I love Little Chefs

Er...that's the restaurants. The dear Little Chef is throwing a bit of a wobbly in the kitchen at the moment. Hopefully all will get straightened out and he'll be out frying the eggs untroubled again soon.

I first fell in love with Little Chef restaurants in my childhood. You could always rely on the meals being beautifully cooked (if not entirely from fresh ingredients!) and nicely presented. There was cheerful(ish) service. You knew where you were with Little Chefs.

You still do. (I have fallen back on their sausage and mash twice in the last six months after motorway service stations let me down). Except in the last year or so, there are less people present in the restaurants. My successors as children aren't pestering parents to take them to Little Chefs any more.

There are now 3 or 4 choices of food outlet in every motorway service station. That new competition has hammered the poor Little Chef.

However, the Little Chef is still a well loved brand with something to offer. But it obviously needs a shake-up.

The chain was built up around "A" roads with Motorway service station outlets as a bit of an after-thought. One can't help but thinking that they need to cull off a lot of the old "A" road sites and somehow give their motorway service station restaurants a shot in the arm. These days, people flock to those motorway service stations like bees round a jam jar. The old "A" road Little Chef restaurants seem deserted these days.

Sofas and Celebrations - responsible for January obesity spike?

Sofas and Celebrations (the edible ones that is).

They seem to dominate the period between Christmas Day and the Twelfth day of Christmas on January 5th.

If you are not sitting in a sofa watching an advert on ITV for sofas (mainly featuring glamorous models just sitting on sofas), you are "just eating one" Celebration (followed by "just another eight") on a sofa, or all three.

Surely it can't be long before someone conducts a "scientific" survey to prove a link between fag-end Festive season Sofa adverts, Celebrations and a serious UK January obesity spike.

There is certainly a gap in the survey market there, begging to be filled.

Tory U-turn on railways - hard to swallow

I know that the Tory U-turn on the railways was executed some months ago. But it is still hard to swallow. This morning on BBC Breakfast, Chris Grayling seemed to be going further than previous Tory pronouncements on the subject (that I have heard).

He said that one of the main problems with rail privatisation is that the control of the trains and the track is separate, and that they should be more closely aligned.

Hallelujah!

I would be extremely rich if I had a pound for every time I heard LibDem spokespeople before, during and after the passage of the 1993 Railways Act saying that the main problem was that it separated track and trains.

In particular, I remember Bill (now Lord) Bradshaw banging on about it ad infinitum. As a former British Rail manager, he did so with great authority.

It really is very frustrating to find out that the pig-headed Tories who implemented the disaster of rail privatisation have finally admitted the error of their ways 15 years and £31 Billion of extra public subsidy later.

Simone Clarke's colleagues

It is interesting to read a list of the birthplaces of the colleagues of Simone Clarke who are principals or first solists in the English National Ballet:

Bilbao, Spain
Camagüey, Cuba
Estonia
Estonia
Hertfordshire, UK
Hokkaido, Japan
London, UK
Matanzas, Cuba
Newcastle-under-Lyme, UK
Pinar de Rio, Cuba
Prague, Czech Republic
Ranacagua, Chile
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Sofia, Bugaria
Spain
St Petersburg, Russia
Tbilisi, Georgia
Vienna, Austria
Vilnius, Lithuania

My tolerant outlook towards people of other ethnicities and countries of birth was forged at school, where we had many countries represented.

Wouldn't you think that rubbing along with such a diverse company as the ENB would have led Simone Clarke in the opposite direction to the BNP?

She says that immigration to the UK has "really got out of hand". Ah. But if the BNP get their way, most of her colleagues will be offered money to return "home" and she could be left with just three colleagues. It must make for a rather uncomfortable working relationship when most of your close colleagues know that you want them to be paid to "go home".

BNP policy is:

IMMIGRATION - time to say ENOUGH!
On current demographic trends, we, the native British people, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within sixty years. To ensure that this does not happen, and that the British people retain their homeland and identity, we call for an immediate halt to all further immigration, the immediate deportation of criminal and illegal immigrants, and the introduction of a system of voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin assisted by a generous financial incentives both for individuals and for the countries in question. We will abolish the 'positive discrimination' schemes that have made white Britons second-class citizens. We will also clamp down on the flood of 'asylum seekers', all of whom are either bogus or can find refuge much nearer their home countries.

It is one thing being a member of the BNP. It is another giving an interview to the Mail on Sunday when you are member of such an ethnically diverse ballet company.

Simone Clarke seem to be rather naive. She says:

I am angry because I don't think it should be public knowledge who someone votes for. People are easily offended by political views, whatever the persuasion, and for that reason I think it should stay private.

Of course, which way someone votes is private and will remain so unless, like her, you join a political party, in which case, I would have thought you are fair game. Does the lady not realise that there is a difference between voting and being a member of a political party?

Doesn't she realise that by giving an interview to the Mail on Sunday she is ensuring that another 6.2 million read about how she votes?

That is hardly the way to keep it quiet.

Calculations

Calculations related to this posting. They take a while to appear. You can click on the spreadsheet and move around it - there are several columns to the right. Also you can click on "Save as Ex" to save it to your hard drive and work on your own version.

The calculations are also available in a more quick-loading format here.

Tories try to gloss over their implementation of rail privatisation

It appears that some re-writing of history is going on in Conservative circles. A Conservative supporter writes in this week's 'Newbury Weekly News':

Richard Benyon was not an MP when rail privatisation was pushed through, and was therefore as powerless as the rest of us.

That’s strange. On 10th December 1996, a copy of the Conservative party’s "West Berkshire Messenger" was delivered to my door and to the rest of the elctorate locally. John Major was the Conservative Prime Minister and Richard Benyon was local Conservative "Parliamentary Spokesman" at the time. It seems that Mr Benyon was extremely proud of his close relationship with John Major, the pusher-in-chief of rail privatisation. You can tell this by the fact that Mr Benyon is pictured in full colour enjoying a joke, standing right next to John Major at the top of the front page of the newspaper (see above).

So it would seem that Mr Benyon wanted us to believe at the time that he was not quite so "powerless" as the rest of us over rail privatisation.

Indeed, it seems that Mr Benyon, at the time, did not feel that rail privatisation was being "pushed through". On the contrary. If you turn to Page 2 of the same paper (see below) he acts as a positive evangelist for rail privatisation. There is an article entitled: "A Better Train Service for Newbury". It says: "PPC Richard Benyon has hailed rail privatisation as a huge success." The article said rail privatisation would mean "more services from Newbury and Thatcham to London Paddington." Richard Benyon was directly quoted as saying: "We are going to get an improved service at a cheaper cost to the taxpayer and with the certainty of cheaper fares for the customer."

Calculations