Perfect spring day and why i love london

15 mins early for a meeting in town and just enough time to enjoy some moments by the river. Its been a horrid week at work with no one understanding what a deadline is. But after this meeting i'm going home; i'll deal with the implications monday. But for now i'll feel the sun on my face for a few moments more.

Hungry pirates

Lost Pirates on the tube

Well it made me laugh. It is a tuesday lunch time after all. I'm quite suprised they are allowed underground with those swords.

My resolve crumbled

Mr L now owns a Wii. My worry is nothing will now ever get done in the house. However, as Tamsin points out it is actually quite good fun (Tamsin's Blog: The open road). I'm actually far better at virtual bowling than in real life. And I'm sure the boxing could actually keep me fit...

Chickens

This has been excellent so far. Hugh and jamies programmes about the way chickens and eggs are farmed has really got us thinking. Looking at the state the chickens are in has made me decide i def don't want that inside me. Free range for us from now on. Actually we were pretty good before and we mainly get our meat from waitrose which seems to have a good record. Watching jamie's programme last night did though was really open our eyes to thinking about where the egg and chicken in other food comes from. Also where the meat comes from when you eat out. Paying extra now doesn't seem silly at all. If only i had time to make everything i eat from scratch. I also appreciate that some people are on really tight budgets and demand cheap produce. I'd love to see britain eradicate indoors intensive farming but think it would be worse if the supermarkets then went and bought cheap eggs and chickens from abroad which is what would happen. British farmers really are in catch 22. So i think hugh and jamie are doing the right thing targeting consumers. And i for one have taken notice.

British Gas took £600 from our account

Can you believe they are allowed to do this?

Earlier this year they wrote down a reading wrong and said we'd owed them £600 for electricity. We complained and they admitted they were wrong and would correct it. Next bill - we were £600 in debt. We reminded them they said we didn't owe it. They agreed and said they'd fix it. We decided to leave. They told us we owed them £600. We pointed we didn't and they agreed. We left.

Today they take out £600 without telling us.

I've just been at a conference about web 2.0 and how brands should be using it for research. One theme that came out is that they should be monitoring the negative conversations that are being said about them. So I hope someone from British Gas reads this and realises how crap their customer service is and tries to improve it.

Imagine if i walked into their office and took out £600 worth of equipment. Surely it would be called stealing. So how can they be allowed to get away with this?

We've had to contact our bank to try to get money back and we'll be charged for this let alone charges for going overdrawn and our time in sorting it all out.

I just can't believe that big companies can get away with such blatant disregard to their customers in this day and age!

We've recently just lost lots of money because of Fly Be and Lloyds TSB crap travel insurance and i was going to write about that..

Fly Be cancelled the flight we were meant to take to Inverness. This meant we had to get a different flight to Glasgow. We had to rearrange our car hire - which cost more as we would now pick up from one airport and return at another. We'd booked a luxury B&B near inverness which as we arrived in Glasgow 12 hours later than we were meant to be in Inverness obviously didn't make and they charged us the full price. Plus we had to pay for another hotel. Fly BE refused to refund this money as they cancelled the flight because of safety worries (although they told us at the time it was because the plane had a light on they didn't know what it was). So we thought - at least we have travel insurance - but guess what it doesn't cover this. I'd like to therefore ask what the fuck does it cover if it doesn't cover losing money on holiday.

So Lloyds TSB, Fly BE and British Gas - you are all money sucking big corporations that don't have a clue about customer care or customer service that i plan never to use again in my life and i hope you all go bankrupt and catch horrible corporate diseases.

OK so not a well written blog - but at least it has got it off my chest

What a joke

Johnson is Tory mayor candidate - Boris to be mayor???

Lets hope not.

Has he not noticed that bendy buses are actually very good - especially if you are getting on at a crowded bus stop or in a wheel chair or have a push chair etc etc.

And actually the congestion charge is working pretty damn well and is attracting interest from other major cities in the world (e.g. New York).

He's going to give us all bigger houses.. er ... Nice idea but I'd like to know how

Now I was never a fan of Ken when he was a politician but i think he is a great Mayor.

To all those who voted for Boris because they thought "he was funny": Please stop. It won't be funny if he fucked up the greatest city in the world.

there are 16,000 people out there who don't deserve to call themselves Londoners. Hopefully they'll be to busy watching repeats of have i got news for you to vote in the real Mayoral election.

Although if we are all really lucky they are actually Ken supporters who thought that it might be amusing for Ken to say he beat a monkey in the race for Mayor.

However, on the up side - thank fuck he has nothing to do with education now. Please Boris - go back to presenting TV where you can be funny ......

Kubb

The history of Kubb is shrouded in mystery and there are several theories about the origins of the game. Most of these agree that Kubb evolved in Scandinavia and is over 1000 years' old and came about as a way for the Vikings to wile away the long summers' evenings. It is occasionally suggested that it may have developed in Northern France, but seeing as the Normans were originally from Scandinavia, the source was probably the same.
It has been suggested that Kubb evolved into the version played today from an early form where the Vikings used to play with the skulls and thigh bones of their victims of rape and pillage. Then as Christianity swept across Northern Europe, it was no longer deemed politically correct to kill people for the purposes of a friendly team game and so the Vikings started using wooden blocks instead. The more probable and mildly less gruesome (but far less interesting!) theory is that Kubb started off as a game played using the off-cuts resulting from chopping firewood. This is supported by the fact that in Swedish, the word "kubb" means block of wood

Glastonbury 2007

My favs were:

Just Jack

Mr Hudson

Lily Allen

I want to go next year already!!

Wet holidays

Two holidays in England in the wettest June ever. However, they were fun. Glastonbury was great, made even better by the people we were with and a fab gazebo.

Scotland was beautiful, even through the rain clouds. For once on holiday I really relaxed (in Scotland rather than Glastonbury) and its taking a few days to get back into the hecticness of London life.