Omar's Diary Sunday 18th January 2015 - horse racing, tea and Arsenal

Man and lady servant have been somewhat restricted to the house this weekend.  Man servant has not been too healthy.  At least he was not unceremoniously woken up, bundled into a cold plastic feline carrier type box and driven to be examined somewhere in a surgery like I was a few weeks ago.

Thank you for asking.  My tail is much better now and the fur is growing back where it was shaved.

Yesterday, Saturday, along with his cold the man servant descended into a short term depression. Once again he demonstrated a consistent and reliable ineptitude in the art or science of selecting successful horses in The Daily Telegraph Fantasy Racing game he is involved in.  Following the Peter Marsh Chase at Haydock he has now cast himself adrift from the rest of the members of the mini league he is in.  As they look back from their ship of success all they can see is a dot on the horizon drifting into the sunset of failure.

I watched the documentary on BBC2 this evening with the servants about tea.  How it travels from the plantation to our tea caddies, tea pots, infusers and a genetic part of British culture.  What the documentary showed were the plantations in Kenya and Uganda where most of our tea comes from.  The workers at the start of the supply chain who pick and process the tea are quite often earning less than £1 a day.  That is less than my Omar style diet costs per day to maintain.

The man servant mentioned that the United Nations a few years ago defined poverty in terms of income as less than $3 a day.  Based on that definition most of the plantation workers were living below the poverty line.  What the film also showed was that the workers, sometimes children, were part of a supply chain managed by international conglomerates worth billions.

This situation does not seem very fair but what is the alternative?  If all the man and lady servants boycotted drinking tea from these countries then these workers would lose their jobs and slip further into poverty in societies lacking the social safety nets we so often take for granted in our societies.

It is for this reason that man servant, from his earlier studies, remembers reading that as consumers should not change their spending habits but when they do spend be aware of how a product arrives ready for consumption.

Oh dear, man servant’s cold has made him rather maudlin this weekend.

On a brighter note to end the weekend his favourite football or soccer club for North American readers, Arsenal won 2-0 away from home against Manchester City. He is very pleased with this success and gains vicarious pleasure from it which far outweighs his ongoing failures at racing.