Up The Revolution

Jul 26, 2020 | Covid-19 Diary, Dead Water, Rants

Please forgive me if I indulge myself in a slight rant about garden furniture.

I like sitting out on the decking at the back of our house. Some years ago, we bought a cheap picnic bench in a B&Q sale, and it’s done fine. But time, and Scottish weather, have taken their toll, and it needs to be replaced. So this morning, God help me, I started looking for garden furniture on the internet.

As it happened, I had an idea of what I might be looking for, and it was a style of furniture I’d seen in America. In fact, it seems to be one of the bog-standard designs available pretty much anywhere in America. Surely I’d find something similiar here? What I found instead was that almost all of the garden furniture on sale in the UK is either boxey, boring and cheap or boxey, boring and expensive. There is no middle ground of attractively designed stuff, that’s built for the British climate (photographs of stuff in the sun on a Cotswolds Terrace doesn’t tell me much, lads) and is reasonably priced.

So I did what I’ve often done before when stuck: I went on Amazon France. Al fresco living in France is de rigueur and so, I reasoned, they might have a better range of stuff. Which they did. I didn’t find what I was looking for, or at least not yet, but what I did find was some furniture manufactured and distributed by a British company, on sale via Amazon.fr for £300 cheaper than on Amazon.co.uk. £300. That, it seems to me, is prima-facie evidence right there of rip-off Britain. As it happens, it wasn’t what I was looking for, but I kind of wish it was so I could order at the lower, French price and see what they said.

£300.

Bastards.

***

Music: the greatest band to come out of Wigan were Tansads. I wrote about them here: Hello, Hello, Welcome To Your Bright New Future. The last song on the last album issued under the Tansads name was Drunken Serenade, sung by Janet Anderton. In time, Tansads had some reunion concerts, which I found out about afterwards, and out of that came Merry Hell. The first track on Merry Hell’s first cd is Drunken Serenade. It’s one of my go-to songs if I want to sing along in the shed.

But wait! That’s not all! The second video is the mighty Tansads from 1994 and Iron Man mashed up with footage from Marvel movies. Get it before Marvel’s lawyers take it down. Closing time in Accrington, indeed.