The three most popular British meals in Britain are, in descending order, fish and chips, a roast dinner with Yorkshire pudding and a fry-up breakfast.

This is the result of a survey commissioned for the Discover Cornwall food and drink guide, which placed at positions four to ten bacon butties, apple crumble, strawberries and cream, bangers and mash, cream tea, shepherds pie and crumpets. Most popular pub grub, after bangers and mash was ham, egg and chips (11), toad in the hole (16), Cornish pasty (18), steak and kidney pie (19), pork pie (20), ploughmans lunch (22) and scotch eggs (30) Other popular sweet items were ice cream (13), sticky toffee pudding and custard (17), bakewell tart (21) and rhubarb and custard (24). Continue reading →

Edifying to read that Sir Martin Sorrell of advertising firm WPP is trousering a pay package of £43 million, with the support of 80% of WPP shareholders.

Apparently only 20% refused to back the nice little earner for 2014 at the firm’ general meeting last month, after shareholder advisory consultancy Pirc pointed out that the “excessive” package was 37 times Sir Martin’s base salary.

Sadly most of the shareholders don’t seem to have considered the simple mathematics that for that price they could get 43 top advertising people delighted to earn £1 million a year, any one of which could possibly do as much, or more for the firm than the overpaid Sir Martin. Or how about giving 86 top people £500,000 each?

Over the last few years we’ve added to our collection of DVD’s from trips to the entertainment exchange shops of CEX, and we’ve always been happy with our second-hand purchases.

Earlier this year however we decided to try out their postal service, whereby you order online and pay for the items ordered, plus a one-off delivery charge of £2.50 for the order, which CEX then arrange to have sent from the stores with the items in stock. Accordingly we were happy to order and pay for three items costing 50 pence, £4 and £8 and a box set costing £10, a total of £22.50 plus the £2.50 delivery charge, making £25. Continue reading →

Canadian adultery website Ashley Madison, credited with helping to break up thousands of marriages, is having problems with its plans to go public in a European country, where its operators believe there is a “more relaxed attitude to infidelity” than in North American or Asian markets.

Reportedly however our City brokers are “queasy” about associating themselves or their clients with something many view as immoral and sordid, an arguably hypocritical view given the enthusiasm for profits from gambling, tobacco, alcohol, bent banking and weapons that kill people. Continue reading →

An elderly widow spent her life savings and a trust fund of £100,000 sending increasing amounts of “administration fees” to fraudsters who told her, by letters and telephone calls, that she had won cash prizes in a lottery.

The extent of the frauds came to light after Vicki Westwood, 81, died four months ago and her son was going through her bank accounts at her house near Stourbridge, Worcestershire. Here he found that she was actually overdrawn by several thousand pounds, and also found thousands of letters sent over a six year period from scam companies telling her of her “instant win” and the fees she would need to send to claim it. Continue reading →

Clothing brand Dolce and Gabbana are facing calls for Macy’s and Debenhams to stop stocking their products. (Ethical Consumer)

The boycott call, and a petition signed by 43,000 people came after the brand’s founders made it clear in an interview in an Italian newspaper that they opposed same-sex marriages and gay parents, despite marketing to gay consumers.

In the interview Dolce said that “You are born to a mother and father, or at least that’s how it should be”, and went on to attack IVF and surrogate parents, saying “I call children of chemistry synthetic children. Rented uterus, semen chosen from a catalogue” points agreed with by Gabbana who added “The family is not a fad”.

Campaigners have accused D&G of hypocrisy, bigotry and homophobia, and have urged the couple to “put labels on clothes, not children”.

Clothes for overweight and underweight people should be banned from most stores, to make people feel uncomfortable about their size when they can’t find anything to fit them.

This is the view of R+B pop singer Jamelia Niela Davis, 34, expressed on ITV show Loose Women, who said that extreme size clothes for the obese and the very thin should only be available in specialist shops, to “shame” people into doing something about their size. (Suppose they can’t?)

The singer’s ill-conceived comments drew criticism for muddled thinking from some women who pointed out that she had joined the SelfieEsteem programme, which encourages women to be confident about their looks. This drew the response from Ms Davis, who likes to describe herself as “brutally honest”, that she was “misunderstood”.

The marketing manager of the Royal China restaurant group has been pilloried in the press for illegally importing shark’s fin to make soup, not on the menu, for his rich Chinese customers.

Jason Chan boasted to reporters how he had a team of people bringing the shark’s fins through customs in suitcases “so that they are not confiscated”. In fact an investigation by Trading Standards found that they were being illegally posted from Hong Kong, and officers confiscated and destroyed them.

Consumption of the expensive, gloopy and relatively tasteless dish, usually served at banquets, has dropped significantly as more, particularly younger diners realise the cruelty involved – the fins are simply hacked off the living fish and the mutilated shark, unable to swim, defend itself or feed, thrown back in the sea, often taking up to a week to die. Rejection by celebrities, such as actor Jackie Chan has also played a part in the demise.

A recent trip to our local ASDA found their bar-coding and till-reading working in their favour.

Expensive convenience packs of washed and bagged salad leaves were marked on the shelf at £1.00, yet the tills were reading the bar-codes as £1.50 and charging customers accordingly.

Fortunately we only bought a few items, so picked up the error. However we doubt that busy shoppers picking up the week’s supply would clock every price on the shelf and check it against the receipt.

Curiously, or perhaps not, we’ve never known these supermarket errors work in the customer’s favour…