The High Street is doomed

High streets are doomed You may have seen the headline the high street is doomed, according to Mary Portas High Street Doom and Gloom I am going to ignore the angle that Mary’s company YellowDoor promotes Westfield as I don’t see the relevance of this. The report shows that the number of vacant shops on the high street has trebled from 2007, now standing at nearly 29,000.   And there are

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An update to an earlier post

As some of you are aware, earlier this year my 82 year old granny got scammed over a property deal.   To the tune of £395. My original blogpost is here:  Dear Scammer   As one of my replies to comments at the bottom said, on the day I posted that, unbeknown to me, Fryer was actually in court.   Not for this crime but for a similar fraud where he conned

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So what did you do today?

It is probably around now that you are getting home from picking up children from school and asking the question “what did you do at school today?”  Or waiting for your other half to come home from work and you will ask the same of them. I am interested though in what you did today.   Does anybody ever really ask you that?   No, I thought not. So please tell me.  

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The Malmaison Reading — A review

Sadly this is not a glowing review of the Malmaison in Reading, I really wish it was. At the end of a very stressful week last week came a little tunnel of light in the shape of a very good friend’s hen do.   A private room at Malmaison had been booked for eight of us to have dinner before  going on somewhere else for some more drinking and dancing. The

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The perfect Cheeky bacon butty.

Having reviewed sausages last week Cheeky has been begging since to review another meat product for my blog.   Since International Bacon Day is around now it seemed appropriate to do a bacon sandwich for him. There is a formula that according to Leeds University researchers that reflects the perfect bacon sandwich: It is N = C + {fb (cm) . fb (tc)} + fb (Ts) + fc . ta

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A “Cheeky” review — Sainsburys Sausages

One of my favourite blogs is  owned by @needaphone  aka Claire. A fabulous blog that covers all sorts of things.  My favourite posts are generally the reviews by Rollie the cat.   Yes, Rollie is a cat and he has reviewed all sorts of things from Soda Streams to yogurts.   Rollie will shortly begin hotel reviews.  I love him and plan one day to cat-nap him. Seeing how great Rollie is

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Reading Festival — A review

Reading Festival — A review Well we appear to have survived.  My first ever festival and I might say, my last. So there was mud.   Everybody knows there will be mud at festivals.  It’s the law, isn’t it?   And as our campsite was the furthest from the main arena we saw our fair share of it. From the outset I have to say that Reading Festival is fabulously organised and

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Reading Festival

  When C came home from the Reading Festival last year it seemed like a great idea to plan going this year en famille.   How wonderful it would be to do something all together, listening to music, sitting around a camp fire in the evening drinking hot chocolate and laughing about what fun we have had.  How very Enid Blyton. We bought five tickets as soon as they were released

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Is this THE best complaint letter ever?

Every now and again you come across something in my line of work that stops you in your tracks and either makes you sick or makes you laugh.  A story you can dine out on for years or as I say “is another chapter for the book”.   In property management you do truly see it all and I think I have probably heard and seen it ALL at least once.

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Are you Facebook friends with your children?

I read this this morning:  Why I don’t want to be Facebook Friends with my daughter and I wanted to scream.   Yes, I know it’s the Daily Mail and I should have learnt by now. This tells me more about the relationship that the journalist and her daughter have than it does about the “perils of Facebook”.  And also about her daughter and her friends, on how acceptable they

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Dear Rioters

Right, sit there and look at me. Sit up straight, put your feet on the floor, unfold your arms from that defensive stance and look at me because I am going to talk to you and you need to hear this. What the hell do you think you are doing?  No, what are you actually doing?    Not why, I don’t care about why because, whatever the reason why, it is

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Is a maths qualification so important?

The news this morning that wasn’t talking of riots in London was full of Carol Vorderman saying that children should do maths in school until the age of 18. I am not sure I agree with that as a simple concept. I don’t have a maths O Level.  Not because I failed it, but because my school wouldn’t even let me sit it because they knew I would fail it

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