The Lemon Fool

back in the days when we had cats (before a daughter with asthma triggered by them), we used to keep emergency reserves in the form of tins of tuna.
Could then be deployed for cats or humans as needed

Bizarrely of my current four cats, two are very averse to eating tuna or anything tuna flavoured. One will only eat dry food, apparently this was her only experience before coming to live with me and she regards the wet stuff eaten by the others with great suspicion, occasionally sniffing round it but then backing off. Most bizarre of all one is simply terrified of shrimps/prawns! The cat before the current lot lived with me for some while on her own as she had got to be elderly and I felt it wasn't fair to inflict any new companions on her. Milly's greatest delight was any cat food with prawns in it or - the most heavenly treat of all - two or three real prawns. As she got older and couldn't do so much, one little thing to make her life interesting was to keep a bag of the tiny economy type prawns in the fridge and defrost a few for her whenever very cold weather or rain was making her feel she didn't want to go out. After Milly died the remainder of the last bag of prawns sat in the freezer for a little while until Miss Whizz came into my life and I thought a prawn or two might help her settle in. Her terror was a complete surprise and to this day she won't eat any cat food which contains even the tiniest shrimps.

The most recent stray to inform me that he was adopting me and wasn't I lucky most fortunately likes both tuna and shrimps and hoovers up anything from selection packs regarded as no go by the other three

puffster wrote:I would be careful about giving dogs profiteroles as they are coated with chocolate which is not good for dogs. - Regards, Puffster

What I said was

Now dog food could be a problem - but mine are all labradors and eat anything including "profiteroles" which I have never been able to eat since someone pointed out the similarity of a pile of horse droppings to a serving of them. Guess which variety the dogs eat.

My horses and donkeys don't coat them with chocolate!

regards - BBB

The OP asked what single item would you stock up on and why?

Nothing. No need. And if there is a need - which I very much doubt - I'll leave for a few years.

Eb.

Eboli wrote:And if there is a need - which I very much doubt - I'll leave for a few years.

But Brexit is supposed to end economic migration.

Oh, you're one of the special ones...


GS

Nothing. We'll eat beans on toast if needs be, and the cats have plenty of mice outside. Why worry about the uncontrollable?

I'm not stocking up on any supplies, but I have recently topped up Warehouse REIT (WHR) to try and capitalise on those who are.

I have also been looking at SMDS (DS Smith) who make cardboard boxes and packaging.

TheMotorcycleBoy wrote:

BusyBumbleBee wrote:Various people I know are already buying in emergency supplies in case of a no deal Brexit.

What single item would you stock up and why?

I personally cannot think of anything I need to buy for this reason.

Nothing. We'll eat beans on toast if needs be, and the cats have plenty of mice outside. Why worry about the uncontrollable?

Request to have this entire topic moved to Laughing Lemons please. For the record not only am I stockpiling nothing but I am running down my supplies as the day approaches. We have nothing to fear but project fear itself.

Lootman wrote:Request to have this entire topic moved to Laughing Lemons please.

Oh dear - hope you are not serious : this board used to be very lively - and quite humorous before we were forced to move - it's pretty dead now and I was merely trying to liven it up a bit.

BusyBumbleBee wrote:Coffee seems to be top of the list and yet as far as I know none is grown in the EU.



.

This is probably answered somewhere else in this thread, but access to coffee from coffee producing countries is probably via an EU trade agreement which will disappear after Brexit, so will need setting up. Or under WTO rules which _may__ make it more expensive.

Or summat.

didds

didds wrote:This is probably answered somewhere else in this thread, but access to coffee from coffee producing countries is probably via an EU trade agreement which will disappear after Brexit, so will need setting up. Or under WTO rules which _may__ make it more expensive.

Or summat.didds

Ah - in the old days you would have got a thwack for that

Here are the tarrifs : http://tariffdata.wto.org/ReportersAndProducts.aspx (for all countries and products) - you need to select the countries and product group 9 and then you can download an excel spreadsheet with all the tarriffs.

At this point I gave up the will to live and did think of buying enough coffee for 100 years from Amazon (the company not the rain forest)

Over the last couple of months I have been buying anything that I'll need in the next two years. My house looks like a cash and carry.

I've got trays of tins of; plum tomatoes, chopped tomatoes, tomato soup, veg soup, other types of soup, pasta sauce, pasta, rice, baked beans, kidney beans, flageolet beans (no idea), tinned peaches and fruit, corned beef, olives, pickled onions etc, chocolate and sweets, juice, squash, pop, seventy odd bog rolls, 20 boxes of hankies, scouring pads, shirts, socks, nuts, bolts, screws, washers, rivets, threaded bolt, paint, white spirit, and a full workshop of power tools and hand tools. I've got candles for the three day week, spare duvets for the freezer, boards for the windows (whether we leave or remain), and motors and batteries in case I need to knock up the odd wind turbine. I'm just about there.

The only things left to get are petrol and bottled water.

Well, there's not much doubt about it - other people are buying up in advance. Our local Sainsburys (small blue-collar town that voted Leave) is running short of tinned foods because the possibility of not having a Fray Bentos steak pie is clearly not a risk worth taking. Even though it comes from Uruguay, not Dortmund...

The panic-buying focus on tinned stuff suggests that some people (at least) are expecting the power to go off on 30th March. I couldn't possibly comment. But my barbecue remains ever-ready for action. And my Camping Gaz cooker as well.

Half-seriously, I've bought what seems merely sensible - a couple of bags of coffee, a case or two of French wine, a few loo rolls, a few additional cans of the emergency curries that we take with us on camping trips (so we'll need them anyway), and various packets of dried food such as basmati rice or couscous or tabbouleh that we'd be using on summer evenings in the garden. As for the rest - well, I have a row of parsnips in the ground which have now had their first taste of frost, so maybe I'll dig some of them up some time?

Joking apart (says BJ ), my wife and I are fortunate to have a big, crumbling old place with masses of storage space which we've always used for loading up with whatever happens to be cheap this week. It seems somehow ironic that the most imminent impact of the stacked-up lorry traffic delays at Dover will be felt most immediately by those poor souls who can't afford to buy anything in advance - those who depend on a weekly benefits giro - and who seem (errrr, allegedly) to have voted overwhelmingly to land themselves in this mess. Such as in our town.

Here's hoping it ain't so.

BJ

Panic over problem solved.
Unilever are stockpiling Magnum's ahead of Brexit.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business

maximan wrote:Unilever are stockpiling Magnum's ahead of Brexit.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business

I was pleased to see from this article that they are also stockpiling deodorant. Not so much to head off the garlicky whiff of our continental cousins, but rather because they've had a particularly large order from the House of Commons. Poison, Right Guard and Fcuk are said to be the brands topping the list. Not so much demand for Lynx, though.

BJ

I think one needs to know what comes in via what route, if there are logistic blockages I would expect them to be on the cross channel routes rather than the bulk goods routes,

Whilst we can check original origin, and we can check whether via an EU distributor, it is trickier to know via which route items currently arrive.

The only work ones we are doing are ground coffee, paper towels and toilet rolls. Re the house it is trickier due to lack of space, we have already crammed as much as we can in so am considering my mother in law's house as she has lots of space.

The catch is the items I would have difficulty without tend not to keep that well, fruit/veg/milk/bread, so expect if I get some more space it will be rice,pasta, olive oil, tinned tomatoes, herbs, jars of diced garlic, fresh garlic, onions. We eat very little meat anyway as my wife has virtually cut it from her diet and she does most of the cooking. Re my daughter, given her inability to cook, it looks like tinned macaroni cheese, beans with ghastly sausages and pot noodles- we though sending her away to university would improve her cooking abilities but instead she got on first name terms with the staff working in the St Andrews sandwich/fast food outlets.

There is a reference on an LBC phone in to goods shipment priorities the government could introduce from a fruit buyer who seems to suggest they have been told they might get permitted 25% truck capacity if No Deal issues re truck movements if anyone is interested, I suspect fresh food is more going to be an issue if there is an issue.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/ ... al-brexit/

richfool wrote:I'm not stocking up on any supplies, but I have recently topped up Warehouse REIT (WHR) to try and capitalise on those who are.

I have also been looking at SMDS (DS Smith) who make cardboard boxes and packaging.

SMDS - good point. You think the house construction market will take a new direction?

TUK020 wrote:

richfool wrote:I'm not stocking up on any supplies, but I have recently topped up Warehouse REIT (WHR) to try and capitalise on those who are.

I have also been looking at SMDS (DS Smith) who make cardboard boxes and packaging.

SMDS - good point. You think the house construction market will take a new direction?

If there are issues at ports how will DSSmith bring in their pulp from abroad ? Or their board/card product ? Remember that 2/3 of UK paper is sourced from abroad and the UK has only got 1/3 the number of papermills it requires to be independent (and practically none of the forests & pulp). The pulp situation goes back about 70-years: there were merchant navy sailors killed bringing in pulp cargoes in WW2. This is not a new issue.

I am ALREADY seeing logistics issues due to Brexit affecting our factory. For some reason there is a shortage of empty containers in circulation ready to be loaded, and for the life of me I cannot think why ......... This has delayed some of our despatches abroad by a week. So I am having to write grovelling letters to our clients about late despatches, not that many weeks after writing to our clients (at their insistence!) to tell them that we had our Brexit contingency plans all lined up.

If the southern ro-ro ports jam up do not think the problem will only be contained there. The northern & container ports will also jam up. All it will take is for a) the media to have a hissy fit about queues at Dover and all the customs officials will get sent there (and there will be queues and the media will have a hissy fit) and the result will be no customs officials to clear inbound cargoes up north etc. Oh and b) no containers in = no containers out, irrespective of whether they inbound ones came on a lorry or off a crane. Oh, and c) logistics agents/handlers will be snowed under wet nursing the ro ro trade and will not have time for the regular trade, and d) quite likely HMRC systems will crash (moi, a cynic).

regards, dspp

Dspp, have you noticed that DS Smith are big in recycling paper and board? I suspect that a high proportion of their feedstock comes from this source. If they have to import pulp, I would expect Canada to be a good source.

Corner Brook pulp and paper in Newfoundland is a good example, originally set up by Bowaters.

TJH

I wondered if everyone has used up their Brexit stocks yet - and are we preparing or the next date adequately? Or would it be more profitable to organise a sweepstake on when it might be?

BusyBumbleBee wrote:I wondered if everyone has used up their Brexit stocks yet - and are we preparing or the next date adequately? Or would it be more profitable to organise a sweepstake on when it might be?

Brexit stocks are running low - I might have to go shopping again soon.

Watis