A Time of Magic

Greenways are the in thing these days basically because they let councils show an eco friendly face, use what would ordinarily be waste land and collect lots of grant money.

That said, they do provide genuine advantages to the communities through which they run. For instance, the disused railway embankment behind our house had became largely a muddy path surrounded by weeds which were regularly set fire to over the summer. That was maybe a decade or so ago when they decided that it should be a greenway.

Over a fairly short period of time, the muddy path was replaced by a tarmac one, the weeds were cut back and trees were planted along the route. We all thought that the burning would continue but in fact it’s never happened since.

The only downside now is that the greenway was put in a little bit too soon as it doesn’t have the lighting that later ones have so you can’t really use it at night. In fact, that’s just one of a whole raft of improvements that we’ll see in a second similar scheme that’s being created as from this November. I’ve walked along parts of what’ll be the new route and they seriously need a cleaning out but in a few years time that’ll all change.

A bit of a gimmic name-wise, but one that’s worth having for all the plus points that it attracts.

If the marketing companies could get a definitive answer to that question we’d be even more inundated with the give aways than we are at the moment.

Of course, the problem is that there are many different reasons why things are collected and kept. I still have the stress ball from an IT convention from many years ago largely because it was the only time I’ve been to a place giving those out: it was unique. A few years ago I remember one stand being swamped because they had cute little pens and those were kept for a while ’til the likes of IKEA started handing similar things out: another unique item. Then there’s the personal reasons: I still use the promo keychains or rather keychain, singular, given with the £60,000 computer system I bought almost 15 years ago basically as a reminder of how daft the procurement people were at that time. I’m quite sure it’s the most expensive keyring in our street!

That unique quality is something worth searching for in items that you give away but requires you to move outside the standard catalogues and make that little bit more effort.

Not too far from us we’ve a major shopping area with two major supermarkets on opposite sides of a dual carriageway.

In principle, it should really matter which we go to as the competition should level out any pricing differences given that they’re so close to each other. Well, perhaps in principle but in practice there are major differences in the pricing.

Thus we do almost all our shopping in one of those supermarkets and largely ignore the other one. That in turn seems to seriously confuse the marketing algorithm that the loyalty card system in the lesser used supermarket uses. Every time we go (which works out at maybe a couple of times each month) we get what seems like a crazy offer from them yet when we go back to use that offer we don’t get anything comparable afterwards.

Now, I can understand that tactic being useful when a supermarket opens as a way to attract customers from the other supermarket. Why they do it getting on for ten years on is something of a mystery though.