Chocolate Milkshake Review #1 – M&S Chocolate Flavoured Milk Milkshake

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Richard

I thought that reviewing food seems popular for all of the blogging. Like with the biscuits person and that guy that eats all of the greggs food. He is a idiot.

I’m well into chocolate milkshakes and am enthusiastic about consumer advice. Today’s milkshake is called M&S Chocolate Flavoured Milk milkshake.

I am sorry that I ate most of it before photographing it. That is unprofessional.

Today’s milkshake was purchased from M&S Simply Food at Wetherby Services. That should be J on that link there. The other letter on that link (B?) is M&S Simply Food Wetherby. I have also bought this milkshake from there, so don’t worry if you confuse the two. Now, at the risk of sounding presumptuous, I’m going to suppose that you might well be able to buy something like this, if not something that is this, from an M&S Simply Food, or even a regular M&S with a small internal food section, that isn’t even anywhere in or near Wetherby. However, I’m not going to suggest that you try to.

So – to the goods…

PRICE: The goods cost a bit over a pound and there was a whole lot of it. It was also significantly cheaper than the other, posher looking chocolate milk that there was less of. So that’s pretty good I guess, especially as I have no other comparable milkshakes yet.

NAME: M&S really want you to know that milk is what they think you should be eating. There is no sense of fun here. The chocolate flavour seems to be out of necessity, to catch the eye, rather than desire. The 2% fat bit is basically also part of the name. The name is really: “CHOCOLATE Eat Semi Skimmed Milk”. The clinical tagline to the milkshake is “high temperature pasteurised milk drink” which reinforces everything I’ve just said.

INGREDIENTS: Who cares really. Here they are:

Note the “blended with chocolate to add a dimension of fun.” M&S hate chocolate, they wish it didn’t exist and they resent having to add it to milk in order to sell milk. We have already established that there is no fun here, there isn’t even a desire for the potential for fun. Fun is gone. Fun is dead.

LOOKS: The packaging is a right bunch of old dullness. Bland as all that. The chocolate in the photograph is not branded, making it look like a supermarket’s own chocolate. A rubbish budget easter kind of chocolate. This is folly. The packaging is a disaster.

COLOUR: The brown is grey-brown. This type of brown is a lot better than green-brown, which is the worst for food, but it doesn’t scream delicious. In fact it screams a kind of malaise that is echoed in the taste.

(Side Note: I once tried to invent cake with a friend. We put in the sort of ingredients we thought cake contained. And then we put in green food colouring. They were green-brown. They were a nightmare.)

TASTE: Like with all milkshakes the first thing you taste is sugar, but we expect this and so it is good. It is not too much sugar though. It is actually quite a nice amount of sugar, making it pretty quaffable, although there is not much body to the whole affair. We can probably call this a session milkshake and M&S has succeeded in making us swallow tons of milk in a short space of time. Chocolate has proven itself as a necessary evil.

The chocolate tastes like the photo would have you assume. Pretty boring but relatively effective none the less. Quite a cynical taste I suppose. M&S hate milkshakes and they hate themselves for producing one. I also did find something odd hanging there in the aftertaste. I couldn’t place what it was at first but after thinking about it for a little while I realised that it was peas. Not the dirt part of the taste of peas but the other bit. This suggests that M&S actually want to make milk with peas in it, and I can believe that that would be true.

SUMMARY:

PRICE: So that’s pretty good I guess,

NAME: Shameful

INGREDIENTS: Who cares / Fun is dead

LOOKS: A disaster

COLOUR: Grey-Brown

TASTE: Cynical, Pea notes

TOTAL: 2/5

I don’t know if I’m going to review any more milkshakes.

An Amendment to my Previous Post

Posted on April 3, 2011 by Richard

When Nigel wasn’t dead he could undo double knots just fine. In fact, it was his ability to undo double knots that gave the banner the slack required to flap about in his face in the first place. Apologies.

What I Did Today (three days ago)

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Richard

Today (three days ago) I went to Cornwall. Cornwall is a place that is so far away that the people there think that it is foreign.

It took me over twenty five years to get to Cornwall and when I got there I spent four and a half hours faffing about in this field.

After over twenty five years and four and a half hours it was getting pretty late and so I rushed down to Lands End before it got dark. On the radio it was the inquest into Nigel’s death, David Archer sounded well guilty about encouraging Nigel to go onto the roof. Nigel couldn’t undo double-knots and so now he’s dead.

It was a very good thing that the clocks went forward last weekend, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to see Lands End.

Lands End is like a theme park where the theme is about how there isn’t any ground anymore. The same theme can be found at any other part of the seaside, as well as beside a lake or at the swimming pool. However, when you got past the amusements the view was an okay thing.

In the long queue out of the car park there were signs advertising other bits of Cornwall. One of the signs said Why Not Visit the First and Last Inn in England?. I had been disappointed that there had been no pub at the theme park and so I said Why Not Indeed!

Inside it was a bit crummy and sounded like jack johnson and so I took my local booze outside, which was nice.

Driving after that I saw this sign:

And I thought I Have No Idea What That Is, but as we were in the spirit of Why Not Indeed! we (me) went there anyway. It was down one of those wiggly roads that you’re not sure if you’re supposed to be on and the car park was basically someone’s back garden. This is where I was:

I had to film myself walking through the fogou (tunnel) because I was scared and the extra degree of separation provided by the screen made it less scary:

It was a very wonderful place and as I was leaning on the gate imagining campfires in the village my phone rang and I pondered on the contrast between the intimacy of the huddled stone ruins and the void between me and whoever was on the other end of the phone. It was my dad talking about european breakdown insurance cover.

As I drove away the radio was all talk about how our brains can trick us and our memory is radomly selective and unreliable:

See. (probably don’t want to watch that^)

Then I got lost trying to find the premier inn.

This is a photo of Price-Drop Tv:

It is the only channel available in premier inns. The broken human goon presenter is a new one and he wasn’t very good at describing tat. My favourite one came along later on and shouted an impressive medley of adjectives towards the bedding he was lolling about on. And, as the numbers on the product total counter rapidly approached zero, I slipped into an apoplectic stupor. I had a long dream about a sociable but drug addled village. It got nasty after closing time.

Me vs DJ Oslek Podcast 1

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Richard

Most likely you’ve got here from there but check out the first of a new podcast series by DJ Oslek of Frijsfo Beats. With additional illustration by myself. Special website and colour artwork coming soon!

Freestyle Party Post

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Richard

this is an update based on the photos I’ve taken lately because we need to blog but we don’t want to have to think much.

First photos for you concern the little wooden drawing fellow. I got one assuming that they were useful. They are not useful for two reasons.

1. Their limbs do not bend enough. They cannot touch their shoulders, nor squat as if to take a poo. These are things that real people can do and as such are things that may have to be drawn, requiring a model.

2. Their pointy extremities make every pose either very camp or very melodramatic or both. Hence:

The next photos illustrate what it would be like if you were to climb up a rose from swimming in the vase to being on the summit:

So now you don’t have to feel like that is something that you need to do.

The final photos are a bit on where work is at. I finally pretty much done 12 pages to a standard that I’m happy with for the Flat Land story and so that’s good and that has taken about a year. So great there. I’m taking a bit of a break from that now although it’s cool that I’m finally excited about working on it and it feels like it makes sense. I’m breaking to do a quickish comic style music video. I’ll make it into a youtube or a vimeo with a picture change every four beats. The second picture is the first sixteen out of one hundred and twenty one pictures. Ignore the fourteenth, I have redrawn that separately. They’re not too impressive yet but I reckon it’ll be fun with some colour slapped on.

Treasures of the A1

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Richard

It’s my intention to draw some of the monolithic cruddy fabrications along the side of the A1. I think they would make a nice series of collectable cards. Probably best make those from photographs though. The illustrations can go inside the presentation book. I managed to stop and grab photos of a couple, so if I never get round to it at least here is documented that I tried a little bit.

1: Ancient Little Chef

This is quite prominent and you will have definitely clocked it if you’ve passed it. Someone else was also taking photos of it when I was. I think it was someone from the estate agents because that makes me feel like my thoughts are original, instead of lazy.

2: Waywest Cafe

The A1 goes north/south so I expect the inaccurate name is why this place has no customers. Also it exists in a place that is psychologically disagreeable. No one stops at the petrol station because there’s a better one a minute down the road and there is a land of static caravans next door. The guy in the white van thinks i’m a mental. Columns are pretty sweet though, it’s what the acropolis would look like if there was a massive poo on it.

Where It’s At

Posted on December 24, 2010 by Richard

I’ve had a bit of a rethink over Flat Land. Decided to step up my game. It was supposed to be a stepping up in game anyway, but having basically finished about the first third (quickest third too), it became apparent that it is no where near as good as it could be and I’m trying to rush it because it takes forever to get stuff done. Here are points:

1 – Not enough establishing of the landscape/atmosphere. It’s supposed to be pretty empty and bleak at first but this needs to be established. Also, the landscape has to play more of a part once the action starts.

2 – Characters not consistent enough, especially the boy, but I’m used to drawing them now and know what they should look like so hopefully I can iron that out.

3 – Too many profile views. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing but there are a bit too many and whilst they make it easier to tell what’s going on they make it less dramatic and interesting to look at.

That’s my main 3 gripes I guess. I started planning it all out properly but then I lost interest in that again when I got excited about redoing stuff. I have also not really finished the story properly, but it’s all progress and maybe this is just my way of working. If I don’t maintain my interest then I’ll never get anywhere so skipping about might be the only way I can move forward.

Anyway, as a treat for reading that you can have the new first page of the story:

It has a poem on it that I wrote when I was looking after cows in the fens. The whole story is a distillation of that time. I suppose I was a bit lonely, but according to my stories I’m lonely all of the time.

What I Did Today

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Richard

Today I was in a dark and humid land of towering crates and I trod on a dead mouse. It was like treading on a snail only more substantial. This extra substance, however, was balanced by less of a contrast between soft parts and crunchy parts. In all I would rate it just as disturbing as stepping on a snail.