I was reading this article by Michael Lewis when I came across this quote talking about Britain in the early 1980’s –
Nothing functioned properly; everything that wasn’t broken was about to fall apart. The food was almost deliberately inedible, an inside joke cooked up by the locals to see what human beings would willingly consume. (I had a friend from Manhattan who said that every time he passed a British sandwich shop “I want to go in and strangle the owner.”) And the most extraordinary anticommercial attitudes could be found, in places that existed for no purpose other than commerce. There was a small grocery store around the corner from my flat, which carried a rare enjoyable British foodstuff, McVities’ biscuits. One morning the biscuits were gone. “Oh, we used to sell those,” said the very sweet woman who ran the place, “but we kept running out, so we don’t bother anymore.”
Strangely enough much of the article sounds like parts of Australia at present. I have often encountered this attitude of not bothering. When LB used to have an office in Kew I would sometimes wander over there for lunch and we used to go to a sandwich place that made the best roast beef sandwich I had ever had. It was so popular that you had to get there quite early to get it. One day we arrived to find it not there and I asked whether they had sold out early, no came the reply. They had stopped serving it because they were having to start cooking the beef earlier and earlier. So instead of cooking two and having enough for everyone they simply stopped.
What dickheads – some people never realise that their lives as as they are because of the people they are……..
