine in for £10 offer which will, ironically, increase their chances of remaining single. Or perhaps I’m being fanciful there. No one (in Europe) is actually going to eat twice as much to take advantage of a special offer, so the offer discriminates against single people. But M&S don’t care. They seem perfectly happy to condemn the single to evenings of dining – on full price non-special food – alone while viewing whatever television programme they fancy without interruption and in their pants. But surely being single is tough enough without being excluded from special offers? What if you were unfortunate enough to be a widower? What if, after the two of you have enjoyed a Saturday night ritual of dining in for £10 for a few years, your tiny grey husband dies (possibly crushed to death by a giant food-Nazi next to the ultimate potato mash)? There’d be no more Dine in for £10 menu for you. How iniquitous.
4. It Forces Extreme Measures. Many of the best ideas are borne out of adversity and, much in the noble tradition of Barnes Wallis inventing the bouncing bomb or Soviet cosmonauts using pencils in space, I have formulated a plan; a method by which single people might take full advantage of the Dine in for £10 offer and stick it to the man by enjoying a spinach and beef roulade followed by a raspberry panna cotta at the cheaper price. Single people need to find a food-buddy. They can do it by placing a personal ad like this:
Fiscally frugal food-lover (Male, early thirties, GSOH, NS, NK) with a penchant for rosemary and lemon crusted seabass and the green pea, bean and vegetable layer seeks similar to take advantage of the M&S Dine in for £10 offer. Must be willing to consume a lesser share of the profiteroles. All applications welcome but please, no time-wasters or merlot-drinkers.
By getting organised, single people can take advantage of the Dine in for £10 offer. But should single people have to resort to their guile, cunning and organisational adroitness to take advantage of the same offers that are unconditionally granted to couples?*
5. It’s Being Discriminatory Again. My wife and I qualify for the meal deal now, but what if we were to have a child one day? It’s not inconceivable (and nor are children, hopefully). Or three children? We’d be disqualified from the offer. Cruelly cast asunder by Marks and Spencer. Because you can’t feed three or five (or any other odd number, I won’t list them all) people from the M&S Dine in for £10 menu. In fact, only one person has ever successfully accomplished a similar feat: His name was Jesus and what he did with the wrong quantity of food for a gathering of people is spoken of as a miracle (which is a biblical word meaning fiction). So – miracles aside – families that contain an odd number of members are excluded from the deal too. The father, the son and the holy ghost can’t take advantage of the Dine in for £10 deal but Hitler and Eva Braun can.
6. Paying For The Thing. Okay, so – after about an hour of pushing tiny grey people around and bickering with your partner about broccoli – you’ve carefully assembled all of the components of the meal and you take them to the checkout. But when you get there they don’t ask you for ten pounds. They ask you for seventeen. “I thought that it was all a part of the Dine in for £10 offer”, you will state. And then they’ll press the Total button and say, “Oh yes, I hadn’t pressed the Total button”. This happens every time. Just press the Total button! We know we’re saving money, we don’t need you to remind us of that every time we buy the meal deal – that’s why we’re buying the bloody meal deal in the first place. All you’re accomplishing by reminding us of the money we’ve saved is to make the widow in the queue behind us cry.
7. The Third Pie. Marks and Spencer does something further to confound us all. As a part of their 2 for £10 menu Marks and Spencer offer a key lime pie. Which comes in three portions. Why three? We’ve already established that there’s only room for two people in this meal, what do they want us to do, fight over it? Go outside and scour the streets for a total stranger to hand it to as a random act of kindness? Perhaps they think we’re so abominably cruel that we’ll invite a dinner-guest – a single dinner-guest – round to watch us consume the rest of the menu before we reward them with a tiny dessert? I know this for certain; cats will not eat key lime pie, no matter how much cat food you mix in with it, so what’s with the third pie, Marks and Spencer? The third pie is sinister, frustrating and baffling. As is the rest of the Dine in for £10 deal.
*No. (But your conscience will surely have told you that already).
If you’re a cricket lover, or if you’re following the Cricket World Cup (which isn’t really cricket) and you’re English, you might be happily going about your March 2nd business right now vaguely aware that you seem to have had some sort of strange and improbable nightmare last night. And you’re right. It is still Wednesday and you’ve had a bit of a funny dream. I know I have. Here are seven reasons why.
This didn't happen. You dreamt this.
1. It’s Too Conflicting. The English, as popular opinion would have it, love an underdog. And it’s true, we do. There’s nothing that the English like to do more than cheer on plucky minnows. We love to see Italy do well in the Six Nations; we love to see Scotland do well at football; we love to see Malta do well at absolutely bloody everything and, had Ireland been playing any other nation yesterday (except Malta), we would have been cheering them on with cries of “Play up, Ireland” and “Hurrah for the Patricks”. But they weren’t playing anyone else. They were playing us. And we were the overdog. This was somewhat conflicting. Because it was nice to see the plucky Irish do well during the cricket, it was heart-warming even, and to someone who fancies that he has some modicum of appreciation for the game, it was enjoyable. But then it slowly began to look like they might actually beat us and suddenly the thin veneer of being a fair-minded Englishman that appreciates a fine performance (even by an opponent) began to dissipate and I realised that I wasn’t quite the sporting chap I imagine myself to be. I discovered that I am, in fact, the sort of Englishman who would happily don a pith helmet and mow down colonials with a Gatling gun if it meant a victory in war or sport for dear old Blighty. No one needs to find that out about themselves when they’re trying to enjoy the cricket. I started the match as a good, upright, moral chap and finished it as a cruel, bloodthirsty, avaricious monster. Albeit one with a nice hat. But this can’t really have happened, because I’m certain that, at heart, I’m a thoroughly nice chap.
2. The Irish Don’t Even Play Cricket. I know about Irish sport; I’ve seen it. There are essentially three major sports there. They play football, like we do, but with muddier pitches. They play rugby, like we do, but with muddier pitches. And they play Gaelic-bloody-hurleyball-thing – a sport I once saw on Channel Four at three o’clock one morning in 1997 – which is essentially a mass-brawl in the mud which may or may not have sticks and a ball. And a net. None of those things even remotely resemble cricket, which is a game played in England, where children are given bats, balls and club ties at birth and spend almost every minute of every childhood summer – except when they are reluctantly dragged away to a tartan picnic blanket and force-fed cucumber sandwiches, orange squash and those Mr Kipling cakes that resemble gaudily coloured plasticine and make your teeth hurt – playing the game of cricket. And then when we grow up many of us carry on doing exactly the same thing, but with Pimm’s instead of the squash and if we’re very lucky, picnic sex. Though the infernal sodding cakes are still there. We have cricket, if not in our blood, then certainly in our souls and in our psyche, it’s a part of our national identity. We are prepared to play cricket from birth, it shouldn’t be possible to just to turn up with a horse and beat us at it. Which is good, because it didn’t happen.
3. There Was A Horse. I’m not going to knock Kevin O’Brien’s knock*. What he did yesterday was superb. He went out to bat and did what every young boy (and grown man and woman and just about everyone who’s ever had any sporting ambition/interest/has even seen a blade of grass) has ever dreamed of doing: He took a game by the scruff of the neck and improbably – almost impossibly – won it single-handedly, against the odds. It was amazing. He was magnificent. Unlike Irish people, however, I have seen Kevin O’Brien play before, and I know this. He’s essentially a lumbering big, ginger horse in a cricket uniform. Of course he’s going to be able to slog the ball around on a flat pitch, he could probably hit balls to the moon. What we needed to counteract him was a backfiring car. They always put horses off what they’re doing, I’ve seen black and white films and read Edwardian novels, and I know of what I speak. It’s just not possible that England’s enormous – and legendarily meticulous – backroom staff consisting of hordes of people with laptops that studied P.E. at university didn’t consider this tactic, not possible at all. As the saying goes: If you fail to prepare, you prepare to get spanked around the ground by a big ginger man-horse. And that’s what happened…er…didn’t happen.
4. It Isn’t Mathematically Possible. The Ireland cricket team represents both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. So England were playing two countries out there yesterday, and you might think that would put England (us) at a disadvantage but wait! The acronym ECB is short for The England and Wales (and some South Africans) Cricket Board, so Irelands two nations were in fact playing our three nations, all of whom are individually better at cricket than them. It’s not mathematically possible that they should have won, or geographically or historically. It’s just not possible at all, so it can’t have happened.
5. Available Talent. That Ireland don’t have any sort of cricketing pedigree is self-evident. But that’s not to say that Ireland is completely lacking any cricketing talent. That would be crass and simplistic. Because there is Irish cricketing talent out there. For there is a man born in Dublin who would get into just about any one day cricket team in the world; a man who won three senior cup titles for Catholic University School; a man who has a ODI batting average of 38.03; a man whose batting shimmers with inventiveness and audacity; a man whose bold stroke-play and natural ease with a bat is admired the world over. And that Irishman’s name is Eoin Morgan and he plays for fecking England!!!! Their best player doesn’t even play for them! He plays for us, so they can’t have won at all.
6. The Reaction. Do you know what the reaction in England to the Irish victory was last night? From people that don’t follow cricket as closely as you or I, people with children and lives and things, people that the news was only slowly filtering to by yesterday evening? The ones that I spoke to all reacted in exactly the same way with the same question. They asked, “Do the Irish even have a cricket team?” Every last one of them asked this. And in Ireland, I have no doubt that they were all asking, “Do we even have a cricket team?” I had to explain this defeat to a Frenchman last night – A MAN FROM FRANCE – and do you know what his first question was? I’ll tell you. It was, “Do ze Irish even ‘ave a cricket team?” I can’t begin to tell you how painful this conversation was. It was several minutes before I was able to turn the conversation to the efficacy of the Maginot Line. Several long minutes. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that we were playing a team yesterday that doesn’t exist. And they beat us.
7. It’s So Weird I Can Only Have Dreamt It. I won’t bore you with all of the details, but it’s fair to say that yesterday was a fairly strange day for me. Here are just some of the things that actually happened to me:
I purchased Vaseline for my cat.
I discussed the Ashes with a Frenchman.
I witnessed a man request “A pint of the lager you have that’s most like Stella” at a bar.
An Irish team that doesn’t exist beat England at Cricket with an orange horse.
So there you go. All of the available evidence is there and it points to only one thing: That yesterday was a really weird dream that didn’t actually happen. Any moment now I’m going to wake up and it’ll be March 2nd again and at some point later on today I’m going to listen to England thump Ireland at cricket. It’s going to be great. I can’t wait.
*That’s the first knock-knock joke we’ve ever done at 7 Reasons.**
It’s Friday the 18th of February, 2011, and after all the build-up and anticipation, the Cricket World Cup starts today. As you can probably imagine, we’re very excited about that here at 7 Reasons and…well, you will have to imagine that, because we’re not. Here are 7 Reasons not to watch the bloody thing.
1. Australia. It’s not so much how good Australia are – they aren’t – it’s more whether anyone can be bothered to beat them. In 1999, South Africa should have beaten them in the semi-final, but Lance Klusener lost the plot and with it the match. And as for the final, well Pakistan didn’t turn up for it and were comprehensively thumped. In 2003, England should have beaten them in the final group game, but decided to let Andy Bichel have his one and only great day in an Aussie shirt and in doing so managed to lose from an impossible position. And as for the final, well India did turn up, but only to watch Sourav Ganguly toss the coin. After that they were comprehensively thumped. In 2007, well, only Australia turned up. They comprehensively thumped everyone. Which leads us to today. Or tomorrow. The 2011 World Cup promises to be the best yet. I reckon you could make strong arguments for six teams winning it. But that would be futile wouldn’t it? Because the script has long been written. Thumpings of the most comprehensive kind shall soon be scattered across the sub-continent. What’s the point in watching that?
2. Length. Now we love our cricket, but this thing goes on for a month and a half. Just imagine what you could get done in a month and a half if you weren’t watching the cricket. You could fly around the world 40 times. You could cook everything in Delia’s Complete Cookery Course. Twice. You could solve the international sudoku problem. You could build a tree house, dismantle it and build it again. You could even write us a guest post. By not watching the cricket World Cup you could achieve so much. The World Cup is your oyster.
3. Timing. I’m in England and the Cricket World Cup is not. It’s taking place far away, over the sea. But I’ve looked at the fixture list and, apart from the odd game that starts at 4am, the times of the matches actually seem reasonable. For the most part, they seem to be occurring during working hours. During working hours!? What’s the bloody point in that? Where’s my epic struggle to stay awake during matches? Where’s my opportunity to complain, bleary-eyed, the day after an important match, to all and sundry that the World Cup is going to kill me? You know how to spot a fellow cricket aficionado while England are on tour? You’ll hear them yawning and/or snoring and find them slumped on their desks/a bus seat/your left shoulder of an afternoon. Now, throughout the tournament, confused England fans will spend their time mistakenly bothering the exhausted parents of new-born children to discuss the batting of Kevin Pietersen, the bowling of Graeme Swann or the point of Billy Bowden. That’s no fun for anyone. Especially for cricket fans who’ll end up learning all sorts of nonsense about nappies and breast-pumps that they’d really rather not hear about. If watching cricket isn’t a challenge, it’s just not as good.
4. It’s Just Not Cricket. Is the ball red? No. Are the kits tasteful and pleasing to the eye? No. Are some of the spectators grey, dusty and possibly suffering from rigor mortis? No. Can each match last for an entire working week? No. Are England any good at it? No. In that case, it isn’t cricket at all; it’s merely baseball for the civilised.
5. National Anthems. I do love a good rendition of ‘God Save The Queen’. But only if it’s at Twickenham or I’m in the shower. Only in these environments do people actually appear as if they want to sing. Anthems just don’t seem to work at cricket. I feel a bit awkward watching them. It’s a bit like chapel at school. No one really wants to be there. The problem is that when the anthems are over, half the players go back to the changing rooms to play cards while the rest hang around for ten minutes until the Umpires check to see if the light is okay. By which time the parts of you that were pumped up are now deflated. And that’s when Straussy loses his off-stump. So, unless we are sadists we should not be watching.
6. Because You Support England. And by “you support England”, what I mean is that I support England; the surest route to heartbreak and despair in all of international sport (outside of betting on Audley Harrison or being Jermaine Jenas). I was pushing my luck by watching the Ashes, so watching the Cricket World Cup can only lead to disillusionment and despondency. Much better to avoid it and stick to watching films about the war. Not the second Anglo-Dutch War, obviously, that would be equally depressing.
The 2011 World Cup Cricket trophy pictured on Horsell Common.
7. It’s Misleading. It’s called the World Cup. But I’ve seen the trophy and it doesn’t resemble a cup in the least. It looks like a Martian tripod from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds standing in the classical ballet stance, en pointe. Can you drink tea from it? No. Can it perform a quick pas de bourrée before killing you with its heat-ray? Undoubtedly. So it’s not the Cricket World Cup at all. It’s the Cricket World Martian Ballet Tripod. If they’d called it that, more people would be watching. And if they had a few of those at the stadia, I would watch.
1. The Weather. It must be quite easy to present the weather in Australia, it’s always “nice” there, so you probably don’t have to be too bright to do it. That would explain this weatherman being outwitted by a pelican then.
2. Wipeout Australia. In Britain, we have Total Wipeout, a programme in which pudgy, potato-faced middle-managers from Droitwich lumber around a ridiculous assault course. Wipeout Australia uses the same course, except everything is harder and the machines go at about five times the speed. The people they send around don’t seem any leaner or sportier though, that wouldn’t be any fun.
3. Skippy. In Britain in the ’60s, men whistled at attractive young women in mini-skirts. In Australia in the ’60s, they whistled at kangaroos. Still, they seem quite happy.
4. Advert. Halfway through, so it’s time for a break. Would you like one of these? It’s undetectable, you know.
5. Soaps. The bush, mushrooms, a mysterious pig, a flaming hand – it has to be a soap opera. Obvious, really.
6. Marriage. This sort of thing never happened on Richard and Judy.
7. The dream. Okay, you knew it had to turn up somewhere didn’t you? That classic Neighbours dream sequence which came out of left-field and astonished the audience. No, not that one, this one. The accents are spot on, by the way.
Okay, it’s time for an admission. I was wrong. All of this stuff is awful, yet somehow brilliant. I’ve had so much fun putting this post together that I’ve become convinced that Australians should make more television – perhaps even all of it. As long as I don’t have to watch Paul Hogan again I’d be quite happy. I might even buy a hairpiece.
