Shortly before Christmas, I popped in to the Company Shop in Bradford, and picked up a basket of groceries for only £8.
Company Shop is a surplus supermarket, and sells discounted groceries sourced from excess stock from other supermarkets. Inside, you’ll see some branded products, and also own-label products from the likes of Ocado, Lidl, Tesco and Asda. Stock ends up at the Company Shop either because mainstream supermarkets have over-ordered, or because they have large quantities of stock which is very close to its use by date.
Consequently, what’s on offer can vary widely from day to day. Most fresh produce tends to be short-dated, so ideally things that need to be cooked and/or eaten the same day. So it’s handy to pop in on a day when you can be open-minded about what to cook for dinner that day. However, it’s not a supermarket where you can rely on a fixed shopping list. For example, there was plenty of cheese on sale when I went, but it was small blocks of fancy cheese with added fruit and not plain cheddar for cooking with.
The packaging is slightly damaged, so expect to see plenty of dented cans of things. If that doesn’t bother you, then you can pick up some real bargains.
Products from failed, missed or returned deliveries.
Some food is sold frozen, and there are also homewares on offer as well as food.
Locations
There are currently 13 Company Shop outlets across England and Scotland. The majority of these are across the north of England and the midlands, as, like Greggs Outlets, they’re concentrated in areas with low incomes. There isn’t a Company Shop in London, for example, and the only store in the south is in Southampton. Back in November, a Metro reporter went to the Southampton store and wrote about her experience.
Company Shop membership
As with Mordor and Costco, one does not simply walk into the Company Shop. You need to be a member, and, like Costco, there are eligibility requirements. I was able to join through my employer, and many public sector and charity workers should be eligible. You can also join if you are in receipt of certain means-tested benefits, such as Universal Credit. The whole ethos of Company Shop is about widening access to groceries to those from low incomes, so unlike Costco, membership is free.
Members can bring a limited number of family and friends along with them, and can share their membership with up to two other people who do not necessarily need to meet the eligibility criteria.
On my visit, I picked up two boxes of my usual breakfast cereal, two litres of long-life lactose free milk (good until April), some onions, oranges and potatoes, some short-dated crisps and some dishwasher rinse aid. Like I said, all that came to around £8 – indeed, the crisps were 10p for a bag of six.
Whilst we’re a fairly high income household, I’m sure we’ll drop in to the Company Shop every now and again when we’re in the area with the car. We picked up some genuine bargains there, and, most importantly, all the food got used. And that’s better than it all going to waste.
The whole idea of the Sad Bastard Cookbook is that the recipes require minimal effort, and generally use ingredients that don’t go out of date at short notice. As an example, the first three sections focus on instant noodles (ramen), starting with simply boiling water for the ramen and then eating them. Many recipes also have a ‘bottom-tier’, ‘mid-tier’ and ‘God-tier’, depending on how you’re feeling and what extra ingredients you have. One of these is ‘kinda like Pad Thai’, which uses rice noodles, peanut butter and sweet chilli sauce, and “tastes kinda like you’d imagine Pad Thai sauce would taste if you’ve never had Pad Thai before”.
Other recipes include ‘pasta in a rice cooker’ and ‘can of soup’.
Core ingredients
Here’s the bit of the book that is probably most useful – the ‘Core ingredients to keep in your kitchen’ section. There are lots of good suggestions for basic and long-life ingredients to buy, and keep on hand for times when you don’t feel like cooking but need to eat something. Even if you’re the sort of person who can usually cook something delicious, no matter how you’re feeling, it’s a really useful list of what to have on hand. I wish that past me had this for times when I’ve lived on my own, as it would’ve given me some fallback ideas for meals.
Like I said, the book is available as a free PDF – even if your mental health is fine, I strongly recommend reading it. You’ll pick up some useful hints for times when you’re late home and tired, or realise that you’re hungry at 10pm on a Sunday when the shops are all shut.
We’ve now had our solar panels for two years, so it’s probably time to review how much money they have saved us, and how close we are to getting a return on investment.
We have a SolaX system, which includes twelve 400 Watt solar panels, an inverter and battery. I’m using SolaX’s app to estimate how much money this saves us, based on the electricity unit prices from the grid, and also the amount that we get paid for exporting surplus electricity under the Smart Export Guarantee.
I’ve included a screenshot taken a couple of weeks ago. We only saved around five pence that day, as the solar panels spent most of the day under a thick blanket of snow. But you can see that, in total, we’ve saved around £1600 in two years.
I should note, however, that whilst this averages out at £800 per year, last year we actually saved closer to £900. Alas, 2024 was a less sunny year, on the whole, and so our solar panels couldn’t work as hard.
The total cost of the system was around £11,000, so after two years, we’ve recouped 14% of our outlay. Had 2024 been as sunny as 2023, then this would have been closed to 16%. Assuming that we have more years like 2023, then we should break even in around 10 years time. That’s a long way away, but we’ll still be paying the mortgage on the house then, and we have no plans to move.
Since we had our solar panels fitted, prices have dropped significantly, and so a comparable system to ours would probably cost closer to £9000. You could argue that we should have waited a little longer to get our system installed, but back in 2023, energy prices were at an all-time high. Still, it does mean that the economics of getting solar panels fitted now is even better than it was.
Most of the money that we used to pay for the solar panels was either savings, or money gifted to us by my parents. However, we did borrow around £4000 to cover the rest of the cost, and still have some of that to pay off. Provided that we don’t have any more major expenses (I’m glaring at our car as I write this), we should have this paid off this coming spring.
Every four years, a different UK city is designated a City of Culture for the year. And this year, it’s Bradford, the city where I work and used to live.
This isn’t Bradford’s first rodeo. Back when we were still an EU nation, it was decided that a British city would be the European Capital of Culture in 2008. Bradford put in a bid, but wasn’t shortlisted. Ultimately, Liverpool won the bid, but the success of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture resulted in the creation of the UK City of Culture designation, to take place every four years. Derry/Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, won the first designation in 2013, followed by Hull in 2017, Coventry in 2021, and now Bradford in 2025.
Now, I’m biased; I spent eight years living in Bradford and still work there, and indeed my employer is a major Bradford 2025 partner. But I was genuinely delighted when it was announced that the Bradford bid had been successful. When the bid was being prepared, way back in 2019, it was claimed that Bradford has the youngest population of any city in Europe, with 29% of people aged 19 or under. Bradford is also well known for being very multi-cultural, with a large population of British Asians. And there are a number of interesting cultural places in Bradford, including the Theatre in the Mill, Kala Sangam, Impressions Gallery and Cartwright Hall. Bradford itself became the first UNESCO City of Film.
The Bradford 2025 bid includes the wider Bradford district as well, so there’s the Saltaire UNESCO World Heritage Site and Salts Mill, and Haworth, long-associated with the Brontë sisters.
There’s already a long list of events planned throughout 2025. These include the re-opening of the National Science & Media Museum, which has undergone a year-long refurbishment. Bradford 2025 kicked off with Rise, an outdoor event which attracted around 10,000 people on both nights, hosted by Bradford-born illusionist Steven Frayne (who previously went by the name Dynamo).
It’s not just the Media Museum that’s had a refit. If it’s your first time visiting Bradford city centre in a while, you’ll find that much of 2024 was spent pedestrianising many of the streets, making it a much more pleasant place to walk through. Whilst there is some work still to complete, it looks much nicer and the extra trees and shrubs are welcome.
When Hull was City of Culture in 2017, it resulted in the creation of almost 800 jobs in the city, and regeneration of some run down areas by the docks. I hope that Bradford 2025 will be similarly transformational.
Good grief, has it really been 23 years since my first blog post? Apparently so.
Whilst I took a break between 2018 and 2022, that’s a very big commitment to something. Certainly, many, many hours have gone into writing blog posts over the years, and many more hours in maintaining a web site to host them on. I’ve always self-hosted my blog, even in the very early days when I wrote blog posts using Blogger. Last year’s blogiversary post goes into more detail about the technical side of things.
Thinking back to when I was turning 23, I was starting full-time work and about to move in with my then-girlfriend Hari. I was still renting a house, didn’t drive, wasn’t married and didn’t have children, but was still an independent adult. And, no-one likes you when you’re twenty three.
Considering that the blog was something that I started on a whim aged 17, whilst living with my parents and preparing for my A-level exams, part of me is genuinely surprised I’ve kept it for so long.
I can’t remember a time that there’s been snow on the ground for eight days straight. It’s certainly not happened in my adult life; it may have happened when I was much younger, perhaps in the late 1980s or early 1990s. But the heavy snow that we had last Sunday has stuck around for over a week now, thanks to low temperatures that have prevented it all from melting.
I’m writing this yesterday (Sunday 11th January) and it’s probable that most of the snow will start to melt today (Monday). Yesterday (Sunday), the temperatures reached a ‘dizzying high’ of 4° C (39° F), which is the warmest it’s been all week. Meanwhile, night-time temperatures have apparently dropped as low as -10° C (14° F).
Suffice to say, it’s been an interesting week. The school that our nine-year-old attends announced it would be closed on Monday. As it’s the 21st century, thankfully this wasn’t a case of listening to local radio, but a message via the parents’ app just after 7am. Also, as it’s the 21st century and in the years following a pandemic, us parents were provided with the schoolwork that our kids would be doing if they were in school. I booked last minute annual leave with my (thankfully) understanding employer, and we got to work. Thankfully, most of it was Maths, and so not something I struggle with.
Tuesday was a return to relative normality as the school re-opened, but many other local schools remained closed throughout last week (some are still closed today, as in Monday). I even made it into the office on Tuesday, as the trains were running with almost no delays. However, many of my colleagues didn’t, and those of us that did were advised to head home mid-afternoon. We’ve then spent the rest of the week working remotely. I am very pleased that we have this option.
Temperatures should continue to rise, and so whilst there will probably still be snow on the ground this morning, at least we won’t also have ice to contend with. And I’m hoping our heating bills will come down too; as per the photo above, we had spent over £64 on gas this week alone. Some of this is because we were home more, but also because of how cold it was outside.
So, here’s looking forward to some warmer weather. The snow has been fun for a while, but it has outstayed its welcome.
I’m not going to link to every single post that I’ve reinstated, because that would take forever. Indeed, so far, I’ve reinstated 445 old blog posts, compared to the 242 new posts that I’ve written since I restarted blogging in 2022 (including this one). My main starting point has been my year in review posts (see 2024 in review as an example) where I have gone through and reinstated most of the blog posts linked from each of these reviews, going back to 2009.
It’s been a big job; I reinstated 78 blog posts from 2014 alone. My focus now is on blog posts from 2008 and earlier, my aim being to have at least one blog post from each month reinstated going back to when I started in 2002.
Reinstating blog posts isn’t a simple copy and paste job. For each one that I’m bringing back, I am:
Making sure any links still work (and leaving them pointing at the Wayback Machine if they don’t).
Re-adding images – many of these are just links to Flickr, but some need uploading again.
Checking spelling and grammar, because I’ve found lots of mistakes that I’d never previously spotted.
Reinstating any other missing blog posts that are linked, if needed.
Checking and adding tags – older blog posts especially did not have tags, or only had one or two.
It’s also worth noting that some blog posts were not individually indexed by the Wayback Machine, and so I have to try to find them in other ways, such as checking older versions of the home page.
My original aim was to reinstate between 1 and 2% of my old blog posts, and at present, I’m on around 1.5%. The quality definitely declines as time goes on; in the early days (mainly before Twitter), many blog posts would be one or two sentences at most but with several posts in a day. I’ll bring some of these back, but there are also good reasons why I won’t be reinstating everything. You can find these in my Finding peace post from October 2023.
Last week, I ended up at a Five Guys Burgers & Fries again. Whilst I wouldn’t describe myself as a Five Guys regular, I’ve eaten at several of their restaurants over the years. And usually it’s because I’m hungry and it happens to be the least-worst option that’s available.
Ten years ago, there were almost no Five Guys restaurants around in the UK (the first restaurant in London opened in 2013). Now, there are 174 restaurants in the UK, of which 48 are in London. Leeds has four – indeed, what prompted this blog post was that I was eating in the new Five Guys location on the top floor of the Trinity Leeds shopping centre, and it’s a literal stone’s throw away from their existing Duncan Street restaurant. I mean it – you could stand on the roof of one, and throw a stone to the other – they’re that close to each other.
My concern is that it’s growing rapidly, and that the owners and/or franchisees are following an overly-rigid operating model. I’m going to cite two case studies as evidence.
Patisserie Valerie
Firstly, let’s look at another chain restaurant that grew rapidly before suddenly contracting: Patisserie Valerie. Founded in the 1920s, it had eight shops in 2006 and 192 a little over ten years later. It turned out that, underneath that massive growth, was (alleged) financial fraud, and its auditors were fined over £2m for not spotting the errors in the company’s accounts. Now, Patisserie Valerie is back down to 10 shops, with none in the North of England; I walked past the one in Leeds which seems to have closed recently, judging by the Christmas decorations that were still in the window. However, its cakes are now available to buy at larger Sainsbury’s supermarkets.
Now, I’m in no way alleging fraudulent accounting practices at Five Guys, but its growth in the UK followed a similar pattern to Patisserie Valerie. Has Five Guys grown too fast, too quickly?
Five Guys in Bradford
There is (at least) one place where Five Guys opened, and then closed a restaurant in the UK: Bradford. And I want to use it as a case study because I think it’s a good example of where Five Guys didn’t adjust their offering to suit a local market.
Around about one third of Bradford’s population is Muslim. Muslims, in the main, don’t drink alcohol, and will only eat halal meat. Other chains, like KFC, Nando’s and Subway, are conscious of this, and so you’ll often find outlets from these chains will serve halal meat in their restaurants in places like Bradford. Five Guys didn’t.
Five Guys also serves alcohol. Well, a small selection of lager. Like I said, I wouldn’t consider myself a regular customer of Five Guys but I have never seen anyone buy lager from there. Some muslims will not enter an establishment that serves alcohol, so again, you’re alienating a significant portion of your customer base to sell a product that, anecdotally, not many people buy anyway.
It’s also worth noting that Bradford is not a particularly well-off area, and Five Guys is expensive compared to, say, McDonalds. A similar meal at Five Guys typically costs three times more than at McDonalds. I accept that the quality at Five Guys is much better, and the ingredients are fresher, but every time I have been I’ve always felt like I’ve been fleeced.
If you’re wondering, the outlet where Five Guys used to be in Bradford is now a branch of Metro Bank. Also, ironically, it used to be opposite a Patisserie Valerie, which itself is now a Pret a Manger.
Nuts about
Besides the two case studies, there’s also Five Guys’ attitude to nuts. According to this meta analysis, about 4% of people in Europe report having some kind of nut allergy – so, one in every 25 people. Five Guys cooks all of its fries in peanut oil, and used to have open bags of peanuts in its restaurants. Now, whilst there will be some variation in the severity of peoples’ nut allergies, for some, they literally cannot be in the same room as nuts.
I’m sure that the decision to use peanut oil is related to the fries tasting better that way. But that decision has to be balanced against alienating well over an estimated 2 million Brits who self-report having a nut allergy (assuming the 4% prevalence).
Every Five Guys is basically the same
With the exception of the Five Guys in York city centre, which is in an old building on Low Petergate, every other Five Guys is basically the same. There’s no variation on decor, and the menu is the same everywhere too. Now that’s probably good for consistency, but it’s also, well, boring.
Indeed, I mention the Five Guys in York because we went there on Boxing Day in 2023. Inside, however, you would not know it was Boxing Day, because there was no attempt to make it feel like Christmas. Pretty much every other restaurant will have got out their Christmas decorations, and maybe even added some special items to their menu for a limited time. Not Five Guys. It’s the same menu all year round. And it’s a very limited menu – basically just burgers and hotdogs. Now, I’ve seen enough episodes of Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares to know that having a limited menu can be an advantage (doing a few things well), but could they expand it a bit?
Sure, you can have different toppings on your burger each time, or a different flavour milkshake. And there’s the Coke Freestyle machines, which provide one of the few ways of getting Mezzo Mix in the UK. But there’s only so many times you can read a scanned copy of the Nantucket Business Monthly April 2009’s review of their Five Guys outlet on the wall.
What I think Five Guys needs to do
So, to summarise:
Five Guys needs to give individual store managers or franchisees some freedom to adapt the offering for local markets – e.g. halal meat or not serving alcohol.
Add a few more items to the menu. Maybe offer chicken as well as beef?
Offer limited edition items related to events like Christmas.
Are the magazine articles on the walls really necessary now? Many of them are regional US magazines for places some Brits may have never even heard of, and it seems kind-of desperate. Consider taking these down, or limiting them to British magazines.
Consider their pricing, and whether they need to lower prices in areas where the local population has lower disposable incomes.
Consider whether they can reduce their use of nuts in their restaurants.
Overall, Five Guys feels like the sort of place where a very rigid concept has happened to have done well, and so it’s being recreated without any regard for local variations. And, in the long term, I just don’t think it’s sustainable.
Last week, we took our nine-year-old for their first visit to the Jorvik Viking Centre in York. Now I grew up in York, and so have been many times over the years, but the last time Christine and I went was in 2012.
Jorvik is undoubtedly one of York’s best known tourist attractions, having opened celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. However, I’m writing about it now because, until the 23rd February, Jorvik is dressed up for winter.
Recreation of Jorvik ride
The main part of Jorvik sees visitors sitting in carriages that move around a recreation of York, or ‘Jorvik’ as it was known in the time of the Vikings. The carriages seat six, and feature a commentary in multiple languages. This part takes around 15 minutes, and the carriages rotate to highlight different parts of the recreated city. The buildings are laid out roughly as they were found when the site was excavated in the 1970s.
As mentioned, Jorvik has been dressed up for winter, so at present there’s snow on all the recreated buildings and on the ground. If you’ve been to Jorvik recently, maybe give it another visit as it looks very different at present. I didn’t take any photos on my visit this time unfortunately.
Accessibility
Jorvik is accessed down some stairs, although there is a lift. If you’re a wheelchair user, you’ll need to book in advance by phone (not online), as only one of the carriages has been adapted for a wheelchair and the staff will need to give you a specific timeslot. However, all the carriages offer a hearing loop for hearing aid users, and subtitles for the commentary. Famously, Jorvik recreates the smells of Viking York and this is worth being prepared for if you’re sensitive to unusual scents. There’s an extensive accessibility page on Jorvik’s web site, detailing what you can expect and how they can help you.
The days of there being massive queues for Jorvik snaking around the Coppergate Shopping Centre are mostly gone, as you now need to pre-book. You should do this online if you can; you can book on your phone on arrival, but be prepared to have to come back later. We turned up without pre-booking and had to return after 45 minutes. However, the following day, there were signs up saying that all time slots were booked up and no more bookings were being taken that day.
I did this last year, and found it interesting to look back at the various statistics of things that I have done over the year. So, here it is again for 2024. It helps that loads of web sites now offer their own version of Spotify Wrapped.
Countries and counties visited
In 2024, I didn’t visit any countries besides England where I live.
Over the course of the year, I have spent at least some time in the following English counties:
West Yorkshire
North Yorkshire
South Yorkshire
Lincolnshire
Greater Manchester
Lancashire
Cheshire
Norfolk
Northumberland
County Durham
Merseyside
Greater London
West Midlands
This doesn’t include any counties that I have passed through without stopping. Compared to last year, I didn’t go to Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey or Hampshire, but I did go to Northumberland, County Durham, Merseyside, Greater London and the West Midlands which were all counties that I didn’t go to in 2023.
For context, I went as far east as 2023, but further north and (slightly) further west. However, as we didn’t go to France this year, I went significantly less far south.
Methods of transport used
Because we didn’t take our car to France, I didn’t drive as much this year – about 8000 miles, or 20% less than last year.
However, I have done more train travel. As well as my commute to work, we took the train to London in March. I have driven once in London and vowed never again; not least because our car is a diesel and therefore subject to additional charges inside the ULEZ. I also took our nine-year-old to Leeds last week on the train.
We’ve also been on trams a couple of times in Manchester – we tend to drive to Hollinwood tram stop and use Metrolink as a park and ride service. And whilst we didn’t cross the channel by ferry this year, we did cross the Mersey by ferry instead. Once again, no aeroplane flights in 2024.
Music listened to
Over the year, I scrobbled 12,671 tracks on last.fm, so slightly down on the 13,194 from 2023 (and 13,447 from 2022). That’s almost 35 songs per day, again down by about one a day from 2023. Assuming an average song is around three minutes, I listen to almost two hours of music every day on average. Spotify reckons that I listened to 436 minutes, or just over 7 hours of music on the 25 October.
Whilst I don’t exclusively listen to music on Spotify, on there, pop was my top genre, following by trance, rock, pop dance and Europop this year, according to my Spotify Wrapped. My most-listened to song was ‘React’ by Switch Disco featuring Ella Henderson and Robert Miles, which I listened to 14 times. Which is unsurprising as it’s one of our nine-year-old’s favourite songs, and samples Robert Miles’ ‘Children’.
My top artist was Armin van Buuren, which surprised me but there’s almost always one of his songs in my weekly Release Radar playlist. The rest of my top five were Patty Gurdy (blog post), Madam Misfit (blog post), David Guetta and Dua Lipa. I listened to 4,235 different bands and artists over the course of the year.
Books read and listened to
According to My Goodreads Year in Books for 2024, I read 77 books this year – 16 fewer than 2023. This amounts to 17,845 pages (although many of these were listened to as audiobooks).
The shortest book I read, at 32 pages long, was ‘The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me’ by Roald Dahl(sponsored link) – clearly, one of the books that I read to our nine-year-old this year. Meanwhile, I listened to 15 and a half hours of Nicola Coughlan reading ‘The Shadow Cabinet’ by Juno Dawson(sponsored link), which translates to 528 pages and the longest book. That’s longer in terms of pages than my longest book last year (‘What Just Happened?!’ by Marina Hyde(sponsored link) – 472 pages) but shorter in terms of listening time (17 hours).
Overall, the average length of book that I read was 231 pages, which is 11 more than 2023. Matt Haig’s ‘The Midnight Library’(sponsored link) was the most popular book that I read last year.
Beers and ciders consumed
I log the beers and ciders that I drink using Untappd, and these stats are from my year in beer. However, I only logged 11 such drinks this year (compared to 58 in 2022). I just haven’t been particularly interested in drinking beer and cider this year, and it’s notable that my favourite style was ‘non-alcoholic’.
Steps taken
My total steps taken was very similar to 2023. Overall I took 3,526,369 steps, which is 5% less than 2023 and means that, on average, I walked just under 10,000 steps per day. Overall that’s almost 2,600 kilometres (again down by around 100 compared to 2023). These are all tracked using my Fitbit Versa 3.
Time spent learning French
I started Duolingo’s French course on the 1st January 2022 (so I have a three year streak now), and in 2024, I spent 4,228 minutes learning – that’s 70 hours or an average of 12 minutes per day. Again, slightly down on 2023, but then we didn’t go to France this year. I also managed to remain in the Diamond League for the entire year, and successfully completed every friends quest and monthly challenge.
My Duolingo Score for French is 100, which means that I’m in the low B2 level (‘vantage’) of the CEFR for French. Currently Duolingo’s maximum score for French is 130, which is high B2 level and should be sufficient to study a university course taught in French. I’m hoping to achieve that by the end of 2025, although there’s a possibility of us going on holiday somewhere else which may see me switch languages for a bit.
Podcasts listened to
I listen to the majority of my podcasts through Overcast (with the remainder in BBC Sounds). My most listened to podcast was RHLSTP (RHLSTP!) with 78 hours over the year. The Guilty Feminist, The Comedian’s Comedian, The Bugle and The Infinite Monkey Cage make up the rest of my top 5. ‘Reasons Revisited’ is the now defunct podcast which was hosted by Ed Milliband and Geoff Lloyd; now that Ed is a government minister again, there are no more new episodes.
Tracking my podcast listening is a relatively new feature in Overcast and so this is a new statistic that I didn’t track in 2023.
Photos taken
Another new statistic that I didn’t track in 2023 was number of photos taken. It’s an estimate – basically it’s the total number of images backed up from my phone to Dropbox over the year. That could also include screenshots, memes and a few videos. Overall, it was 1,813 in 2024, compared to 1,417 in 2023. So whilst I may have been less active, listened to less music and not been abroad, I did take around 28% more photos in 2024.
So, that’s 2024 quantified, and a useful summary of the statistics from various web services that seem to spend their December telling me data they hold about me but in a nice way. I suppose I need to get a bit active in 2025 then.
