If you are looking for private French lessons in Cambridge, you should contact Audrey via her web site

Following on from my earlier log about the micro-site I made for a friend, I made another one for her; this time focused on French Lessons in Cambridge as the keywords of choice.

Google and Yahoo! were happy with the sites, but Bing was not. They appear to have disappeared off Bing’s indexes completely, but this blog gets ranked highly on Bing for some reason. Let’s see if that continues.

I’m sad to say that Ahar has gone downhill in recent months. There was a change of chef and the result has been that the curries have lost their levity, subtlety and distinction. It’s a shame, but after 3 bad meals from there over a couple of months, I have to say it’ s gone the way of many curry houses on Mill Road and I won’t be eating from there in the future.

Cocum

As one door closes another opens. Cocum is a Keralan-oriented curry house that replaced a nice but underused restaurant whose name I can’t remember. Unlike its predecessor, it caters for people with a desire for hotter dishes and red meat, whilst providing a range of drier dishes that don’t swim in turmeric-laden ghee. The Keralan dishes are great as well, meaning there’s a genuine choice for the curry fan. They also deliver (although I haven’t ordered delivery yet.) A good choice.

Which is good – don’t get me wrong – but playing around with CSS, and images, and optimizing a site for search engines is, well, *fun*. Stripped of collaboration, scrums, staging, peer reviews, release processes, rollback processes, credentials, Agile, XP, SDLC, UAT, OAT, QAT, AJAX, MRDs and down to a budget of £6 a year, I’ve made something useful, something that ranks well for specific keywords (think “French Tutor in Cambridge” – and hell, you know this post is all part of that optimization process), something that is *already* making a tangible difference to the world I know.

Putting the punk rock back into web development

But then I agree that Tesco are bloody everywhere and their insatiable appetite for squeezing the grocery trade pips is dulling high streets and village centres up and down the country. But they succeed, in spite of people feeling this way because they literally deliver the goods. So far the NTOMR campaign has focussed on the negative: stop it before it gets there. That’s legitimate: despite it being anti-capitalist and illegal, big companies like Tesco can and do practice dumping to drive their competition into the ground. The Competition Commission will not stop this happening and without the financial clout of another big corporation to back them up the competition can be wiped out by these anti-competitive practices.

However, what about the worst case scenario, i.e. that Tesco do get their planning permission? This ties in with another fundamental reason why Tesco succeed: local, independent shops need to provide the services and goods people want: specifically, they need to open later so that people can actually use them after work. There’s no need for a butchers to open at 9am. Open at 12noon and stay open until 9pm. That way they can increase trade. In case no-one has noticed, housewives are thin on the ground and households with all adults working full time are the norm these days. Next, there is nowhere on Mill Road where you can buy high quality, fresh vegetables. Co-op veg is always limp; and even people I know who are part of the NTOMR campaign say the veg shop next door to the Co-op sells poor quality vegetables (one even experienced off veg from there). We’re in the middle of Britain’s bread basket so why can’t we get great, locally produced, fresh, veg?

For me, and many others in affluent Romsey, price is not the major factor. Ability to buy at a time when I’m not at work and good quality goods are major factors. A couple fewer beers a week for the sake of good quality food sounds a good deal to me. Time the independent shops capitalized on the massive good will they have in their customer base and provided stuff we want when we can buy it. Else you’ll find even the most ardent anti-Tesco campaigners still shopping in Asda and Sainsburys and, no doubt, the third part of the holy trinity of grocers, Tesco.