| 9/3/2007 I'm in a Fair Trade mood. You know why? Well it'll be the end of Fair Trade fortnight this Sunday but after seeing the array of Fair Trade chocolate eggs (that time of year again! Lots of deals and selections of choc-eggs on offer!) in the Union Shop (and Woolworths) I wrote Mum an email asking my big egg selections. One is a Dubble Egg and another a Green&Black's brand. Course Luke comes along and tells me that Green&Black's has recently been taken over by Cadbury-Schweppes, owned by the Coca-Cola company. Blast. Oh well, can't be helped. G&B is still a Fair Trade company and it's Nestle that's considered the Satan of exploitation and Third World immorality. Back to Eggs: looking at the prices, it's heart-warming to see Fair Trade eggs with discounts alongside the typical brands-with discounts. But even with discounts, it's the Fair Trade eggs that are mostly cheaper. A lot of the Fair Trade big eggs are £1.99 or thereabouts. Now the Nestle and Cadbury eggs are becoming even more ludicrous and are priced £4.99 because of the extra stuff packaged with the big egg and whatever sweet goes with it (be it creme egg, mars, flake etc). Take the Aero Bubbles egg: it's got a packet of aero bubbles, a hollowed egg with half chocolate/half mint shell and a mug. There's also the giant galaxy minstrels egg (egg plus 2 giant packets of minstrels). Then we have the 'Mars and friends' egg: choc egg, mars bar and the 'friends' include snickers, twix and 2 more bars. The 'Galaxy collection' goes along the same lines. Now let's look at the eggs that charge £9.99: Thorntons, Guylian (shells), Lily O'Brien-oh! Lily O'Brien! That has to be the most sickening and diabetes-inducing big egg of them all! A large chocolate egg plus a big packet of caramel-chocolate covered toffees. I'm sorry but that's just too much. (However, the smaller and typical creme egg-sized LOB eggs are gorgeous.) Tonight was the most successful of the string of events held during Fair Trade fortnight, set up by the Fair Trade group of (Aber) People and Planet (Luke is a fellow member-thought I'd mention it). Don't wanna go into the other messily-prepared events, for one thing I dunno if Robin can take the shame. This event was Fair Trade wine tasting. For free people could have small amounts of Fair Trade wine and as much FT chocolate as they liked. Over 260 raffle tickets were sold, meaning we got a profit. Also, with it being well-advertised, new people got introduced to the campaign and there was a relatively good turn out. It also seemed that the Arts Centre was a good venue 'cos at first we thought we'd hold it among the café tables but then we discovered it to be busier than we predicted. We got put into Gallery 2 instead-we got a hall to ourselves with artwork on the wall and good acoustics for the CD player. (Most of the music was Latin or African-very nice.) We also had extra people wander in during the interval of Great Expectations-good thing we were on the same floor as the theatre. Now we started packing up shortly before 9 (used up all 8 packets of chocolate and 5 bottles of wine-we've got 1 bottle of red left over and unopened) but we spent the next hour mucking about, including Jenny (current P+P prez) practicing her speech for Environment and Ethics Union Exec Officer election-oh yeah, Guild Elections next week. I walked into my dorm, looked at my bedside clock and it said '10:20'. That was almost an hour ago. What am I doing writing this? I've got a choir rehearsal tomorrow morning and I plan to start source-reading. |