The Systems Administrator's parcel arrived mid morning, when it should have been here on Tuesday. On Wednesday I arranged my day so as to keep the front drive in view at all times (other than when I needed to go to the loo. It is very difficult to keep your front door under surveillance single handed sixty minutes in the hour for ten hours continuously). Yesterday we organised ourselves to go out in shifts so that someone was here all the time, and by evening the SA had heard nothing more from the delivery company and was planning to cancel the order and tell the vendor (Maplin) not to expect our future custom. The delivery firm was Yodel, just in case you are thinking of sending a parcel by courier company rather than Royal Mail. The SA has already stopped using another internet seller who persisted in sending their parcels via Yodel, because delivery was so unreliable.
I have now got one John Lewis burgundy skirt hanging in my wardrobe, and a second one on its way back to the John Lewis warehouse. I had to make a special trip into Colchester, and it took me half an hour in store. I have yet to check through my credit card statement, which will take five minutes if the refund has worked, and an unknown amount of time to resolve if it hasn't. The total time and effort so far expended on this Click and Collect order is one hour in Waitrose and an otherwise unnecessary ten mile round trip. I am not pleased, having expected better from John Lewis. I should say they were about to run into difficulties with internet shopping, and need to increase staffing at their Waitrose customer service desks, and do some staff training to break down the Us versus Them Waitrose v. John Lewis attitude I am beginning to detect in Waitrose.
The customer service desk in the Colchester Waitrose is at the front of the store, so it is the first thing customers see as they come in through the door. Fair enough, but the stock room is at the back, so Waitrose's staff have to walk the length of the store and back each time they go to find a Click and Collect order. They try to batch them up, but it's inefficient from Waitrose's point of view, better to make the customers go to the back of the store. There was one person on the desk yesterday afternoon, who as well as trying to sort out my skirt problem had to deal with a man who had been overcharged by six pounds for a pack of Aberdeen Angus beef which had been reduced from £14.99 to £8.99 but gone through the till at full price, a woman who wanted to return some facial wipes she didn't like as much as her usual brand (I hoped she had bought two packs and decided to return the second), an elderly lady clutching a tin of John West something or other (I thought she said passion fruit, but is there such a thing as tinned passion fruit?) which she was lobbying Waitrose to stock, a customer presenting some old Waitrose receipts which he'd been told at the checkout he could 'add' to his My Waitrose account, a phone call transferred internally by a colleague who wouldn't take a message even after she had said she was up to her eyes, a helpful customer telling her that she might like to know that the low milk warning sign was lit up on the coffee machine, several other click and collect orders, and a colleague wanting to know where the gift wrap was.
Her youngish male colleague, who I think was some sort of junior manager, had great difficulty in finding the click and collect orders and she had to give him further details over the phone, and once back at the desk he became fixated by the fact that my two parcels had two different versions of my first name (nowadays if pressed for an explanation I cite Catherine Middleton, also known as Kate, by way of illustration that it is not that unusual or suspicious to have two names). I think the young manager decided I might be dodgy or trying it on in some way, and he became rather rude. I myself was not quite so studiously polite as I had been at the start of the process.
The Genoa cake was fine. The recipe was from Cakes regional and traditional by Julie Duff, which I'm finding generally reliable, subject to being able to guess where in the Aga cakes need to go to equate to her instructions in degrees C, degrees F and gas marks, none of which are any help at all. The Genoa cake needed 160C for one and half to one and three quarter hours. I tried it on the bottom of the lower hot oven of a four door Aga, with a metal shelf above it to cut down the heat. After an hour and a half a skewer still came out sticky, so I gave it another fifteen minutes but think ten would have been enough now I've cut a slice. That information might be useful if you cook using a four door Aga, otherwise I apologise that it is completely pointless.
The Bakewell tart was out of Tamasin Day-Lewis's The Art of the Tart, which again I've found pretty sensible so far. I looked at Felicity Cloake's Guardian article reviewing different versions, before coming to an Ur recipe for the ultimate Bakewell, but was overwhelmed by choice and decided to stick with the book for now. Tamasin Day-Lewis says to cook the tart for about thirty minutes at 200C, but after twenty minutes on a rack on the floor of the upper hot oven of the Aga, the top of my tart was already an alarming shade of dark brown and the edges of the pastry were starting to catch. Hastily extracting it from the oven, I found the burnt layer had made a skin like custard, which I was able to lift off with a knife, to reveal the frangipane layer still liquid in places. Finishing the tart off for longer than her recommended half hour in the lower oven, and sprinkling it with flaked almonds as she suggested, it didn't look too bad for something which was frankly burnt at half time. It came out fairly moist, possibly moister than the author intended, but fortunately the SA likes moist frangipane, finding some commercial Bakewells too dry.
The election result you know about.
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