Be Excellent To Each Other

That's a salad.

Is that fish eating a courgette? What the heck? That’s some fancy kind of aquarium friend you have there. What is it? We just have some platys for Darwin, but they are great orange girlies.

It is, yes - they like courgette

He's a blue-eyed lemon bristlenose pleco.

He’s great! Are they a bit like catfish? He looks a bit like a cross between The Lorax and a humming fish.

It does look suspiciously like he’s prepared himself as sushi.

They're a type of catfish, yes. The Plecostomus family is 300+ types of suckermouth catfish. Bristlenose plecos are good for home tanks because they don't grow more than 5-6 inches and they're not too territorial.

It’s great, and also slightly scary, and a lot bigger than I thought.

I've still got my website closed at the moment, mainly due to lockdown, but also partly while I decide what to do about my EU customers and whether I should even ship internationally at all for a while.

In the meantime, some of my regulars are already proposing solutions to avoid them having to pay customs charges:



so yesterday I learnt what escamotage means (trickery or sleight of hand), but 'fraud' seems a more accurate description. Obviously I won't be going along with it.

That's a good example of the new costs and red tape small businesses across the country are having to deal with.

Who's your MP? Might be fun to write to them asking for their advice, particularity if they voted for the agreement.

Of course, you can always just lie back and think of all that lovely sovereignty.

Oh, and thanks for the new word!

Giphy "escamotage":
https://media4.giphy.com/media/5ttKizoQCq2Xu/giphy-loop.mp4

I remember play.com used to play fast and loose with customs rules. Everything was less than £20 and the p&p was shocking. But IIRC they were based in Jersey

I used to use play.com all the time. It was great!

I used to get my Region 1 DVDs from them. Had The Matrix and Blair Witch Project before the UK cinema release

Also handy to get uncut R1 DVDs, as the BBFC were notoriously scissor happy at the time. Still got the R1 DVDs I bought from play.com back in the day on the shelves upstairs.

(Even The Matrix got cut in the UK, I imported the R1 DVD and as noted above, also got it early.)

A couple of my friends with small businesses keep being asked to falsely declare the amount on customs forms/receipts and have had angry responses when they’ve said they can’t do that, usually finished with a ‘You deserve to have no business, Brexit idiots!’ parting shot, which hurts doubly when you’ve been stridently anti-Brexit from the start, seen it happen to your distress, are now losing business and dealing with that

What you state is the value is immaterial to customs, if they stop the parcel they will define the value and charge accordingly.
That's how it used to be anyway.

Yeah, someone said there was a set idea of value on ‘wool and animal fibres’, but it didn’t seem to fit the value of their items at all (seeing as you can spend between £4-80 on a ball of animal fibre yarn).

Absolutely. I'm lucky that my site isn't my main income, so that if I do go UK-only, I'll still get regular orders, but I'd estimate at least 50% of the site income came from the EU, so there's going to be a significant hit there.

Didn't everyone. It was mandatory, along with a Samsung DVD player that you could make region free with a universal remote.

Heh

https://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/ ... wa#p711486

Bizarrely, you could also soft-mod it with a handful of very specific AIWA stereos of the time, and it just so happened we owned one of the ones on this list.

I can't remember the button combo, and you had to do it every time you turned the DVD player on (Samsung 709, fact fans), but it allowed R1 DVDs to play.

Ah yes, the 709. I couldn’t remember the model number but that’s definitely it.
Oh, and Starship Troopers on a flipper DVD.

It's alright, I've only been waiting for this parcel since November....

Hey, it's not a delay, it's the Sovereignty Bonus!

In other news, Dominic Raab tells some Americans that it's not me, it's EU



*sigh* No, this was something Boris Johnson agreed to and then Parliament voted for. International treaties are not Itunes EULA - you should have read and understood it before agreeing to it. You broke it, you own it.

Also, I'm not sure that criticising the Irish to a US audience on St Patrick's Day was the wisest move, but then Raab only recently discovered Dover.

I was hoping that at least Brexit would mean that UK politicians would no longer be able to blame their bad descisions on the EU.

If they think the EU's being mean, imagine how nasty the US will be. It's almost as if size matters.

Oh my

https://twitter.com/adampayne26/status/ ... 1998915585

The @Foodanddrinkfed has published a snapshot of UK food & drink exports in January to accompany the ONS data. Stark stats galore: Salmon exports to the EU fell by 98% compared to Jan 2020, beef by 91.5%. Pork (-86.9%) & cheese (-85.1%) close behind. Exports to 🇮🇪 fell by 84.9%. pic.twitter.com/ofLxYP9ugW

— Adam Payne (@adampayne26) March 22, 2021

Pah. You clearly haven't looked at the list of seminars available on the official government opportunities site. Up first was "selling food in Mongolia". I'm sure it was massively over-subscribed so I am hugely reassured and certain these changes can be fixed really easily.

It might be even more popular than I'd thought - Midlands only! Hope I haven't raised anyone's hopes.

Well you have now!

Does anybody now have an idea of how ordering things from the EU works, post Brexit. I want to order something around £15 in cost, from The Netherlands, but I’m worried about being stung by import duties as I don’t understand at all how it works and when I search the information is so very confused that I feel I now know less than when I knew nothing.

Badly

More seriously, it's just VAT for anything under £135 at which point duty and a handling fee kick in.

And also expect a really long delivery delay

Problem is that "just" is a ballache for everyone involved that doesn't have an office on both sides of the channel

Amazon is doing a roaring trade dealing with it on behalf of everyone "fulfilled by Amazon"

Thanks everyone. I was struggling to wrap my head around it. I was hoping to order some bulbs from The Netherlands, so I’ll have to check my timings to see how long they might take to arrive. Thanks for the safe and simple advice.

Very delayed title of your sex tape.

‘It’s a betrayal’: Cornish fishing vote turns against Tories over Brexit deal



I mean, I want to sympathise, but they won. They should get over it.

I had to scroll through quite a way to work out what I was even referring to, but it was Craster’s huge ginger ...fish

Speaking of fish, here's another amazing Brexit bonus:


BBC: UK and Norway fail to reach fishing deal

According to the article, we can still import fish caught by Norwegian vessels tariff-free, so we're still benefiting from our exciting trade freedom.
Go-go Global Britain!

Top story on the news this morning was about the Royal Navy protecting post-Brexit fishing rights. It would be churlish to make a cynical connection between the government's decision to release that story and the fact it's an election day where the broadcasters refrain from political reporting.

I suppose I'm a churl, then.

5 years. Sheesh.

Had I known how things would pan out, how awfully cynical the out campaign would be, how people would take the chance to punch the government in the balls when given the opportunity, how successive administrations would completely fuck everything up and make the wrong choices at every opportunity, I doubt I'd have be so flippant and occasionally trolling in this thread and elsewhere as I was.

Like Cameron, I thought it was just going to be a long forgotten memory once remain won, probably 52-48. With the result flipped, I thought that the EEA would be the acceptable grudging compromise.. This still seems like the missed path, and made a lot of a sense as for years I was of the view that there'd be a time when some states decided to integrate further whilst others, like the UK, joined an outer orbit. It's probably the case that we'll end up somewhere like that over time as the world opens up post-Covid and people start seeing how distant we are for everything. I took no account of how nasty and rapid the Tory party would be

I do feel like I've learnt far more about how the EU operates, the realities of trade and power projection, and the interconnectedness of everything in the past five years than I ever did before, and that's even counting my degrees in politics.

Five years after the event, and the UK doesn't have the strength to stand up to even UEFA.

Have we reached the bit where Johnson throws a shoe over the pub?

Tries to, but actually hits a downstairs window, making it rattle slightly but not even cracking it.

Now we've reached July 1st, it's worth bearing in mind the changes that come in today. Even low-value stuff shipped from the EU will be liable for VAT now. This is one of the big reasons I've paused shipping internationally for now.

PMQs, today:

"Cherilyn Mackrory (Con) says there is real concern in the Cornish daffodil industry that they won’t have enough pickers this year."

Here's an article from four years ago warning that

"... industry could be seriously hurt by a lack of access [post Brexit] to a migrant workforce"


https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornw ... ssion=true

Rule follower MrsA read the sign that said "£35 max" in the petrol station, and did that, so i went back half an hour later to finish the job and daringly put £35.10 in, rebel that I am. No queues if you pull the hose over the roof of the car!

Shot of the week in the Friday Pub is "Panic! At the depot" (white Sambuca, tequila rose)

And the band plays on...