In light of the horse meat scandal, Tesco’s latest poem, What Burgers Have Taught Us, has rocked the literary community.

Widely published, Tesco’s previous poems have included amusing two-liners, neat rhyming couplets, and even postmodern subversions of the written word, which play on the tensions within semantics and question the very meaning of meaning itself.

Their latest poetic piece is a topical apology, which in rhythmic ebbs and flows references the anxious back-and-forth between past mistakes and determined future changes.

The poem begins strongly with an admission of the ‘problem’ facing the author, with the alliterated ‘burgers and bolognese,’ touching momentarily, even flippantly, on the specific products, if only to dismiss them, along with some of Tesco’s own responsibility, in the fourth line: ‘It’s about the whole food industry.’

The repetition of ‘We’, even in its plurality, brings the emphasis back to Tesco personally: ‘We’ve been working on it,’ ‘we really do need’, ‘we need to’, while offering the poem a coherence in the theme of personal responsibility.

‘We know that our supply chain in too complicated’’ enacts this complexity in its awkward cadence, and provides a contrast with the impacting simplicity of: ‘So we’re making it simpler’.

The poem then moves through tenses past, present, and future in rolling lines that culminate in a promise, whose expression in the negative is a hinted admission of previous failures, previous ‘exceptions‘:

We’ve already made sure that all our beef is from the UK and Ireland.

And now we’re moving on to our fresh chickens.

By July, they’ll all be from UK farms too. No exceptions.

The poem ends with a series of avowals, tempered by the conditional:

We know that all this will only work if we are

open about what we do.

And if you’re not happy, tell us.

Seriously.

This is it.

We are changing.

The shortening lines draw our gaze to the author’s name below, tying the finality of ‘This is it’ and the significance of ‘changing’ to ‘Tesco.’

This year’s Mercury Music Prize has been awarded to the band ∆, for their album An Awesome Wave. Their name is pronounced “Alt-J”, which is the command used on Mac keyboards to produce the delta symbol.

Speaking of keyboards, the one you’ve been typing on today almost certainly has a Qwerty layout. Developed way back in the 1870s, it was specifically designed to prevent typewriters of the time from jamming.  A lot has happened since then, and today’s electronic keyboards don’t have any type bars or ribbons to get tangled up. So if we don’t need to worry about jams, can we optimise for speed and ease of use instead?

August Dvorak (1894 – 1975) certainly thought so, and his layout was designed with precisely those things in mind. Unfortunately, despite plenty of anecdotal evidence of improved accuracy and reduced RSI, Qwerty is so dominant that there’s no chance of a revolution any time soon, if ever. Dvorak, can however, rest peacefully, as such notable figures as Steve Wozniak and Barbara Blackburn (current holder of World Record for speed typing) use his layout to great success. That said, could we improve the keyboard any further?

Most of you will understand that typing a shortcut like Alt-J is quicker than clicking your way through Insert, Insert Symbol and so on. However, Alt-J is a seemingly arbitrary combination of keys, as is Ctrl+V for paste, Ctrl+Z for cut and Alt+F4 for quit. I could go on. For first time users, this presents something of a learning curve.

You may be familiar with multi coloured keyboard overlays for things like Photoshop and ProTools, to help you learn these idiosyncratic shortcuts. But with today’s touchscreen and LCD technology as advanced as it is, we might expect the next big thing to be digital keyboards. When you load up your favourite program, the labels on the function keys would change to tell you exactly how to do your desired tasks without having to first learn and then remember all the shortcuts. Perhaps F6 would change to a ruler symbol and you could just press that, instead of pressing Shift+I a couple of times. The learning curve would be much gentler, and then after a few hours, your muscle memory would take over and remove any conscious effort.

If you like a challenge, however, why not try one of these bad boys. The completely blank layout means it’s easy for you to map the keys to whatever functions you like. You could have a try with either Qwerty or Dvorak, or any other madcap layout you happen upon. And if you wanted, you could create a dedicated ∆ key. But if that were the case, calling our Mercury Award Winners “Alt-J” wouldn’t really make sense anymore, so perhaps they could use the HTML expression, “Δ” instead. Though it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it…