Bottle

Tonight, Panorama are doing a program about bottled water. I'm glad, because I have always viewed the phenomenon of buying bottled water in a country with a perfectly good supply of water as being totally ridiculous. I think, purely in terms of logic, it ranks up there with war, advertising and botox as one of mankind's most pointless endeavours. Wow, I spelt 'endeavours' right first time. I'm not going to bother ranting at length about why bottled water is such a silly idea, since I would hope it's pretty obvious, but I will moan about something else.

I'm heading off travelling on Friday, so I'm cancelling my subscription to Tesco Online DVD Rental. When I logged in to cancel, I noticed that there were three options: I could take two weeks of holiday without payment (not much use since I'm away for over three months, but a good idea), I could cancel my account entirely, or I could 'freeze my account'. This sounded tempting - why cancel completely when I could just return my current DVD, keep my account details and list of films that I want to rent, and start paying again when I get back? The answer, it turns out, is that the cost of this privilege is £1 a week. That's about £4.50 a month, AKA more than half what I pay right now for the full service, just so they won't delete my account details. I know, it's called capitalism and they're allowed to charge whatever they want, and I'm not really moaning at that (I don't have the energy). I just think it's a really silly decision - if it had been free, I would definitely have reactivated my account when I got back. Since it's not, I might as well look around for a cheaper DVD rental company when I get back, so Tesco lose out. Then again, I suppose if business were my bag, I'd find it perversely satisfying to have come up with this idea - being paid a fiver a month not to do something. I wonder what the legal definition of blackmail is...