Interlude: My eternal frustration with smoking....

Give me a break!

A: Well, good day to you! And have you had your daily whiff of cigarette smoke yet? No? Care for some by any chance?
B: No, thank you very much!

Blindness, absurdity and meta-economics

No hear, no see, no speak

Blindness

Blindness to the true human condition - even within ourselves - is amplified by the doom and gloom coming from our media and our politicians:

We all constantly hear in the news how high street sales etc have gone down, and how terrible this is for an economy that is (still) in recession. "We hope that sales will pick up soon!" And then, we will all be happier, will we?! Okaaay...

On food, (super)markets, streets, and smell & co.

Is the local market dead?

I got very excited about some of the passages I read today in one my favourite books, which I have already mentioned previously - "Hungry City: How food shapes our lives" by Carolyn Steel. So I decided to share a "flavour" of it here...

.... on markets:

"Borough [market] feels odd because it exists in a country that has lost touch with its food culture - where the vast majority of us do most of our shopping in supermarkets. [...] Borough is not really about buying food at all, it is about celebrating it. [...]

At Borough, food has become an end in itself. It has become fetishised, as if it were invested with some cathartic power to transform lives. The people who come here, although plainly enjoying themselves, seem to be searching for something more: for roots, for meaning, for salvation, even. [...]

Utopian Imagination postscript

How is this for a coincidence: In the Evening Standard Magazine (24 Aug 2012) - a magazine I just picked up from the seat next to me on the train, Richard Branson's response to the question "What would you do as Mayor (of London) for a day?" was written up as follows: "Grass over about two-thirds  of the city so the streets became places for kids to play and London was a collection of lots of little villages and not dominated by cars." Considering that this is what my post from 23 Aug 2012 was about, I wonder....