Continuing theme

Here's one I wrote a year ago, just published.

I can appreciate how disappointed you must be.

Dear Tesco PLC,

I am writing to you to inform that I am sorely disappointed with your own-brand 'Recipe Improved' English breakfast muffins (pack of 6). I am at this very moment eating one. Indeed, I have been eating Tesco muffins for breakfast for many months now and there is just something missing from the new recipe: a certain 'je ne sais quoi' has been replaced with a bald 'quoi?'. The muffins are not the same. I hope to see the old recipe reinstated soon.

I hope to hear your thoughts on this soon.

Yours expectantly,

Guy M. Taylor

Dear Mr Taylor,

Firstly, I’d like to apologise for the delay in getting back to you. Please let me assure you that we always try to respond to our customers' queries in a timely manner and I’m sorry that due to high volumes of contact, this has not happened on this occasion.

I'm sorry that you're not happy with the new recipe on our English Breakfast Muffins. I can appreciate how disappointed you must be.

I'd like to look into this to establish what changes have been made or if there is a quality issue with the ones that you've purchased. Can you kindly advise of the following information from the packaging:

Barcode Number
Date Codes
Batch/Production Code (Found with the Date Codes)

If you could also send me your full address details, and the amount you paid when purchased then I'd be more than happy to issue you a refund in the form of a Tesco Moneycard.

I do hope that, despite the problems you've faced, you'll continue to shop with us, giving us the chance to provide the excellent service you've come to expect and so rightly deserve to receive.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact me at customer.service@tesco.co.uk quoting TES9067180X.

Kind Regards


J------------
Customer Service Manager
Tesco Customer Service

Dear J--------,

QUOTING TES9067180X

Thank you very much for your e-mail. Of course I understand the customer services team of a supermarket chain as large as Tesco must receive a lot of correspondence and the delay is understood.

However, I have since disposed of (recycled, actually) the packaging of the English Breakfast Muffins and so sadly cannot provide you with the Barcode Number, Date Codes, Batch Code or Production Code.

Should I have been able to provide these details, your kind offer of a Tesco Moneycard is duly noted and much appreciated.

However, it's not about the money. That the muffins only cost 74 pence is beside the point, even in these austere times. That I have witnessed the price of butter (it's not an English Breakfast Muffin without butter, it's just a muffin) rise on an astronomical scale from around 1 pound to 1 pound and 30 some pence in a matter of months is also beside the point.

It's the recipe that's wrong. J-----, Tesco has let me down. I used to love breakfast, I used to rejoice in it. Now your muffins just taste cheap, and there is nothing to celebrate and certainly nothing to rejoice in. Can you please change the recipe back, please?

Kind regards,

Guy M. Taylor

Dear Mr Taylor,

Thank you for your response. I appreciate that you've thrown the packaging away given the delay in my reply.

I've asked my support team if they're aware of any issues with our muffins so we can establish if its the change in recipe or possibly a quality issue with the pack that you purchased.

However, my offer of a moneycard still stands. If you wish to receive this, please advise me of your address and I will duly send this to you with my best wishes.

Thank you for taking the time to write further.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact me at customer.service@tesco.co.uk quoting TES9085797X.

Kind Regards


J-----------
Customer Service Manager
Tesco Customer Service

Dear J--------,

QUOTING TES9085797X

That's no problem, I'm determined to get the bottom of this.

I look forward to hearing what your support team has to say about the muffins. I'm fairly convinced the change to the recipe is to blame, but I'm still interested to know of their findings.

With this in mind, J------, can you tell me what change was made to the recipe? I've since eaten some more Tesco muffins, and I can say with some authority that the so-called, 'new, improved' muffins taste stale even when they're fresh. Could that be to do with flour? I think that's part of the problem. I'm no baker, but I suspect flour is at the root of all of this.

Kind regards,

Guy M. Taylor

Dear Mr Taylor,

Thank you for your email and I apologise for the delay in my response. My colleague J------- is currently away so I hope you don't mind me replying on her behalf.

We are sorry to hear that you don't find the English muffin to be improved.

A lot of work has been done to improve the product. This has been independently tested and benchmarked. The new product has been formulated with new kit and a new recipe in order to improve the taste and texture. A 2-stage mixing process allows the correct consistency of dough to be achieved and provides further aeration which in turn gives a more open texture. The griddle settings have been formulated to give a slightly crunchy outer texture and a soft, fluffy inner texture. The quality of the flour used in the recipe combined with the level of added soya flour allows a white crumb to be produced. The flavour of the muffin has also been improved with the addition of an extra 0.2% salt compared to the existing product. An alternative improver system allows a more stable open texture.

I hope this helps and thank you for taking the time to email us.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact me at customer.service@tesco.co.uk quoting TES9097518X.

Kind Regards


A----------
Customer Service Manager
Tesco Customer Service

Bella

On the subject of Romantic Love

I've been debating whether or not to write this for weeks.

The beginning of the year saw the end of another very brief and inconsequential fling. That's how I'm training myself to see it, although it probably meant a lot more to me than that, in all honesty. (It's a coping strategy of sorts, and, in any case, the last time I wrote about a similar topic here, the wrong person read all about it and that, as they say, was that). You wonder about it for hours and your mind can't really get any purchase on any other subject, but, for whatever reason it didn't work out. The less said about it the better, but I do want to note that the other person in this very brief and inconsequential fling read my blog. All of it. Apart from maybe my mum, I don't know of anyone else who has done this. Props to Jackson and Watkins, both of whom I suspect are avid if occasional readers; Champ, who once used this blog in a class he taught and Simon W, who chastised me when I stopped writing somewhere back there in May '08 or something.

No-one else has read all of it though and that's why I hesitated for a long time. You can never be sure of your readership, especially on the internet. You cannot guarantee your readership, nor their point of view on what you write, whatever it might be- poetry, blog entries, articles, whatever.

At work recently we've had some research about (going to say it now) Love. Someone in Japan wanted to know about timing and Love for a TV programme. When is the best time to propose, when is the best time to kiss for the first time, when to reject someone or when to ask something of someone you love. Etc.

It transpires that one of the world's premier experts on Romantic Love is an anthropologist called Dr. Helen Fisher. I had never heard of her, but you might. She is very careful to refer to Love as Romantic Love, and in various speeches, papers and books of hers she peppers her work with references to literature and folklore and aphorisms and stories about Love. She talks of it as one of a handful of things to have been found in every known society on earth and as something that people have always been driven to articulate, understand, counsel on. She'll take a quote like, 'The less my hope, the hotter my love' and study fMRI scans of people recently fallen out of a relationship and afix a scientific reasoning for the very emotion that gave birth to this poetic articulation. It's all about the reptilian brain buried at the core of our minds, apparently. She'll explain everything we have ever had to say about love, in our most lucid expressions from the best of our poets, ever, by looking at the brain and pointing to the R-complex in the middle of it all. It takes a little of the fizz out of it all, but reinvests it with so much substance.

Dr Fisher also found activity in the brain region that calculates and measures gains and losses. It's impossible to come through a very brief and inconsequential fling without trying to weigh up what you won and what you lost in it all. Things mostly pile up in the Losses column. But it looks like I've got through December and January with one big Gain, one lesson learned- comedians know it, politicians, not so much: you can't let an audience- imagined or otherwise- get in the way of what you want to say.

Laser 3.14

I SAW this guy in Amsterdam, everywhere, back between 2004 and 2005. Came across him again researching artists to film in Amsterdam for a project. Some of his stuff is pretty pithy but some of it really strikes a chord.

Good to see Laser 3.14 is still kicking.

The Leaderboard

It seems like a long time ago now I tried online dating with Guardian Soulmates. For those not familiar with GS, there is a leaderboard of sorts that guarantees boosted exposure, self-esteem and, one presumes, dates. Lots of dates with lots of attractive people pulled from the cream of the gene pool (does that phrase work..). They call the leaderboard 'Popular profiles' and there are 20 girls and 20 guys.

Back when I tried out GS, I told myself I would pay for no more than one months' membership- roughly equivalent to what I could piss away down the pub one night getting drunk and not quite scratching together the courage to go up to a girl who caught the eye. A month of casual flirting and dates sounded like a good return in place of one night down the pub. Most of all lots of dates excited me, with people totally unaffiliated to anyone I know.

Early on, I realised the leaderboard was the answer. If I could just get myself in amongst the popular profiles, it would all happen. It's based on the number of people who have added you as a favourite- if more people like you and make you a favourite then you get on the popular profiles list.

Now, I thought I'd give myself a helping hand, of sorts, and devised a strategy to get on the leaderboard. I'm not going to divulge the details of my strategy, but suffice to say it was pretty shameful stuff. Could be seen as shameful, maybe. But, you know, all's fair in love and all that and it's nice not to be on the receiving end of that aphorism, or any love-aphorism, for a change.

The strategy didn't work. It didn't exactly backfire, but it was a close-run thing. I didn't get on the leaderboard.

Imagine, then, imagine my incandescent envy when my housemate tells me she's signed up to Guardian Soulmates and she's on the popular profiles list. Number 17. JUst waltzed on, no strategy, no nothing. To make matters worse, she ran through all of the top 20 guys and told me me which of them had got in touch with her. 'That one...that one...that one and that one...' A good quarter to a third of them. Proof that if you get on the leaderboard, the cream of the gene pool comes knocking (..now that phrase definitely doesn't work). Hmpph.

More like a clatter than a pop

Insomnia

I haven't been sleeping well. It hasn't been the best start to the year. Actually, to articulate it properly, it's been a shit start to the year. I don't think that's to blame though. Maybe partly.

I don't usually have a problem with sleep. Sleep is a good, good friend to me. One of my oldest friends, in fact. I hit the sack, lights out. Straight out. I can eat a tonne before I climb into bed, I can drink coffee late at night, I can exercise and get to sleep easily. I sleep well before big days, interviews, etcetera... So not much idea why sleep has rolled over and turned her back to me.

It's not such a problem really, it's just the getting to sleep. Usually that's my forte. I don't even have time to register pillow:cheek before everything sinks away, usually. Lately I can't. I get to the very brink of sleep and something pulls me back, gently and not altogether unpleasantly, were it not for the fact that I know I'll be tossing and turning before I do finally get to sleep. It's not like I need too much sleep for my current day-to-day, so it's not a bother, more a weird inconvenience.

Coincidentally, I've been researching folk remedies and naturopathic treatment for insomnia at work. Onions work, apparently. Cut up some onion, stuff it in a glass and breathe deeply from the glass before you go to bed. Who would have thought. Grass too- take a walk barefoot on grass before you go to bed. People swear by this. Long-term insomniacs- not like me.

When I did finally get to sleep last night, I dreamt I was riding a London bus on the top deck. Then the flooring disappeared, along with the chassis and the driver and the other passengers- pretty much the entire bus- and I was a long, long way up, kind of floating along the path the absent-bus was taking. Lots of people below milling around like there was a carnival going on. No vertiginous complaints, no fear, no idea where I was going. All I could think of was How on earth am I going to reach all the way down to push the button for my stop (wherever it is).

Appendix to Friday 10th December 2010

- Appendix to 4th January 2011

Cars 3 - Bike 0