Post office strike

So, the Post Office are on strike? Well then, if you want more money, don't screw up my post.

I received a letter which I was expecting this morning, containing (or, as we will subsequently discover, not containing) a 3G Vodaphone dongle.

Rather than arriving in the normal way, emblazoned with a stamp, crisp, shiny and reminiscent of Christmases past, this package, for all its brilliant yellow envelope, was encased in a slightly shabby plastic bag, bearing the legend ‘ Our Sincere Apologies’.

The dongle was in a card envelope, standard 100g one. That in turn was in a Royal Mail plastic bag, upon which were the words:

Our Sincere Apologies

Dear Customer,
I am sorry that the enclosed item, addressed to you, has been damaged whilst in our care. Although we do all we can to prevent such damage, it does occasionally occur.

If you think any of the items are missing or damaged, you can obtain the form ‘Lost, damaged or delayed inland mail’ by phoning your local Customer Service Centre on 08457740740 (all calls charged at local rates) or from Post Office® branches and we will arrange for investigations to be made.

For more information please refer to Royal Mail’s Code of Practice booklet, your guide to our service standards.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Yours sincerely

Customer Service Manager

Telephone: 0845 740 740

Except the envelope hasn’t been damaged. It has been opened- neatly. And the Dongle has gone.

So you cannot have a pay rise until you learn how to send letters without stealing from them.

Allegedly.

Fray Bentos Pies

Chez Manley, Friday is Fray-day as we celebrate the joy that is the Fray Bentos pie.



It is only as relatively recently as recently that I discovered that Fray Bentos was not named after a brace of culinary geniuses who I had presumed were named Messrs Bentos and Fray. No, gentle reader, it is in fact a small town of 25000 in South West Uruguay, close to the Argentine border.

The town appears to have pretty much always produced processed meat in one way or another and the site of the Liebig Extract of Meat Company (which was responsible for such meaty goodness as Oxo) now boasts a rather smashing museum, presumably dedicated to the mighty Fray Bentos Pie.

Personally I have always favoured the Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney Pudding, but the family Manley grows and, with it, the menu must adapt to meat [sic] every palette. Now Fray-days can stretch beyond steak and kidney, through to such delights as the Fray Bentos Mince Beef and Onion Pie (as recalled in late 2008 for containing shards of metal) or even the god-awful mushroom one.

So, I knew that Fray Bentos was owned by Premier Foods (The UK's largest manufacturer of foodstuffs), and I was not overly surprised to learn that, thanks largely to the UK market, last year the Fray Bentos brand was worth around £30million, but I am shocked to learn that, despite the huge success of the little pies from South America's cattle country (Fray Bentos Pies command a 94.6% market share), Premier Foods intend to change the Fray Bentos brand.

One of the positives from this is a Tender 'Just Steak' Fray Bentos Pie offering, which I welcome, but there is a massive downside.

"all recipes across the entire range have been improved, with a 20% reduction of salt per pie and no artificial colours and flavourings"

Why ruin my Fray Bentos Pie? I love it just the way it is. Oh, and there is more. . .



Why, PF, why? Why destroy the Fray Bentos Pie brand? You know it is successful, why ruin it?

Rob Stacey, who is something to do with Marketing at Fray Bentos pies, apparantly has been saying that: “The evolution of the Fray Bentos pie has led to the perfect recipes being created. These new modern recipes will attract sales from a wider consumer base without losing our original following of “Great British Blokes”. Premier Foods and Fray Bentos are making it our priority to create the ultimate pie and hot canned meal which can be eaten by any family, couple, or student.”

Well Rob Stacey, I say that you are a tit. Fray Bentos Pies were perfect, you are just going to wreck them and the “Great British Blokes” really are not a real persona to target, After all, the “Great British Blokes” are generally not going to be doing the shopping anyway, so you need to be targeting the “Beaten British Wife”, you bell-end.

I mean, really. Fray Bentos Pies are and almost saturation brand, utterly in control of their market, and they go and pull a stunt like this. I suppose that every Marketing Manager wants to put their stamp on a brand, but let's not stamp on the brand, eh?

I'll leave you with the complaints of Tricia, who feels that the new Fray Bentos Pie tine are too thick and even goes as far as questioning whether the new recipe is worth the extra effort needed to get to it.

Fridays may become fry-days at this rate, Fray Bentos. Don't forget your user base. I seriously believe that, in an economic climate which should benefit the Fray Bentos Pie, you may just have made a blunder which simply removes your product from the eyes of the consumer and opens the floor to a new pretender.

Then where will Uraguay be, eh? Apart, obviously, from in South America.

An updated interface - Hacklab's automated tweeting toilet.

The crazy fellows at hacklab have produced a toilet which tweets every time it is flushed.

If you follow @hacklabtoilet, and I cannot imagine why you would not want to, then you'll get to see every time the flush is activated (or at least as often as it works).

The full tech spec is available here, should you wish to set up a similar device, or if you want to follow someone more interesting then you could do a lot better than My Lordship. Really, you could do better.

Oxley Cold Distilled Gin

I am a big gin drinker. Let's face it, I am a big everything, but I do like a nice gin. Bombay Sapphire, my home made sloe gin, Plymouth, Larios, Tesco Dry London, Tanqueray or Hendricks (especially Hendricks), I'll drink it. The way I see it, short of novelty flavours, you are going to have to go a long way to pique my interest with something new on the gin front.

with their cold distilled gin, Oxley have done so.

The Oxley twist is that their ‘super premium’ gin is produced using a "cold distilling" process. 14 different botanicals are macerated in grain spirits, then the macerated grain is hand spooned into the kettle. Rather than heating the micture, in the traditional manner, a vacuum is then created, which causes the alcohol to vaporize at just -5°C.

The vapour then condenses in a secondary probe at -100°C, from where the liquid gin is hand collected in one of the 120 bottles a day which is produced. That is just 480 bottles a week - when you make gin this good you can afford a day off.

Obviously this all sound a little gimicky, so I had to taste it. I was pleasantly surprised. Apparantly "Oxley has a mild juniper bouquet that gives rise to intense, almost sweet, herbals on the tongue only to surprise with a return of juniper vapor. The mouth feel is very smooth and the martini it makes is excellent". All I know is that it was the cleanest tasting gin I have experienced.

Oxley also employ continuous distillation. Where batch distillation can mean that an amount of flavour is lost in the heads and the tails of each batch, where continuous distillation continually extracts the pure gin.

The Oxley bottle, with its sartorially worn galvanized tin bucket around the bottom a leather cord 'fashionably twisted around the neck' is quirky but tasteful, but it is not cheap at around $100/litre.

Indeed, it is too expensive for me, but . . . because of the low output, Oxley bottles are individually numbered. Whilst looking around I came across #00063 and my interest was aroused. Some time later we discovered #00073 and #00075 (which Dug purchased, it being the year of our birth). I was considering #00063, but had decided to leave it (it is very expensive gin) when #00069 was discovered.

I now own bottle number 69 of Oxley cold distilled gin. I just need to convince myself to open it.

Stop turning me against Freddie.

I love Flintoff, he's a great British all rounder and I love his happy approach to the game (in contrast to, for example, Collingwood).



That said, I am getting fed up with Freddie fever.

Hearing today that Broad's performance yesterday was a rival for Freddie's at Lords was supremely irritating. 5-37 is considerably better than 5-92, whichever way you look at it.

His batting has not been extraordinary either:
37 + 26 at Sophia Gardens
4 + 30 (not out) at Lords
74 (and a good 74 at that) at Edgbaston
7 at the Oval.

An average of nearly 30 is not bad, but it is not even as good as Collingwood who scored only 4 runs across both innings at Headingly, where Flintoff was rested.

Bowling he has 8 wickets for 375 runs, which is not comparable to Collingwood's better 1 for 38 (because of the difference in scale), but Anderson has taken 12 for 496, despite playing in the disaster that was Headingly and Broad has racked up an astonishing 17 for just 473 runs.

I'm not saying Flintoff isn't great, he is, and I am not expecting him to perform as well as the batsmen and the bowlers, but why he is being lauded to quite the extent he is, I cannot understand. Sadly this media frenzy is turning me against him, when I want desperately to have him leave the scene with a great series.

Yes he is good, but he's no Botham.

The remainder of Nadia

I turned up this morning to find this:



which amused me, slightly.

Nadia + Laurence Dallaglio = Sturdy Girl.

This is Laurence Dallaglio, we escorted him from the premises of the pub (John Gandy's). We hope we can go back.



We think he is too Manley and so we have taken a model from a high street retailer who we call Nadia (because we have 'no-idea' what her real name is) and cut her head off. This hurt quite a lot. Not her, me. Donna, I am sorry, but your weak girly scissors were not suited to the job of hacking through cardboard. After all, this was not just any cardboard, this was hard, laminated High Street Retailer cardboard.



Because it hurt so much, David Tapp took over cutting duties. He likes it really and made a particular fuss of her hair.



This is the finished product. It looks a little like Sturdy Girl, b3ta's favourite celebrity:



She is fine! We like a girl whose neck doesn't quite fit her shoulders. And there ends the blog.

Locked in.

Today I became locked in the lavatory with no paper.

This would be less irritating if it were not for two aggravating factors:

I would have had enough paper had I not blown my nose several times whilst on the job.

I had to call David Tapp to come and rescue me.

The toilet roll dispenser takes two rolls, each huge to the point of ridicule, so that when one is empty a slide allows access to the second. Sadly the second was not there today. I have yet to kill the cleaner.

David, bless him, came to my rescue by bringing a life-size cardboard cut-out of Lawrence Dallaglio into the toilets and assaulting the cubicle.

Thankfully he assaulted the cubicle next to me and I was able to get some paper and return to a full ovation in the office.

Bah!

Have I died of Swine Flu yet?

No.

Ginness

Today is a lovely day for a Ginness.

Ingredients:

• 4 ice cubes
• 2 oz Hendricks gin
• 4 oz Fever Tree Indian Tonic Water
• 10 oz Guinness Original Stout
• Lime wedge for garnish

Preparation method

1. Gently pour Guinness into a straight pint glass.
2. Place the ice cubes in a tall, narrow glass.
3. Add the Hendricks and the tonic water onto the ice cubes.
4. Stir gin mixture well with a long spoon.
5. Upend gin into the pint glass with the Guinness.
6. Garnish with lime wedge and serve immediately.
7. Rinse and repeat.

* Calories 298.4
* Protein 2.0g
* Sugars 29.6g
* Total Fat 0.3g
* Salt 8.8mg