Day Jar View

Straight off the bat, congratulations to Sean Penn for winning the Oscar for Best Actor the other night. I say winning, but of course we can’t say that any more; we must say the Oscar “went to” him – presumably for fear of implying that the others are all losers.

Well, they are. Or at least they were that night. I’m sure some of them will be again, and some will win something one day, but let’s call a spade a spade.

Apropos that victory (natch) for Milk, and something that happens on a regular basis in my house, I thought I’d bring up the subject of Use By, Best Before and Sell By dates.

Before we go any further, I love my Girlfriend, who is also the Mother of my wonderful Daughter and has another one brewing, as it were. However, there is one aspect of her behaviour which I find brilliantly off the wall and endearing at the same time, and it’s her relationship with the dates printed on the side of everything these days.

For the most part, if a perishable good is even in the same lunar cycle as its Use By date, she will become agitated, and make moves to hide it from me, so that it can then be discarded without my noticing.

However, as we order our shopping online, and I do all the cooking in our house, I know exactly what we’ve got at all times, so her efforts are largely in vain.

Notwithstanding the waste of money, my beef isn’t so much with this particular habit as with the behaviour that she displays alongside it. For example, whilst pouring 2 pints of perfectly drinkable milk down the sink (as she did this morning), she can be happily cutting the mould off the cheddar before making her daily sandwiches.

Whilst chucking out a chicken that’s been deep frozen for 2 months, she can be happily reheating a pie portion from the fridge I made 6 days before.

I don’t try and work out what’s going on in her head – I’ve long since given up on that – but I do wonder about it.

For the past ten years, I’ve had a plant. It’s been in a few offices, and now resides in my house., above the fire. I don’t know what it is – I think it might be an Amaryllis, but don’t quote me – but it is still around, and is the only thing we haven’t managed to kill.

Each year I am consistently amazed by the appearance around this time of green stalks, from a bulb that has all the hallmarks of a dessicated cricket ball. How does it survive? How does it know it’s spring? How on earth can it go without a drink for 4 months when I forget to water it?

Who knows. All I know is that around the same time that the Business minister was busy putting her foot in her mouth about the green shoots appearing in the economy’s flower bed, my plant was busy putting up a few of its own. Here’s to another ten years!

The news that BMW is cutting 850 jobs at its Cowley plant doesn’t come as much of a shock to anyone I wouldn’t have thought. Apart, it seems, to union leaders.

Despite the fact that the past quarter showed a fall of around a third in new car sales, it seems the union dinosaurs can’t help themselves when it comes to slagging off the government, the manufacturer, and anyone else who perhaps ever bought, drove or looked at a Mini.

In most businesses, if people stop buying your product, you have to cut costs. BMW will make less cars, cutting the working week from 7 to 5 days, and therefore need less people to make them. As a business with shareholders, they have a responsibility to them first and foremost; paying workers to sit around idle to avoid the wrath of union leaders is not only a catastrophic business decision, but it is also just plain daft.

The workers that are getting the chop are mainly agency workers I understand, and the unions have branded the decision a “disgrace”, as they accuse BMW of picking them as they are easier to sack as they have no rights, despite the fact that some of them have been employed as agency workers for 5 years or more.

I think it works both ways. They had jobs, often at a higher rate of pay than if they had been officially employed by the company, for around 5 years in a very competitive industry. If they had been promised anything by the unions then that is wrong, but I can’t believe that they expected special treatment at a time when the parking lots at Cowley must be a sea of steel.

I hope they get all the support they need, but to expect to walk into another manufacturing job is not realistic, so they must be prepared to re-skill where necessary. And in future, like the rest of us, be prepared for the worst at the start of each day.

Today it has emerged that Michael Phelps was snapped by a “friend” indulging in a little extra-curricular substance abuse.

Given the recent fuss over the likes of Marion Jones and Dwain Chambers using performance-enhancing drugs, I thought it was a bit odd that they considered the use of cannabis in the same way as EPO, or steroids, given that on the occasions I’ve indulged I would have struggled to get changed into my trunks, let alone swim a length or two.

Maybe being an uber-athlete it affected him differently, but I would have paid good money to see him in action.

I’m sat here reading a magazine from Sage, the accounting software bods, and its title is “Solutions”. Fair enough, I suppose, given that presumably it deigns to solve problems that crop up with running your business.

When I saw it, however, I was reminded how many things seem to be a problem – given the amount of times you see the word “solutions” thrown about these days.

There’s Shanks Waste Solutions – waste is a problem when it hangs about, so that’s fair enough. There’s a “washroom solutions” van that I see around from time to time, and I guess soap and water solve the problem of germs, so that’s ok too.

But there’s a hair salon on my route to work – with “Hair Solutions” plastered in the window. Now I have a problem with my hair  in that I don’t have much of it, and the only “solution” is probably a wig, although that will of course create its own problems. But if you are saying that everyone who goes in there has a problem with their hair, it sounds to me like they might be put off a bit.

Just a thought.