Skeletons in the cupboard

There have been problems with our beekeeping supplies. They left the courier depot on Friday morning, spent the day on a jaunt around the south Midlands and returned to the depot in the evening. Today, they made it to my co-organiser's premises, but only after the driver carried them up a difficult hill, having ignored explicit instructions not to use that road

My co-volunteer asserts that many drivers are illegal immigrants with poor English, working under a gang-master system in a form of what he calls 'glorified slavery'. Part of the precariat; part of the black economy. I have no way of knowing if this is true; I do know he has a friend who works in the industry, so he does have at least one way to validate his opinions. The exploitation he describes definitely does happen: the Morecombe Bay cockle-pickers and various dark corners of the farming industry are two examples. If it is truly widespread in the delivery businesses, I wish government would give more attention to its root causes, and less to trumpeting their 'effectiveness' in rounding up a few of the victims

The crockery came to us from various different branches of the family. Though it all looks similar, it is from several different ranges at a number of different traditional English potteries. It sits in our cupboard, seldom used, just as I remember (some of) it doing the same in my grandmother's. Stuck in a meta-stable place between utility, sentiment and nostalgia. Hidden in the cupboard; bone china