Pop meets Culture

John Lennon meets Andy Warhol

or 

Andy Warhol meets John Lennon

POP MEETS CULTURE

Canon 70 D repair at Jessops

I bought my Canon70d in April 2014 from Camera World in Wells Street London


I recently lent it out to a friend and it came back to me with a fault. The rear touchscreen monitor was displaying some hazy pink noise and then suddenly it completely failed and would not power up.

I had taken over 9000 images with the camera and up until this point I had not experienced any problems at all.
I can thoroughly recommend the 70d as a great camera for both stills and video, the 70d has an excellent auto focusing system which makes it great for fast moving video .

Unfortunately the manufacturers 12 month guarantee has now expired and so I will have to pay for the repair. I took the camera into Jessops in Shrewsbury last week and I have now had the news that the repair is going to cost me £228.00 , apparently a circuit needs to be replaced and then the camera also needs a full service. 

This sounded rather a lot of money but I feel it was worth it as the camera to buy new is still close to £1000. My moto from now on is Don't lend your camera out to no-one.

Jessops have a deal where they charge you £25.00 upfront to send the camera off for assessment of whats needs doing, they then take the £25.00 off the bill when you agree to the repair being done, which seems a fair system to me.

My last piece of advice when buying these expensive item cameras is try to shop somewhere that will give you a two year guarantee like Jessops.

Sunday Lunch at the Half Moon Pub

This was the Sunday lunch we produced at The Half Moon Pub when I was the licensee just over two years ago.

Roast beef medium to rare , roast carrots and steamed broccoli

Sunday Lunch has returned as one of the most popular dishes of the week for the British public.
It is also one of the hardest meals to perfect if you are in the kitchen trying to produce it in a pub and make money from it and sell it a reasonable price. 

You set up your kitchen to cook for 60 -80 people, who will all arrive at the same time into what is an already busy pub. 

The football is on the big screen, its Arsenal V Man U and its three deep at the bar.

Oh and I forgot to mention everyone who orders a Sunday Roast in your pub is also an expert at cooking it him/her self at home.

They know exactly how they like their Beef cooked - Medium rare to pink, well thats half of them and the other half like it medium to well done. 

They all want an extra Yorkshire Pudding because we do them so well.
The trick we found with Yorkshire puds was to leave a gap between each row so the air could circulate around them, not sure how accurate this was but it worked for us in the pub.

Don't get me started on where would you like your gravy Sir? Over your parsnips or on your Brussel sprouts. This problem was negated by the small jug of gravy on the side, they get to pour their gravy wherever they like and it also stay warm in the jug. 

It took us about four weeks to get it down to perfection.

The beef is the crucial one , you don't want to over cook it whatever you do or all the flavour will be gone. The roast potatoes have to be perfectly crispy on the outside and nice and fluffy on the inside. 

The Roast chicken has to have lovely crisp skin and still be juicy on the inside. So we chose Half a small chicken and we cooked cook it in  our Pizza oven at very high temperature, it worked perfectly as you can see below and the roast spuds were to die for.

Rosemary and Lemon Roast Chicken

We even managed to get our South American chef to produce a decent Yorkshire pudding and not one of those fancy big hat jobs produced with a blow torch, just a nice Yorkshire like you mom would make for you. 



All together delicious and all the plates always came back emptied and the customers loved them.

Sunday Lunch was a great challenge and one we got just about right.

Wolverhampton Market

This morning we went for a trip to Wolverhampton to pic up the weekly veg.
  
The fruit and veg market is not what it used to be when I was a kid, but then again nothing is these days.

We visited the indoor market where we found The Spice Centre to stock up on all the ingredients you need for a curry.

We then made our way outside to get some Vegetables from Bradleys, They have been trading in the market for over fifty years.

However they are very concerned that when the redevelopment of the indoor market happens there will be very little left of the outdoor fruit and veg market. 

This problem is not exclusive to Wolverhampton, Markets have been disappearing all over the country , no doubt they are forced out of business when a huge supermarket springs up right next to them as happened here last year when Sainsbury's opened a new 60 million pound store.

Towns like Wolverhampton are suffering up and down the country and the problem is a hard one to solve.

The supermarkets have large amounts of cash to invest in deprived areas which can be very tempting for local councils.You have the likes of Tesco etc offering incentives like paying for new pedestrian crossings etc, to help their planning applications go through a little quicker. Small independent retailers and market stall holders can't compete with that. 

We need to find a balance to our retail economy and this is one of the biggest challenges facing the national government and local planning departments. 

Mary Portas had good intentions when she launched her campaign to rejuvenate the High Street a couple of years ago.  

A trip to Wolverhampton would tell you there's much more work to be done. 

Rory McIlroy goes in search of the Slam

Golf fans always get excited at the prospect four days in front of the telly watching the US Masters. Commencing the first week of April it’s the first Major of the year and the superbly manicured Augusta course always has a starring role to play in the tournament.

This year there is added interest for Rory McIlroy fans as he chases the final piece in his quest for a career grand slam.  Having won the British Open and the USPGA last year and the US Open in 2011 Rory only need the Masters to complete the Full House.

Only five players, Jack Nicklaus, Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player and Tiger Woods, have won all four of golf’s major titles and McIlroy is a strong favourite to join them.

If McIlroy wins the Masters then the pressure really piles on him when the US Open starts in June. If he were to win that one too then he would hold all four major titles at the same time, no one has achieved that since Tiger Woods in 2001.

McIlroy has made a lightning start to his professional career at only 25 years old he is already well up the list in the medals table and is fast securing himself a place in the golfing record books. It will be interesting to see how his career progresses with the constant comparisons with Woods and Nicklaus who had a similar amount of success at the same age.

There have been some classic Masters tournaments over the years; the great champions always seem to win in dramatic style. 

Think back to Jack Nicklaus becoming the oldest winner in 1986 when he overhauled the likes of Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman and Tom Kite in the final round.

Lets hope Rory can finally bury the memories of his final round meltdown a couple of years back and put on that famous green jacket.

Supermarket self checkouts

Many of you will have noticed the growing trend for self-service at the supermarket checkouts when you pay for your weekly food shop. It’s something that started to appear many years ago on the petrol garage forecourt.

Do you remember the days when you drove your car onto the garage forecourt where you were met by a pump attendant? They would ask you what type fuel you wanted and then after filling up your tank they would give your windscreen a quick wipe and maybe offer to check your water and oil levels.

Well those days of customer service have long since gone, we now take self-service for granted and in todays busy times self-serve is often the preferred way for paying for goods and services. I wonder though if this practice is good for us in the long term.

There are times when you don’t want to engage too much with the person who is checking taking your payment. There are also days when it frustrates me that I have to engage with a machine that repeatedly yells ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area’.

Six months ago in my local supermarket you would see three sales assistants behind the checkout but that has now reduced to only one member of staff and another one encouraging you to use the self-checkout.

To the worker and the jobs market this is disastrous, replacing workers with machines is not the way forward. This country needs jobs for shop workers, if they are replaced with machines it is the working class people who will ultimately suffer from a lack of jobs. It will leave a large group of people with no money, claiming benefits and no purpose in life. We have seen this already in the manufacturing industry where huge swathes of the once bustling West Midlands industrial heartland is now reduced to barren wasteland and Disney style shopping centres.

If Supermarkets are to be allowed to continue with the dominance they enjoy in the market place, they should at least be expected to provide jobs in the community.

They should not be allowed to make such huge profits without contributing something back to society, a contribution to the welfare of the people they are profiting from.

They should be obligated to provide well-paid manual jobs.

They should also give something back to their customers in return for all the information they gather from us when we shop with our loyalty cards.

How about they offer Free Dental care to all shoppers who carry their loyalty cards.

If the population had better teeth then surely they can chew more beef.

It’s a win-win situation for both Supermarkets and the Consumers.

I personally don’t use self-service machines. I will always wait for the sales assistant to become available.

I suggest you do the same. Ignore the Self Checkout and Engage with a real person and help support Britain’s working classes.

Hospital Food at King's London

I was visiting King's hospital in Camberwell last week and I popped into their shop to get a sandwich.

I was shocked at the prices they were charging, A beef sandwich was £3.95 which seems a hell of a lot for a basic Sarine, that's Top end prices you expect to see in Pret a Manger and other deli sandwich shops.

When you are visiting a hospital you notice that the vast majority of the people there are not wealthy, they are ordinary people going about their business, struggling to pay the bills and yet they are being asked to fork out top dollar for basic sustenance while sorting out their health issues or visiting friends and family.

This sends out a bad example of how we view our access to basic food and how it is reserved for those that can afford it .

A hospital should set the benchmark and should be High in quality and Low on price

Come on Labour party! this basic cost of living crisis is what you should be focusing on in the run up to the election in 2015 . The Tories are not helping anyone apart from the wealthy in this country , its about time we had saw fair prices return to our food shelves. The price of oil has dropped enormously over the past six months due partly to government sanctions against Putin, this just shows when they want to change systems they can do it . So lets fix up our food pricing structure so that good quality food is available to the masses and not just the few.