Pizza the Action...

CIRCA 5:45PM on Monday... I'VE made an appointment for my doctor's for 9:00am Thusday (earliest time available). They'd had the cheek to chuck me off their list, having allegedly written to me mid 2007 to "confirm I was still on the list" (why wouldn't I be~?) What doolalliness. I just realized: if I were no longer there I would surely have registered with another doctor who would have written to my present doctor (a long Tamil-type name) in order to forward my notes and paperwork. In other words they know I've moved nowhere. Had I done so, the new doctor would long ago have been in touch!

What scandal!!

At the weekend ~ I can't believe this! ~ I got ripped off by a major highstreet supermarket for 63p. Hardly a bankbreaking sum, I'm well aware, and yet highly annoying nonetheless. When I passed through the tills with my 600g intellectual pasta tomato and cheese (ie "margarita" pizza flavour) (this is the raw tortelloni I favour: 7 mins boiling time with ready-chopped broccoli in the same pan, grate on intellectual cheese and the result's incredible!)

So I buy one 600g cheese & tomato tortelloni for £1.67 ~ broccoli I have already at home (my robos' favourite); plus one Wensleydale cheese for on-grating (not my top preference ~ far too crumbly and I hate crumbly cheese. I like my cheese strong and nutty and smooth-plasticky in texture... Edam-like, ideally (for eating); Cheddar-like for cooking (don't bother with the supposed-authentic mozzarella it's nothingness...) The holey Norwegian Jarlesburg is a particular favourite of mine. So I don't really like this Wensleydale cheese. According to the packet it's made by Northern monks:... I'd always assumed it was one of those industrially-named massmarket cheeses with no heritage. Y'know the sort of cheese with an "authentic" English TV-ad filmed Lord of the Rings-style in New Zealand...

Anyway I purchased only one 200g or so Wensleydale for £1.37; a total bill of £3.04. Supposedly.

Imagine my repressed middle-class shock when the till lady trilled out "that's £3.67 please!" in terribly cheery tones. Cussing myself for allegedly lousing up the mental arithmetic I kept on my best bourgeois poker-face whilst handing over my very last £5er...

My purchases (plus my trotter broccoli) made a yummy dinner. I have to say. I love freshly boiled-up tortelloni. Broccoli went wonderfully with it. The Wensleydale, though peppered and grated right on the steaming pasta, being too crumbly and unpleasant in texture, refused to melt.

T'was only upon a relaxed reclining idle-minded glance over said till receipt that I realized my mental arithmetic wasn't off-kilter at all, but my cheese had been scanned twice. Generously with a multisave ("2 for £2!" but ungenerously leaving me with the mere one Wensleydale I took home and not the two I'd just realized I'd paid for!

Having arranged to meet a friend down a cafe a half an hour away the supermarket had to wait...

By Sunday afternoon my indignation was no cooler. So I stormed down the supermarket, receipt and empty packs in hand (I may have been overcharged but the food was yummy!)

The man at Customer Services was quite bemused. How do I prove paying for 2 items yet receiving one? I'm glad now for the Shops & Robbers documentary I viewed a couple of years ago, which highlighted how each individual till in a large supermarket is individually CCTV'd and auto-cross-referenced on-screen as every item's scanned. This prevents (or at least records) potential staff scams. The most famous being when a till person acts in cahoots with a customer, passing several expensive articles (eg magna of champagne) with fingers blocking the barcode, while a small enough bill for Value toilet paper and bread is rung up to avoid suspicion...

So when I got a blank look I pointed out that every product scanned is filmed ~ and got my refund forthwith. How highly petty. And yet how very annoying. If I had dared walk out without paying even 63p, I'm sure security would have been all over me and quite possibly even the police. Put the boot on the other foot, however and though I'm refunded without a verbal quibble, they say ever so much more with their eyes!

What else? Our robo blood-in-wee shocker's still ongoing and I'm ever more sure the situation's "hormonal" rather than symptomatic of any illness.

I've observed Baby Itchy pee "normally". She holds still ~ you'd not even know she was doing it ~ still ~ still ~ and it's done.

The other pee is quite a different posture:~ bum up in the air and bright red drops of blood are left behind.

I think this explains her intermittently highly fractious behaviour ~ including biting me ~ if you rightly remember ~ and rides out the ever more likely seeming explanation that "she just needs a boyfriend"....

Poor little cow! So extraordinarily tiny and barely anything to her... yet so extremely highly sexed!

I cleaned out the tiny trotters yesterday morning. Bashful and Itchy went a-scrabbling in their diggery, where I dropped them. Spherical, suspicious as ever, stashed herself in an aerial loo-roll tube and pretended not to be there. They don't live among woodshaved "cage litter" any more as I don't think living waist-deep in itchy shavings can possibly be good for them as a permanent measure... I don't want my poor babies getting scratty fur. Their current (new) enclosure's as deep as it is wide (ie a mirrored square, as you view it head-on) and the floor shape's bowed outwards, necessitating special cutting or tearing of the flooring material. This I did with a specially adapted copy of London Lite. Out the old one came. Spherical glared at me balefully from her tube. In went the new "carpeting", followed by those 2 baby trotters fresh from the diggery. How they pinged around and around, bemused by the horrid new smell, devoid of days of dutiful scent-marking!

Round and round they trotted, like a furry horse-race. And I gave them a tiny new bedroom just now ~ a Swan tips filters (big-size) box.

The little trotters are a-sleeping as I speak, but they'll soon be trotting again and poking out like furry moose-heads from plaques.

Now I've got to go; I'm extremely tired and more to the point hungry. I got an intellectual chicken tikka pizza to check out my whizzy oven (225C (though the packet states 220 I always err on the side of incineration. Only one oven in my life's ever over-cooked and that belonged to a friend with relatives in Mayfair...)

Righty-ho: better go else I'll never get this posted...

... 1000 apologies everyone for not having been in touch personally (still!) for such a long while... I really haven't had the net-time, xcept to "post-&-go"! (As the cyber-shampoo ad might say...)

VIDEO:~
SAM SPARRO: BLACK AND GOLD

This is such a catchy tune; see how you like it...