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ENGLISH VILLAGE - WEEK 18 - A SHOPPING TRIP |
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| It's been
very sunny weather and we even had a picnic yesterday on the small
piece of
ground my wife uses as a smallholding. The village is very peaceful nowadays: the never-ending truck traffic to & from the strawberry packing plant has stopped, now that the plant is closed and all the migrant workers have been deported - err - I mean "provided with travel assistance to return to their home countries". The fuel shortage also helps cut down the traffic - a lot of the commuters are now working from home, or they are staying in the city near their offices for most of the week. The farm traffic is still as before 'tho. The huge tractors still zoom around the lanes as they move between the different fields. The farmers also seem to have no problem with driving their Range Rovers and Land Rovers around the place all day long. There seems to be no fuel shortage for REAL work such as agriculture. We are now seeing "townies", from the big city some 35 miles away, turn up in cars & pickups on the lookout for food or fuel to buy .. or preferably steal. Most of the these uninvited visitors are friendly - but simply desperate. In a very, very few sad cases we will hand over some food ... but mostly we send them on their way empty handed. Charity begins at home. A few of these "visitors" are extremely unpleasant people - but we have learned how to deal with them. Someone bought a crate of those cheap mini walky-talky things and handed them around the village. They have a range of about 1 or 2 miles which is just about OK. As soon as we have any trouble we simply call for help and within a couple of minutes two or three carloads of farmers with shotguns turn up. The trouble makers soon decide to move on. (A few of the riff-raff looked like they might have had guns under their coats ... but they clearly decided that a pistol will not win against 5 or 6 shotguns!) We also have foot patrols at night to make sure that nobody is sneaking around looking for things to steal. A couple of times a week we need to chase off groups of outsiders lurking around the village in the dark. Luckily we haven't had any sort of nasty fire-fight yet. (We don't however go after "lampers" ... local poachers with bright lights who hunt rabbits etc in the fields at night. Lampers have always been part of the rural scene and will certainly not be outsiders. Lampers are also pretty tough people and often illegally armed ... best left alone!) My main grump at the moment is that with a village population of about 2000, only around 50 people are dealing with local security etc. Most of the other residents clearly still believe that they can sit back and that "THEY" i.e. the Government .. will look after them. If the power goes off again or if food becomes short then this crowd will find life becoming a lot less comfortable! I drove into the local town today. The roads and the town itself were remarkably quiet. Many shops are still open - but their stocks of useful stuff are generally very low or non-existent. The number of Police seems to have increased significantly - most seem very young or very old so I assume they are some sort of trainee or "auxiliary". The "real" Police have now started carrying guns ... all very un-English. I used my Ration Card for the first time. It's a clever system - the card is "swiped" through the electronic till card reader just like any normal credit card. (Note for our USA friends: Unlike the USA we no longer sign for credit card transactions in the UK - we swipe the card through the till and then type in a PIN number instead of signing anything). I bet the government has done a deal with the credit card companies to handle the Rationing Database. I was a bit annoyed to find that the ration allowance for each week only lasts 10 days. You can't accumulate several weeks worth of points and then buy a huge amount of something like chocolate. Use It Or Lose It. This 10 day "timeout" is also quite a clever trick - many shops are out of stock of many things ... and with the reduction in truck transport some shops only get restocked every 14 days. This means that my ration points for something unusual can expire before the local shop gets any more stock in! (I know that I could get someone else to swap points with me ... but the legal penalties for "Illegal Transfer Of Ration Points" are horrific so I'm avoiding that sort of trickery for the moment) Food in the small shops in the town seemed fairly plentiful - but the choice was very limited and of course everything needs to come off your Ration Card. I didn't see much meat on sale except for frozen Australian lamb .. which has probably been sitting in a cold store for several years! It seems that the unemployed are also being treated fairly - their ration cards allow them to get some basic food free of charge. They are however being asked to do community work in return. A special office has been set up so that the various tasks needed can be matched to people's skills. The jobs they have been asked to do so far seem to be not too bad: bicycle couriers, leg powered delivery services, street cleaning, gardening, security guards etc. Anything to save fuel. On the way home I came past the main supermarket on the edge of town. I was surprised to see that the exterior was somewhat damaged and the doors seem to have been smashed and then repaired with wood panels. The store was also now surrounded by barbed wire - but it however seemed to be still operating. I decided to check the situation there and drove into the car park. I had to swipe my Ration Card at a makeshift checkpoint as I entered the store ... there were some armed guards there to make sure I didn't forget! Clearly the Ration Card is now also being used as an Identity Card too! I suspect that an alarm would have sounded if I was not from the local area. The inside of the store was a bit of a shock ... about 50% of it had been trashed and was closed off by tapes. The store aircon was not running so it was strangely warm inside. Only basic goods - mostly bread, milk, potatoes were in plentiful supply. Just a couple of freezer cabinets were still turned on - containing mainly butter, margarine ... and the dreaded frozen Australian lamb. I bought a load of plastic bags of all sizes - they were not a rationed item for some reason, and there were plenty available. Not an obvious item to loot I suppose! I bet that even plastic bags will become a rarity in a few months, so I couldn't miss the opportunity to stock up. I also bought a stack of really boring stuff such as floor mops, clothes pegs etc ... just in case the companies making this sort of vital trivia go bust. I had a quiet chat with one of the store staff who explained that the store had been looted by a gang of the migrant workers shortly before they were forced onto the trains & buses to take them home. The shop assistant also said that she had recognised quite a few "respectable" local people taking part in the looting. I also asked the girl how the migrants had been "persuaded" to get onto the transport ... apparently a small but heavily armed military unit from outside the area did the "persuading". She said that she heard gunfire during all this, although she wasn't sure if anyone was hurt or killed. Apparently there is a lot of news censorship in place which explains why news of this sort of event is not public .. even 'tho similar troubles must have happened all over the country. I'm not sure what the future of the big supermarket chains will be: Perhaps they will become a sort of basic food supply network - or more likely they will simply fade away. Finally, I paid a visit to the local bike shop - I had planned to replace the one that I had stolen. You will NOT believe how much a bike now costs ... even a heap of junk is now £500 ($1000) and decent bikes are over £2500 ($5000) !!!! The security at the shop was also amazing - several burly men were "helping". Surely organised crime hasn't moved into the bicycle business???? I left without buying anything except some strong security chains ... the family can share the bikes that we have left! I also don't plan to have any more stolen, hence the chains. Overall quite a pleasant week. |