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.