We harvested a good crop of blackberries and I stopped off at the coop store to buy ice-cream to accompany the blackberry pie I would make when we got home.In the shop I overheard a conversation about ALDI taking over coop stores. The gist of it was that our small store remains the coop but coop stores with a petrol station forecourt will become ALDI. I don’t know if this is nationwide. I did google it and there seem to be lots of notices about ALDI taking over stores, including Waitrose in some places.
Well, well! ALDI has certainly come a long way since I watched their store being built in Shaw near here some thirty-odd years ago when I was working at the community centre there. It was the first of the supermarkets, in our area anyway, to introduce a coin deposit for trolleys. Their range of goods was strictly limited and I knew people who sort of scuttled in and out rather shamefacedly, almost afraid of being seen to shop in “the cheap supermarket”. The girls (and they were almost all girls) on the tills had to memorise a code for all the items sold and if they could not adapt and learn fast enough they did not survive the trial period. Strictly cash-only, the store did not accept payment by credit or debit card. And nowadays their range of goods is huge, aLthough their displays remain perfunctory and their big stores are introducing self-service tills, must like all the other supermarkets. Is this progress?
Today began rather dull and cloudy, had a sunny spell mid-morning and has now gone back to being cloudy. No frost today but it remains rather chilly.
Late last night I heard revellers making their way homeward from the Party in the Park. When I went out first thing this morning I found a half empty plastic glass of beer on our garden wall. In the fifty or so yards from our house to the corner I collected three more plastic glasses, empty this time, and a couple of half-empty beer cans. They are now in my recycling bin. I suppose the revellers could not see the bins in my garden in the dark!
Amongst the various articles about things royal which abound at the moment, here is an odd one about the crown of the UK monarch.
I like the bits of implausible mythology connected with such things. There’s St Edward’s sapphire, possibly the oldest stone in the crown, apparently buried as as a ring with King Edward the Confessor in 1066 and dug out of his ring a century later. Edward had given the ring to a beggar, the story goes, who turned out to be St John the Evangelist. Shades of St James sailing to Galicia on a stone boat - these biblical figures did get around.
I like the fact that it is not the “imperial crown” because of the British empire but because Henry VIII liked the shape of the closed arch. However, mynfavpurite bit is this:
“A delightfully dated 1960s film available on YouTube shows the Queen talking about the crown, saying of the ruby: “I always like to think of it being worn by King Henry V during the Battle of Agincourt.” Richard III may also have had it on his helmet when he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth, the Tudors retrieving it before it ended up in a car park.”
Hey! Ho! What a lot of nonsense!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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