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The guy who runs the workshops is called James Lockley and I think I used to work with him. To be honest I want to applaud - regardless of whether you believe it works or not, extracting

Gosh, you guys are going to give me a big head.

I'm all for it. I mean, it's not like they're actually bubbling Granny's mortal remains through the jacuzzi, or offering discounted gym membership when you cremate your fifth relative. The heat isn't even being generated by the corpses. It's being generated by a gas burner.

Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising

This had me giggling and cringing for a few minutes.

I think it will depend on industry. The guy in the story was going for a marketing position so a practical demonstration of his marketing skills was more use than any number of qualifications listed on a paper CV. Even if he'd never actually worked in marketing and had no qualifications, demonstrating that level of imagination and competence would be enough to get him through to interview.

Hiring someone for, say, a firm of builders, would be a completely different scenario. No one will care how computer-confident a carpenter is or how many times a bricklayer says "erm," as long as they're experienced in the building trade, can show their current CSCS details, and provide a couple of references.

If you just want cheap and basic custom printed, it's worthwhile having a look at Vistaprint... it depends what your priorities are really.

On my personal scale Tesco is somewhere between Asda and Sainsburys.

I'd put Asda for the shell suits. Aldi and Lidl are more student-y - great for bulk buys of rice and pasta and potatoes, fantastic for cheap booze and sweeties, but the vegetables are a token effort and the meat is all mechanically reclaimed.

hahaha! Hadn't heard that one

There's always horses...


I think (and this is going to resonate for the techies) that the difficulty is we've been constantly upgrading the transport system for hundreds of years, as and when a given problem gets too bad.

You start off with the track made by the path the cows take to the river and then you make it bigger, wider, flatter, change the end point, make it wider again, link it up to another track, and before you know it, the whole mess is too big and too unwieldy and you're working flat-out just to try and keep the holes patched up.

A completely new system might provide a solution. We could probably come up with some incredible ideas, like maybe a public transport system for longer journeys which teams with automatic rental rights of an electric car for poddling about town at either end. But that would be far too big and expensive to ever start.

It's aspirational, different groups of society value different things.

So at one end of the scale you have people showing off about how little money they've spent and aren't they doing well with such limited resources (think along the lines of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch). Thrift is applauded.

At the other end of the scale are people showing off about how much money they have available to spend (think Hyacinth Bucket). It is the fact of *not* having to count every penny that is applauded.

I currently shop at Sainsburys and you want to hear the amount of ribbing I get for it from friends and family about having become "all middle-class".

I think Steve's right about Waitrose competing in the M&S market, but perhaps for a younger generation.

The difference I feel is that the M&S food range is centred on reliability and (not to beat around the bush) ease of use - you can buy a potato in M&S but their core products are the prepared items that just need to be heated up and/or tipped onto a plate. The adverts have Caroline Quentin entertaining her guests and emphasising how simple it is to "cheat" with these nice, ready made, high quality, easy-open packets of food.

Waitrose on the other hand is centred more on creativity and *ingredients*, organic this and free range that. Their adverts feature chefs like Heston Blumenthal and "new recipes" (freshly-marketed manufactured products). They're doing a really incredible job of appealing to both the idealised Professional Persona (dynamic, creative, new ideas, no messing about) and the idealised Homemaker Persona (home baking, healthy and delicious family meals, ethically-sound, environmentally-friendly).