Like many people, I have been very disappointed to read that many international corporations, such as Google - the owners of this blogging site - do everything that they can to avoid paying their corporation taxes. We would all like to pay less tax (at least, 99% of us would, I suspect), but for the most part, we pay up and shut up, seeing taxation as a necessary part of running a civilised society. Not so for some of the biggest companies in the world.
I have already stopped shopping at Amazon and I no longer buy my coffee from Starbucks (it was filthy anyway). I have a problem when it comes to Apple, who also practice this off-shore nonsense, so I suppose I could easily be accused of hypocrisy in this small step to put the world to rights, but the alternative is probably no better. At least I buy my Apple stuff from John Lewis, who DO pay their taxes and do support the British economy properly.
There is the wider context of buying locally, of course and we are doing everything we can to do that too. The scandal of the Romanian horse meat in ostensibly beef products which has broken this week, demonstrates that even the food chain is completely out of control. We are proud to only buy our meat from the local butcher in town. We are pleased to buy locally produced eggs and "Buy British" wherever possible in Sainsbury's. We do not shop in Aldi, Lidl, or any of the other supermarkets which have a positive "Don't buy British" ethos.
So, after nearly four years of having this blog hosted here, on Blogger, I have moved it, lock stock and barrel to Wordpress. The link will be at the bottom of this post.
I played around with other alternatives, especially Tumblr. I have friends who seem to be able to use Tumblr quite successfully (if their Twitter feeds are anything to go by!), buy I just found it incomprehensible, despite several rainy afternoons of effort. Within one hour of setting up the Wordpress account, it had imported the whole of this blog, including all the photographs, comments over the years and so on. Very impressed. The formatting, or "theme"might need a little tweak here and there, and the number of "widgets" on the right hand side is fewer than this blog system, but overall, the new look is very pleasing.
So, if you do follow this blog, and I am very grateful that you do, I would be delighted to continue our relationship over on Wordpress. Thanks for reading here over the years and the support that you have offered me, both through the comments facility here, and off line. It really is appreciated, and has helped me through a most interesting period of my life.
See you on the other side.
The address is
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