Travelling broadens the mind so they say. Just returning from a weekend sailing to Chichester and back, glorious weather. Woke early this morning for the return from Yarmouth, to the sounds of the first ferry of the day arriving from the mainland. Only traffic seemed to be 6 lorries, 3 big Sainsburys ones, and 3 smaller, 3663.
Yarmouth is a lovely little town, hardly unchanged in the 40 years I've known it since visiting as a small child, with a small grocers, an old fashioned newsagents, chandlers, several coffee shops, a deli and a couple of others. Yet the 'Sailors guide to Yarmouth' now had full page adverts on consecutive pages. One for Sainsburies, with 4 stores dotted across the Island, and the other for a Tescos Extra at Ryde, at the far end.
Of course the Isle of Wight has always depended on its links wth the mainland, and many goods have always been imported. It now seems though that the big supermarkets are muscling in even here, where the locally produced foods, the Isle of Wight garlic and other special local products may be even more subsumed by the megalithic traders.
The ferry of course makes this much more visible than the procession of lorries visiting every town across the land in the early morning, how are we to get locally self-resilient when such massive conveyor-belt technologies daily fill the supermarket shelves.
It must be extra-expensive for them to ship goods across the Solent, perhaps we just have to anticipate that the price of diesel, or taxes on the environmental costs per mile will eventually tip the balance in favour of local production. But will that be too late ?
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