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Post by PG on Dec 8, 2020 11:20:46 GMT
My wife has never been able to get her head around the idea that despite being an island nation, we aren't big fish eaters. That has not always been the case. I think your perception of that depends on your age. Time was that fish and chips was pretty much what take-away food meant and most families eat fish a couple of times a week, from shops or cooked at home. Fish vans were pretty common, delivering fresh fish and shellfish to homes. When I was at school fish on Friday was still de-rigeur for example. But fish definitely went up in price after we joined the EEC and after the various Icelandic cod-wars. That drove people away from fish. Plus tastes changed as chicken, which used to be expensive, became way, way cheaper as industrial production methods became used. Hence, as an alternative to red meat, people moved away from fish to cheaper chicken.
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Post by Roadrunner on Dec 8, 2020 11:22:39 GMT
Which is about 80 miles or some-such similar distance, right? Yes. it’s 70 miles, so James will be closer than that en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coton_in_the_ElmsI do really like fish (including the battered kind), but anything that needs dissecting to eat is generally too much hassle. I do really like Oysters and scallops, would always choose them if available. Only 70 miles if the fish is travelling in the beak of a crow, returning from a visit to Mr & Mrs Seagull. I also love scallops and cooked them as the starter for my mother's 80th birthday dinner a couple of weeks ago. This thread now has me thinking in terms of something involving smoked salmon for lunch.
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Post by racingteatray on Dec 8, 2020 11:26:15 GMT
If I were to venture down to the main road in the early morning or evening and wait for a short while I'd be able to see a number of fish merchants going by in their vans at warp speed. My mother grew up in a tiny coastal village (actually more of a hamlet than anything as grand as a village) in Suffolk sandwiched between the UK's answer to Roswell and the saltmarsh on the edge of the sea. We moved back there to take on her family home in 1990, so I lived there all through my teens. The village shop had closed years before and the pub (a proper old smuggler's den) closed down for good when I was about 18. There was no bus and as kids if we wanted to go to the nearest village shop / post office and my mother was busy, it was a six mile round trip by bicycle that used to feel like a great adventure. I suppose nowadays that a parent would be scolded for allowing three young teenagers to cycle off on a six mile trip on country lanes on their own, but in those days none of us thought anything of it. But despite all that we did have the fish van which came twice a week and was our only regular service apart from the milkman. Our house was set well back from the street so Mum had a wooden fish that we hung on the gates at the top of the drive if she wanted to buy fish and so the fishmonger knew to stop and honk his horn when he passed.
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Post by johnc on Dec 8, 2020 12:29:12 GMT
I love fish and eat it as much as possible when I'm eating out. My wife can't stand it so I don't get to eat it at home unless it's a takeaway or some rollmops on bread for a healthy lunch. Ditto. I only have fish when we are out and I actively choose it too. When I was growing up we had fish from the local fishmonger a couple of times a week. I also used to catch fish from about 50 yds in front of the house so Mackerel or Cod were fairly regular too.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 8, 2020 13:48:02 GMT
We had a delivery startup canvassing for fish and poultry deliveries but we had to order once a fortnight every fortnight or he was not interested. I told him I was not interested and he took offence. He was looking at his delivery to each house being in the order of £50 a fortnight. I'm pretty sure he did not get much in the way of take up because I did not see him after about a fortnight.
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Dec 15, 2020 17:28:22 GMT
I’m hearing a whisper that a deal is about to be agreed and Parliament will be recalled next Mon/Tues.
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Post by johnc on Dec 15, 2020 17:48:44 GMT
I’m hearing a whisper that a deal is about to be agreed and Parliament will be recalled next Mon/Tues. At least that would be some good news for 2020 (until people start picking at it and pointing out all the negatives)
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Post by racingteatray on Dec 15, 2020 18:29:44 GMT
It cannot at this stage be anything other than a shit deal but that wouldn't stop it being good news in my view.
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Post by Alex on Dec 15, 2020 22:12:17 GMT
It cannot at this stage be anything other than a shit deal but that wouldn't stop it being good news in my view. Goes nicely against the Tories previous motto of "no deal is better than a bad deal" but then the Bojo government haven't exactly been keeping their promises (sorry that's rather the understatement of the decade)
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Post by racingteatray on Dec 15, 2020 23:50:46 GMT
There is a school of thought that makes an articulate case for no deal being better than a bad deal.
I can see both sides of that argument but my instinct is that a deal is better than no deal, especially given the circumstances of COVID etc.
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Post by johnc on Dec 16, 2020 9:26:35 GMT
but my instinct is that a deal is better than no deal, especially given the circumstances of COVID etc. That's my feeling too. A deal at least signifies some agreement on some things and perhaps allows some fine tuning over time. No deal just smacks of two spoilt children who won't even look at each other and as an island nation we need to trade outside our shores so that's a non starter as far as I am concerned. I know of two businesses which will close if we move to WTO terms and the likely consequential fall in the value of the £. Better for exporters (although likely cancelled out by tariffs) but disastrous for importers and the price of imported goods in the UK.
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Post by Martin on Dec 24, 2020 15:05:53 GMT
So, a deal is done with a week to spare, although it's only provisional because the EU members won't get to vote on it until the New Year. I'll leave someone else to review the 1,000 page document but I gather well have tariff and quota free access to the European markets and the French get to keep eating our fish.
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Post by ChrisM on Dec 24, 2020 16:16:08 GMT
^ I thought they said it was 2000 pages, not 1000 ?
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Post by racingteatray on Dec 24, 2020 16:39:53 GMT
So, a deal is done with a week to spare, although it's only provisional because the EU members won't get to vote on it until the New Year. I'll leave someone else to review the 1,000 page document but I gather well have tariff and quota free access to the European markets and the French get to keep eating our fish. For trade and manufacturing, but it's not so rosy for services.
But then we knew that, because the Tory party hasn't yet extracted itself from a 20th century mindset when it comes to the economy. Or in some cases a 17th century one.
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Post by Martin on Dec 24, 2020 16:45:34 GMT
So, a deal is done with a week to spare, although it's only provisional because the EU members won't get to vote on it until the New Year. I'll leave someone else to review the 1,000 page document but I gather well have tariff and quota free access to the European markets and the French get to keep eating our fish. For trade and manufacturing, but it's not so rosy for services.
But then we knew that, because the Tory party hasn't yet extracted itself from a 20th century mindset when it comes to the economy. Or in some cases a 17th century one.
I haven’t spent any time looking at it, what’s the issue for services?
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Post by PG on Dec 24, 2020 22:36:42 GMT
I think the deal looks to be a good outcome after all this time. Yes, the die-hard brexiteers will find stuff to scoff at, and the die-hard remainers will bemoan that it's not actually being in the EU. But we've left and this gives us quota free, tariff free trade in both directions. Mercedes, Audis at al will not be more expensive and in return we can sell stuff to the EU as before. Perhaps at the end both sides stared down the barrel of the gun and decided that pulling the trigger was pretty silly. So it was like most commercial negotiations I've ever been involved in - nothing gets decided really until the last few minutes.
On services, yes the deal excludes services. But was there ever really a single market in services? From my time as a European Finance Director I never saw one. My UK audit firm could not sign off French or German accounts; my UK bank offered Euro bank accounts, but they were all domiciled in Ireland; the Italian government insisted that only Italian domiciled accounts could be used to pay taxes; our "pan-European" payroll bureau had to have offices in every country to run the local payrolls; I had to retain a legal firm in all EU countries to act as our local representative; etc etc. Yes, people could travel and do work in every country, but that always seemed very different to an actual "single market" where services were freely traded and recognised.
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Post by michael on Jan 29, 2021 19:24:33 GMT
What are the odds it's going to be no deal after all?
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