In message , at 16:42:03
on Wed, 16 Feb 2005, d remarked:

Some people would say you were selfish to buy your vegetables at the
supermarket, rather than spending several hours a week digging an
allotment. People's standards vary.

Why?

There is a lobby which says that it's environmentally criminal to truck
vegetables halfway across the country (or fly them halfway around the
world), when you could easily make do with ones grown locally. In a
built up area that would have to be an allotment, in the absence of farm
shops.

Different people have different "issues". It's impossible to satisfy
them all simultaneously, if for no other reason than it wouldn't leave
any time to do one's day-job.

Are supermarkets hideously overcrowded with runaway cans of tomatoes
killing people and ruining the athmosphere? Not having an alotment, or
even having access to one, that's not even possible. Public transport is
there and it works.

No, it's not available to many people. You perhaps live in London and
are spoilt, try going outside the M25 and the picture changes
dramatically.

Take what happened to me last night.

Train was supposed to get me to the station (from London) at 20:39, but
as often happens it waited outside the station for ten minutes, so
arrived at 20.50.

Although there's a very good bus service during the day, and even a bus
every hour all through the night, the mid-evening gets a bit grim (by
comparison, most people living outside London would give their right
arms for a bus every half hour after 6pm)

So I missed the 20:41 and 20:46 buses (although given the queue at the
stop when I got there I'm not entirely convinced the latter had just
left).

Next one scheduled for 21:01 but didn't turn up until 21:08

So I was stood around in the cold, in a dodgy part of town, for almost
20 minutes, and got home at around 20:20, 40 minutes after my scheduled
arrival at the station - not bad for a 2.5 mile journey !

Meanwhile, the meeting in London ended, as predicted, at 5pm, but my
train from St Pancras was at 6.30 (to give allowance for delays crossing
London). In the event it did indeed take me 50 minutes from docklands -
thanks to the DLR having some kind of issue (platform completely jammed,
next train in "9 minutes", which is 'forever' on the DLR) so I walked to
Canary Wharf and got the tube.

All in all, getting on for four and a half hours: an unplanned walk, two
tubes, two trains (had to change at Leicester) and a bus.

If I'd driven, my route planning software says 2 hrs 18 minutes door to
door, but allowing for congestion getting to the M11 feeder (only a mile
or two from where my meeting was), let's say two and a half hours.

OK, so the "extra" two hours yesterday (plus the extra two hours going
down - I'd allowed 5 hrs door to door by PT in case of cancellations
etc) won't kill me, but if I was doing a trip like that regularly (and
every trip I make is very similar to the one I described) I'd start to
wonder if PT was the right solution.

It's not about needs for these people, but
wants.

Like you "want" to buy your vegetables and fruit flown in from
California, rather than grow your own?

--
Roland Perry