how many toasters does it take...

Some many months ago, I was (unsuccessfully) attempting to combat a bout of insomnia with repetitions of On Ilkley Moor Bar t'at, and its theosophy.

Last night, it was economics, thanks to 24 Hours from Tulsa.

In the mid-1980s, a petrol, or possibly oil, company had a tv advert to promote its reward card. Everybody used Green Shield Stamps back in them days, so although the reward card scheme was identical to that, racking up points in return for paying for petrol, there was obviously some need to preach to the suspicious who were not sure about a plastic card versus tiny slips of gummed perforated paper that you were supposed to lick and stick onto a cardboard...card. (In reality Green Shield stamps just got lost in the glove compartment or were whipped out of your fingertips by the wind as you crossed the garage forecourt to your car. As a kid, I found it hard to get a handle on the Green Shield stamp. It was so important, because it was like...money. But they were always crushed and coated with mud in the footwell, or dinged to shreds in the ashtray, and the card was never about, and then sometimes you would find one among the pile of parental pocket change on the sideboard, and...wonder).

So. The petrol company (I googled it; it's Mobil) did this advert about the things you could get with your points, and the song went: "I was only 24 toasters from Scunthorpe. Only 6 double beds from Torquay".

Now, we all know, until very recently at least, supermarket points things - aside from being calculated to confuse foreigners - buy practically nothing until you have been accumulating them for four hundred and ninety years, and then your options are an acrylic tumbler with the supermarket logo on, or a keyring. (The reason they are meant to confuse foreigners is the way you are asked for the card relating to a particular points scheme when you try to pay for things. It's not a quesion, as in, 'do you have a Nectar card?' The cashier just says, 'Nectar?' - or here, 'Optimum?' If you are confused, or are foolish enough to ask for elaboration, it is customary to simply repeat, 'OPTIMUM?').

So to reach even ONE toaster, even a hundredth of a double bed? You would surely have to drive a considerable distance. Yet the singer is in a car, 24 toasters away from Scunthorpe. And six, count them, six double beds from Torquay.

You're wide awake now too, aren't you?

The furthest point in the UK from Torquay has to be John O'Groats. Torquay is way in the south west. It's only about 100 miles from there to Land's End. The driving distance from John O'Groats to Torquay must be something just over 620 miles.

If I can earn 6 double beds from driving 620 miles, then...I can get a bed for going about 100. I could drive to London from Leicester, and I wouldn't even have to go back.

Conveniently, probably the furthest point from Scunthorpe is Land's End, since Scunthorpe is in North Lincolnshire. It can only be about 400 miles. That's 17 miles for a toaster.

Mobil, I didn't take A Level Economics. I didn't even take GCSE Economics. But even I can see that's financial suicide on your part.

This song was written before the Channel Tunnel existed. I guess you could allow for car-ferry transport to, say, Zeebrugge, or Ostend, thus opening up Europe and a much greater distance for the 24 toasters and six double beds to cover, but I don’t think that’s really in the spirit of the song.

However, since I still was not asleep at this point, I decided to allow for that Channel Tunnel they’ve got there, and assume Mobil must mean a much greater distance than the UK could offer.

Since I was in bed, I made some guesses about reward-points-to-litres-of-petrol ratios, and random looking-it-up after the fact bore it out – a litre gets you a point. 4.5 litres per gallon = 4.5 points (can you keep up with the maths?).

A nice economical little car like the Micra (I wish they had them here, but can you imagine driving on the Prairies in one? The people in their monster trucks wouldn’t even see you as they chewed you up into their front grille) gets about 50 mpg when driving long-distance. 4.5 points for every 50 miles.

Now, points-to-pounds. I don’t live in England any more but I’d say you could get a decent toaster for fifteen quid. (Not one that does eggs, probably, or has a muffin-or-croissant cradle on top for when you want to defrost pastries. But one that toasts.) The best-known supermarket points scheme gives you £2.50 for 500 points. 3000 points for the toaster.

Times 24.

72,000 points.

If 72,000 points gets me 24 toasters, and 50 miles gets me 4.5 points..then...16,000 miles. 16,000 miles for my 24 toasters.

As the crow flies, that’s beyond New Zealand. Driving distance, overland and through the Channel Tunnel (remember that far back? Still with me? Getting sleepy? Good) it’s got to be somewhere in Asia. Mongolia, maybe (I’m adding miles to detour through Iran around... that sea there, above Iran. My geography is about as good as my maths. The Black Sea? The Caspian?)

None of this, though, approaches the question of why, if you had 16,000 miles worth of points under your belt, you’d think of getting 24 toasters. I hear you can get some really good stuff from those points things now. There’s more to rewards than acrylic tumblers and multiple toasters.

Unless.

Unless you have a large extended family in Ulaanbaatar who all really enjoy breakfast, and you are looking for holiday gifts to take them, I suppose.

what did you expect...

...if you're going to leave partially-drunk travel cups of tea out in your car for the day at this time of year?

vous connaissez l'histoire...

Health and peace to you as the old year passes.

Try not to make any pacts with the devil tonight, ok?

taken for questioning

I buy soap and shampoo from a particular shop for a particular reason. They sell solid shampoo, which means it doesn’t come in a plastic bottle.

I hover around fifty-fifty on whether it’s preferable to avoid plastic or palm-oil when it comes to soap and shampoo. I don’t know which is worse – buying things with palm oil in them, or buying things in plastic bottles. Each as bad as the other, probably. However, at the moment it is certainly easier to avoid the plastic bottle (soap and shampoo-wise) than to avoid palm oil. Even fair-trade places like Ten Thousand Villages still use palm oil in their soap.

I’m not sure if the particular shop has palm oil or not.

Okay, I just looked it up. Apparently not, so there’s another reason for me to keep going there.

Anyway I was lucky enough to receive a gift voucher for this shop, and was almost out of both soap and shampoo, so today I went.

I headed straight for the shampoo, and picked up the one I always get, because it’s meant to be good for if you swim in chlorinated water a lot. Immediately, a sales assistant appeared. ‘Which is your favourite shampoo?’ Um, this one. The one I’m buying. She fetched me a little paper bag to slide it into and I carried on. Another assistant asked if she could help me. I asked her to cut me a piece of the face soap I use. ‘Have you used this before?’ Yes. A third assistant then approached to ask if there was anything she could help me with and if I’d seen a particular product, the one she was holding. No, I said, because I hadn’t. Then she told me all about what it did. And then, shampoo assistant came back, and, wondered ‘Do you know that buying two shampoos would mean you get a free tin?’

I’d been in the store about a minute and been asked six questions already.

At that point the second assistant came back with my soap and asked if I knew about their promotion. I could get the same amount of soap again – of any soap – free! So I set off to look at all the soaps and choose one. Then, the first assistant came up again. ‘How long have you been a (our product) lover?’ I blinked. Caught off-guard, I actually started explaining how when I first moved here I’d fly home to England through Toronto airport and there was a shop there, and then when I came back I…

Then I stopped. You know, I finished vaguely. She nodded receptively, but I managed to hold my tongue and turned back to the soap.

‘Have you chosen your second soap yet??’ I jumped. Second assistant was back. No, I’m still looking. She slipped away again. Each time I reached for a soap, I could feel her inching back towards me. I backed off and took a turn around the shop to steady my nerves. And, in honesty, to see if I could do it without getting questioned.

With a deft two-step I made it back to the soaps and grabbed one of approximately equal size to the one I already had. I stepped smartly to the cash desk to pay, congratulating myself on avoiding having to parry a single enquiry.

‘Have you seen our (these products on the counter)?’ This time, I went for yes, because they were technically in front of my eyes and I had, in fact, seen them. ‘Would you like one?’ Not today. ‘Have you received our newsletter??’ No, I said, again truthfully, and watched as one was put in my bag while I paid. ‘Have you signed up for our email newsletter???’ Just for a moment I almost told the truth, but caught myself in the nick of time. I straightened my shoulders, got a grip and, Oh, yes, I said sunnily, signing the slip with a flourish and picking up my bag, escape now firmly in my sight.

One soap was left on the counter. The sales assistant picked it up to put in my bag. ‘Ah, you chose that one?’ she said encouragingly, and unable to stop myself, I said, I once got a lip salve thing in the same…flavour, and I liked it. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, ‘we don’t have the lip balms in that line in our stores any more. You must shop online. How long have you been visiting our online store?!’

I eyed her for a long moment.

I haven’t, I said. But I begin to think I might start.

some sort of joke?

Winter solstice, don't get me wrong. I like you. I like your vibe. I like what you signify.

But...let's make it a year til I see you again, shall we? Because this is the third time in a row we've got together, without an intervening interruption from your carefree brother, summer solstice.

I'm glad we were able to meet again here in the northern hemisphere, where things are the right way up and go in the right order. But, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder. So how about this: I promise to stay on this end of the globe, and you promise not to come back for 364 days. Deal?

Also: today's lunch? fly in my soup.

off

For holiday giftitude this year, I decided to only get people exactly what they wanted. Often I spend a lot of time thinking of something [that I think is] cool and unusual that totally goes with someone’s interests. But the thing is, everyone gets a lot of gifts. Not only is there Christmas and Hanukkah but there are a tremendous amount of end-of-year birthdays within my closest and mostest. And the thing I thought of was probably fine, but it wasn’t something they said they wanted, it was just something that kind of goes with them.

In the past I have also made socks for people. Because, well, even if socks don’t necessarily ‘go with your interests’ as such, I still think someone spending time to make you something nice by hand is a good gift. One reason I like to make people socks as gifts is because it means I was thinking of them, and spending my time producing something that is especially for them. To me, it’s meaningful.

I am still going this route in one direction; possibly two. But for everyone else, this year is the ‘just pick something off the list and buy it’ year.

This may sound a touch cynical and easy-way-outish. Well, it sort of is. I am making myself an easy holiday after all the travelling and moving and jobhunting and so on. But if there are Amazon wish lists out there, and there are HBC registries, and they have on them things that people said they wanted, well, why not point and click? You said you wanted it; here it is.

Then, quite recently, my dad threw a spanner in the works. When are you going to do me another pair of socks, then?

So my dad would really actually like - he said he wants - a pair of socks. A week and a half ago, I decided I would just about have time to squeeze in making a pair and mailing them.

This, friends, is lovely yarn. Look at it. I absolutely knew it was going to self-stripe in an interesting colourway and pattern. It’s Gawayn and the Green Knight foresty – pine foresty, the dark green and silver-grey-blue of evergreens and mythology.

And lo, the silver-blue behaves and interacts very nicely with some of the other blended colours, interleaving row by row. Pleasing.

Then suddenly, this arresting weird-ass pooling effect with the dark green. What the hell?

It doesn’t get better.

I did not sign up for making socks with a map of farking New Zealand on them. I hated it more and more as I went along. I wondered if it would work differently if I had knitted it pulling the yarn from the inside of the ball rather than from the outside, but deadline knitting is no time to be experimenting in that way. I had to get these in the post, pronto. I decided the Pooling New Zealand of No Apparent Reasondom could go at the back and down the heel, where it would be covered by trouser, and carried on.

When I got to the foot, it did this:

So now the well-behaved interleavery of the smoky silvergrey with the other evergreen forest colours was pooling to make a new zigzag stripe – a New Zealand in negative, if you will, and right on the top of the foot – in colours pulled straight from my sister’s bedroom decor circa 1987: pale grey with dusty rose, lavender and powder blue accents.

None of which features in my dad’s favourite colour schemes, for socks or anything else. None of which is part of any legendary evergreen forests of yore. And all of which combine with the original New Zealand effect for a yin yang of Ugly As Sin.

I have two balls of this yarn, so my final bid to unbugger up this sock was to add in the new ball, knitting one round in the first yarn and one in the second, to try to break up the pooling. Break up the pooling it did, but it also gave me a random pattern last seen on the screen of my Atari computer during the 20 minute burr-burrr-burrr session it underwent while loading the Sammy the Sea Serpent game from a cassette tape.

I unambiguously hate this sock. I thought it was going to be lovely, and it’s ugly. It’s taken a lot of hours, and everything about it is off. I don’t even slightly want to give this to my dad for Christmas. I definitely don’t want to carry on, and finish it, and then waste even more hours making a second that is equally hideous. There is nothing to like about either the process or the product.

Emergency socks are on the go. There’s still time.

books

If you look at the thingy at the top left of this blog, you may have noticed that the ingredients of the magical fusion have been absent of late. Not a lot of books, music, socks or cake going on at the moment.

Remiss.

Luckily Joan is about to release her new book! and here is the spiffy trailer:

Click here to see it on Joan's blog.

my hero

I am a treehugger. You know this to be true. I take my canvas bags to the supermarket and my travel mug to tea and coffee shops and recycle and compost and don’t buy stuff or eat meat and I get fair-trade tea and use solid shampoo because it's made without palm oil and doesn’t come in a plastic bottle and most of all, I ride a bike and take the bus. I’m not on the map as far as cars are concerned. The Top Gear men would hate me (even though I actually find them quite charming and watchable, for ridiculously posh wealthy petrol-headed hoons). I don’t, in general, much enjoy the burning of petrol to get places you could get with the burning of a bit of leg energy just as well.

A year ago, I had a car, to get to a stupidly distant job. The best I could do was find a small and fuel-efficient one and carpool daily. Since that time ended, it’s been bike and bus all the way.

But I have to admit to you, that in the last week, my hero, whom I love with a love that knows no bounds at all, at all, is:

I have a new job, and a new home. It’s a long long way from where I last lived in Canada. More than 3,000 kilometres. And everything I own – which to many people, doesn’t amount to much, but is still quite a lot to me – was located near to where the old job and home were. It had to be moved from one to the other, and so did I.

This, my small and fuel-efficient hero, is what got me and everything I own – that is, EVERY. SINGLE. THING. I. OWN. – more than three thousand kms in three days, without a complaint. Without a squeak, a moan, a groan, a hiss, a crunch; without even a polite request for a refreshing drink and a bit of a sit down.

It took me safely around scary Detroit in the early hours with news of a gas station carjacking shootout on the radio;

through the centre of Ann Arbor because of my creative map reading; across the rest of Michigan in such a flash I hardly noticed;

over the Chicago Skyway, pointing out the baseball stadium and a building with funny white ears on the way, and politely ignoring the oddly pull-y camber of the road and the continuous stops for bizarre mini-tolls of sixty cents every ten paces;

into and through Wisconsin without requesting fresh cranberry juice, or asking to stop at the restaurant with the name you’d never hear in the UK (The Bog) or even at the Wisconsin Indoor Kalahari Experience;

purred happily along the beautifully-paved highway between La Crosse and Madison;

joined me in a juvenile giggle at Minnesota’s billboards for Stearns Vet Outlet and Pharmacy (We Do Cows!);

stepped easily up to the challenge of the 75 mph speed limit in North Dakota that meant we zipped through the state like a dose of salts;

nobly protected EVERYTHING I OWN through one night parked in Eau Claire and one in Brandon, Manitoba...and proudly rolled me home more relaxed and content than I’ve felt in a while.

It’s been treated to a nice new set of winter tyres and a service, and as a true hero should be, was allowed to rest on its laurels for an entire day before we headed off flat-hunting together.

Last week I was on the bus to my new job, outside temperature minus four. The woman sitting next to me commented, ‘well, I guess we’re getting our Indian Summer at last!’

Hi, Saskatchewan! I’m back!

here

I'm here.

I am here, I promise.

It's just that here, on any given day recently, has been an astonishing variety of places, most of which are extremely far apart, and it's a bit tiring and quite hard to think or even put my trousers on the right way round, never mind get the right vitamins and/ or any sleep at all.

So. I'm here. Soon, I'll be elsewhere.

Oh, also? The keys keep pinging off my keyboard. ('keep pinging off' = two keys. Have departed my computer keyboard, and I can't fix them back on). One of them, even the little rubber nobble beneath the key has come off. It's been suggested it's because I bang the living daylights out of my computer keys, having learnt to type on a typewriter as a wee girl. I say, they should stand up to that sort of treatment. Is nothing built to last any more?

doing it by the book, or Sybylla says hi

So I set off from Jasper Jones...

...made a right at Breath...

...and oddly enough, ended up right in My Brilliant Career in time for tea.