FORUM

I am the first point of contact for clients rental properties.......so obviously I expect the odd phone call to say a fuse has gone or a sink is blocked.

The other night around 8 pm I had a call from a holiday maker introducing who she was and which property she was staying in. A wonderful property, all mod cons, an indepth information pack. So wondering what was the problem.
'Its my husbands Birthday tomorrow, could you recommend a restaurant? '

I did recommend a good one, I know they did not use it.

What is your most trivial 'dilema' from holidaymakers?

Having to do a round trip of 14 miles to show them how the shower worked!! True its not the easiest as it has an overhead, handheld and jets. There are instructions in the pack which owners send out and in welcome book in apartment. Anyway surely with powers of deduction it cant be that difficult.

I had a great phone conversation on Wednesday evening around 19:45.

A couple wanting to know if the winery was still open for a "look around". When I suggested that it was a bit late but that they could come back the next day, they said "Maybe we'll just go somewhere else".

Good luck finding "Chateau 7-11", I thought

Somebody rang me last week to ask when Tim the sausage man would be back in the PO. When I said I didn't know, he said that surely I should make it my business to know this kind of thing, and inneffiency seems to be rife in this region.

If you're reading this Mr Granthan, (I think that was the name)please don't think that a bad connexion was responsible for cutting you off!

hi

Do any of you have a 4 bed vill to rent - friends from the uk want to visit in Canet/St Cyprien?argeles/Bacarres/Torreilles area

Close to the sea/golf/tennis


Thanks

Nice one! It only takes a read of the forum to see that we are all put on notice when Tim is coming back.

fromHelen

Kate:

I was in our local fruit/veg growers tiny shop the other day buying luscious locally grown greens. A couple came in and when the owner had finished serving me she asked them what they'd like. They mumbled "Just looking" & wandered out

We have had a few,including ,
"I am trying to make a carrot soup and we don't seem to have a saucepan big enough"
" my mother likes to cook a fried egg in a single egg frying pan and there is not one in the property"
I could go on,and on,and on.

I (with my GP's hat on) got woken at 2am by a patient complaining they couldn't get to sleep. You couldn't make it up!

Robert Ferrieux wrote:fromHelen

Kate:

I was in our local fruit/veg growers tiny shop the other day buying luscious locally grown greens. A couple came in and when the owner had finished serving me she asked them what they'd like. They mumbled "Just looking" & wandered out

That translates as "Sorry. We like to look at nice food but we're too cheap to buy it. We're a bit gullible and are now unable to buy food unless it's offered at a discount. We're off to a supermarket where we can pay 50% less than the 'normal price' or get something 'free' and then throw it away."

Santiago wrote:I had a great phone conversation on Wednesday evening around 19:45.

A couple wanting to know if the winery was still open for a "look around". When I suggested that it was a bit late but that they could come back the next day, they said "Maybe we'll just go somewhere else".

Good luck finding "Chateau 7-11", I thought

Business doing well then Jon, it's not like you to turn down chance of a sale

There's a niche for someone!

A little unnecessarily personal but I believe we are all free to choose our niches.

That translates as "Sorry. We like to look at nice food but we're too cheap to buy it. We're a bit gullible and are now unable to buy food unless it's offered at a discount. We're off to a supermarket where we can pay 50% less than the 'normal price' or get something 'free' and then throw it away."

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Right you are, St.James....
And then they go off to Lidl in their four-wheel drive & buy some frozen chicken wings to gnaw at with processed Pot-8-Os in front of their 2 metre wide tv.
Oh well, who am I to tell folk how to spend their hard-earned cash?
Helen

Steady on - there are other ways of shopping at Lidl than seeking out the frozen chicken wings (do they stock them?). Plenty of good stuff! You need to be careful with the fruit and veg but you should see the state of the "fresh" produce in our village shops.

Mind you, what we get in Lidl here gets put in a rattly old Scenic and then cooked from fresh so maybe that makes us ok?

I Live near Lidl and it seems to be getting more and more late night shoppers
or should i say peploe who wait for the bins to come.

Chicken wings were on offer at Lidl when i was in there on Friday 3.98 per kilo.
I did not buy them as they wre Mexican flavour........I do not like any 'flavour' on meat whether it came from Lild or marks and sparks.

from Helen

I'm not knocking Lidl (excellent sugar, flour, baking powder, bin bags) but let's not fool ourselves. Chicken wings at 4 euros a kilo come from miserable birds who've spent their miserable lives in a cage.

Not paupers, tho' near enough living on one pension, but I'd spend as much as I could afford on morally raised food & eat smaller quantities, and be happy to forego the 2 metre TV screen.
But these are only my priorities.....

So your chicken ate better and had more fresh air, it still ended up in your stomach!

Now now Opas it had a happy life before it was slaughtered. I wont buy eggs unless the hens have lived outside and wouldnt buy veal at all or the milk lamb. Then I become a traitor to the cause and by Lidl cheapo whole chickens but then my cents only spread so far.

Sue, you're right.
Free-range eggs are marked 0 FR. Caged birds' eggs are 3 FR. Legally there must be a notice in shops saying which eggs are free-range & which are from cages....it's usually written in tiny letters, so I always underline the notice in bright red lipstick! (Yes, I have been asked to wipe it off, but only once)

Helen

opas wrote:So your chicken ate better and had more fresh air, it still ended up in your stomach!

As Sue rightly said, it had a happy life before it was slaughtered, andf surely that is just the point. We've all got to die; what's important is the life we - and farm animals - live......Agreed?

Helen

Agreed.

I'm not a animal-rights militant but I do think we have to question whether we need to pay so little for food like chicken wings that animals need to be raised inhumanely, when we have a choice.

I think it's awfully hypocritical when we have all the trappings of a wealthy society - mobile phones, swimming pools, cars, etc but we pretend we can only afford to buy food that requires the animal to suffer during its short life or farmers to damage the environment.

I feel we have digressed. could this discussion be moved?

As a lot of people have commented in the past, each to their own how they spend their money or not.
I have a £9.00 mobile from Asda that is around 7 years old, no apps just text, calls , alarm and even a calculator
No Swimming pool, no room for one and not enough free time to use one.
No flash car either........on these roads ! If I were to upgrade I would go for the Darcia without any electric gadgets to go wrong.
No hypocryte here, just watching my pennies.

Whilst I agree with Helen and jon to a point, I do feel that humans should also be taken into account.
In an ideal world we would all like to eat/produce BIO/Freerange/Organic, but It just is not possible to only produce these foods in the quantities we would need to feed the popoulation.
I agree with the ethics 100% but am also a realist.

That's true that the planet cannot provide enough food it it were all grown under Organic conditions.

I'd also warn people that Organic certification is not always the most ecological and most of the claims made for those products being healthier for us are false.

However, in the absence of any further information, choosing an organic product over a non-organic one, especially if we are talking supermarket products, will probably be more environmentally friendly.

When we live in an agricultural region, we have the benefit of meeting and buying directly from producers who are only too happy to discuss their methods. In many cases this is no more expensive than buying a branded item.

Hi, I agree with helen and sue. Always try and buy free range even if it means eating less. have witnessed what I call pig prisons in spain and they are awful, had to load my lorry next to it and always go as fast as possible to get out of there. Have also seen a chicken farm and when they are loaded and it is not much better. Although I'm not vegetarien it has woken me up , I think it's the saying of what the eye doesn't see etc. I think there are way to many animals bred and killed, you just have to look at the amount that end up in the bins of supermarkets, but then if there was less I suppose they would put the prices up saying there was a shortage so you just can't win.

Tia, yes you can win. We can refuse to spend money on things which will end up in the bin. Haven't we all looked, agog, at trolleys filled with frozen pancakes (for heaven's sake how long does it take to make pancakes?) and toxic sugar-filled drinks and "fruit" yoghurt (can't we put a teaspoon of jam in a plain, cheaper, yoghurt?) What's wrong with giving our kids bread for breakfast instead of sugar sodden cereals? What's wrong with drinking tap water rather than Coke or fluorescent orange juice? If money wasn't wasted on such rubbish there'd be more for quality food.
Helen

Oh, hark at me! Come to change the world

just taken delivery of a 'Simple' Dacia LOGAN ESTATE. so far so good....
.it replaces my 'work car', a Peugeot that has just about bankrupted me over the last 18months in repair bills.
i had to wait 5 months for delivery and Peugeot are shutting factories!!! maybe a lesson to be learnt
The Skyman

Robert Ferrieux wrote:Tia, yes you can win. We can refuse to spend money on things which will end up in the bin. Haven't we all looked, agog, at trolleys filled with frozen pancakes (for heaven's sake how long does it take to make pancakes?) and toxic sugar-filled drinks and "fruit" yoghurt (can't we put a teaspoon of jam in a plain, cheaper, yoghurt?) What's wrong with giving our kids bread for breakfast instead of sugar sodden cereals? What's wrong with drinking tap water rather than Coke or fluorescent orange juice? If money wasn't wasted on such rubbish there'd be more for quality food.
Helen

Oh, hark at me! Come to change the world

agreed. but why put jam in yougurt? fresh fruit is in abundance.