A WARNING!

but first, a big thank you to Mary of mh-mixes for my award.  I’ll leave it up there for now and then move it to join the other awards further down the page. You can click on it to reach Mary’s scrapbooking website.  Lots of lovely freebies for you scrapbookers!!!

So, to the main event! 

I almost bought a new bathroom last week!  The idea of a shiny new bathroom suite, tiled walls and floor….. really appealed, so when I got a cold call from a company offering me a voucher for £1000 off a new bathroom – or kitchen, or bedroom – I fell for it.  OK, I know, It was stupid of me, but hey ho!

The salesman came to call.  I showed him my less than 2m x 2m bathroom – shower, no bath.  We discussed my budget – not very big, but neither’s the bathroom – and what I would like in a new bathroom.  He did some measuring up and we looked at catalogues – you could have this, and that, and that tile would look nice…..….. and “for the whole lot”  he came up with a figure almost three times my budget, to which I exclaimed in John McEnroe fashion  You’ve got to be joking!   I can’t afford that!

Oh but we can get that down, he was quick to explain - as you can have a 50% discount for having your before and after photos in the sales magazine!  And what about my £1000- off voucher?  I asked!   He actually told me not even to go there, in those very words!  He’d already given me 50% off, hadn’t he!  Just remember you came to me, I didn’t call you, I reminded him, and eventually he agreed to include it!  The new price was still above my budget  though, and I told him I still couldn’t afford it, so we haggled a bit and eventually agreed on a figure that I thought was reasonable (still above budget, but reasonable) but he reckoned was me driving a hard bargain – he said!

The surveyor arrived a couple of days later, did some more measuring up, and we talked about the fittings.  Tiling the shower cabinet was mentioned.  And the rest, said I.  After all I’d have expected the astronomical price first quoted to include not just the floor and wall tiling but gold taps etc, as well!   Well, I’d  certainly expected it to include the tiling of the walls – but no, they weren’t on the plan – at which I thought some  rather unladylike thoughts, and said almost as much to the young surveyor.  He got on the phone to the salesman, who said no of course the wall tiles weren’t included.  He couldn’t do that on my budget!   That would cost four thousand more!  Yes, thousand!  What!  So the astronomical price he had given me to begin with would have been even more astronomical?   There were more “blankety blank” thoughts at that moment, especially when he said we hadn’t even discussed the walls being done!  (So why did he say the boxed -in pipe work in an entirely different corner from the shower corner would be difficult to work round, if the other walls were not being done at all?  Trouble was I didn’t think of that till later!)

Well, I wasn’t a happy bunny at having been taken in by his sales pitch – So what’s to be done?  Am I going to have to cancel the order.  Oh I hope not, was his reply!  I bet!  Finally we agreed a compromise.  No tiled floor -which had been included - but tiling half way up the walls, which in effect was only one wall as there would be cabinet units and the suite against the others. 

However, that was still going to leave me with a half done bathroom costing over my original budget for the whole job, PLUS I would still have to pay out for what they weren’t going to tile to be painted or otherwise decorated, so after contemplating for another 24 hours and talking it over with my friend Linda, I decided NO WAY, and wrote to the company cancelling the whole thing!  Thank goodness for a 7-day cooling off period! 

On Monday I got a call from the company.  Was there a problem?   Was there?  I had explained the “problem” in my letter, but had to go over it again.  Of course they gave me the spiel about maybe getting the job done at cost price if they’d made enough money that week.  Forget it!  I told them, and was still feeling strong when the something-or-other-else manager came out to the house to “sign off the paperwork”.  Apparently it has to be done in your home as anyone could write to cancel an order and they need to make sure it’s the correct “anyone”!   Customer protection, it’s called!  Hmm!  They need customer protection against pushy lie-ing salesmen.

Of course this guy had to back up his colleagues, but even if it was just to placate me he said he understood my problem and that what he would have done would have been to tell me they couldn’t do a lot with my budget but discuss what they perhaps could do!  That is why I’m cancelling, I said, because that is what I would have expected from the salesman in the first place.

I know these sales folk have to make a living, but  coming up with an astronomical figure, knowing the customer’s low budget, and then offering all the discounts to make them think they’re getting a bargain – and especially then telling them that they never were getting all they thought they’d agreed to in the first place is definitely what I’d call a rip off.  So be warned!

Talk again soon.  

Gardening group

  I was back along the same path a few days after my last entry, when I went to a meeting of the U3A gardening group.  We were visiting Joyce’s garden for a bit of a look around and a discussion on various plants, their habits and what to do with them – and when!  It wasn’t a bad day with just a little bit of breeze making the trees in the woodland creak and groan somewhat.  Here the group are contemplating the stump of a eucalyptus tree that was cut back perhaps at the wrong time.  Will it grow again?  Have to wait and see.

 

Not sure what Joyce is demonstrating here (right).  This is in her woodland garden, where she has also dug a veggie patch! 

In the main garden Joyce also keeps bees!  Morna, another member of the group, and her late husband were beekeepers,

and Morna  became a honey judge.  She has come to talk to the bees while the rest of us looked at the greenhouse, or sat on the garden swing seat admiring the garden!       Here’s a solitary little anemone blanda.  Mine didn’t come up this spring!   Don’t know why!   The primulas were all looking very pretty in various shades of pink or yellow, and the miniature daffodils and chinodoxia looked very attractive…..

…….as did the large headed daffs in a flowerbed by the garden wall.  My own daffodils are going back already.  It hasn’t been such a good year for them in my garden.

After a cup of tea with beautiful homemade scones and jam with cream, and honey from Joyce’s bees – which Morna declared very nice -  I set off back along the riverside for home.

This will be a familiar view.  I took the same view the last time I walked this way.  Not so bright this time but it was the movement of the water again that caught my eye.

The view of the parish church from further along the path, across the cauld.  It was very tame this time in comparison to days over the winter when the high water came raging over it.

Plenty of wild celandine flowers grow all along this bank of the river, like golden stars.  They are so pretty, reflecting the light like summer buttercups!

 

Crossing Tweed Bridge I stopped to look down the brae towards the work the council had been doing on the Green, putting in the new path.  Then I just had to walk round the next corner to the High Street and home.

Talk again soon.

A Walk along the Riverbank

I had a committee meeting to go to, so being a beautiful day I decided to walk the riverside path which was in fact the most direct route to our meeting place.  It must have been one of the first sunny mornings of this spring, and it was so invigorating being out of doors.    Crossing Tweed Bridge I stopped to take a photo looking downriver past Priorsford Bridge to Lee Pen, the hill in the distance.    Across the road the view is upriver towards Neidpath Castle away in the distance beyond Haylodge Park. 

Once more the zoom on my camera  came in very useful.

I turned down towards the riverside path and took this photo from the hill of the parish

 

church with the swimming pool to the left.  A little further and nearly at the cauld, some gulls were perched on a piece of tree washed downriver at some stage, and festooned with grasses that had caught up in it when the river was high. 

 

On the opposite side is the old Hay Lodge, now part of the medical centre and hospital, but once the home of the Hay family, whose parklands now form the recreational Park for the town.   More or less opposite the lodge there is a path leading from the river bank to the street beyond, and this is where I was bound for the next couple of hours, but coming home by the same route I took a few more shots . 

These snowdrops nestling by the tree must have been planted here by someone in the past.  The parish church is the main landmark in the town and is visible from all directions.  The reflection is often clearer than this but there was a slight ripple on the water above the cauld that day.

The daffodils were in bud, but not yet in bloom.  They are so pretty when they open up their vivid yellow flowers.

Soon I was back at the bridge again   The old 15th century original stone bridge, wide enough in those days for a horse and cart,  is clearly visible here.   It has been widened twice since then to accommodate ever increasing traffic – and now there’s serious talk about a second road bridge over Tweed, probably linking the newer residential and commercial properties of the south side of the river with the main road to the east of Peebles.  There are several possibilities but a decision has still to be made by the region’s councillors over its position.  Let’s hope they choose the right one!

So back up the path to the road again and I took  this shot – the parish church again with one of the several lamps that adorn the parapet of the bridge at intervals along it.  The half timbered building is a pub on the ground floor with the Italian restaurant above.  It’s an unusual style of building for Scotland, but now just part of the townscape.    

Down on the Green, a new piece of path has just been put in, to connect the one from the bridge side to the one that crosses diagonally across the Green of to the right of the photo.  The mechanical diggers made a right mess of the grass on one side , but have now levelled it again, though no more grass seems to have been planted yet.  They surely can’t be thinking of making it into a flower bed, though that would be pretty, because the council are actually cutting back on looking after the ones they already have!  Another job for “Bonnie Peebles”?   We’ll have to wait and see!

Talk again soon.

Celebrations!

Talk about confused!  I am sitting here listening to seagulls squawking loudly outside my window.  You’d think I was at the seaside – but no, I’m in Peebles, about half way between east and west coasts!  When I was a kid we were always told that there were storms at sea when the gulls came inland – and that was in Edinburgh which wasn’t that far from the sea.  However we often do seem to have gulls flying around over the river here though I’m not generally aware of the sounds I am hearing  today!

It was the same feeling of confused I had last night as I joined Janet, her husband, birthday boy Ray – 70 yesterday – and friends Marion and Scott, at North Berwick for a celebration dinner.  Janet is an old school friend – less of the old, I can hear her saying, especially considering she was the youngest of the group last night.  She met Ray in Darlington in the north of England, which was where I also first met him, as they were living there when I was in the Dales.  They moved to Inverness about 25 years ago, and since I too moved back to Scotland I have seen them loads of times up there.  Scott and Marion live in Inverness too, so seeing them all in North Berwick which is on the coast and about halfway between Inverness and Darlington, got me quite confused.  Where was I?  Inverness?  Darlington? Certainly not Peebles, as I’d driven up there  for the evening.   We had a lovely dinner at the Marine Hotel where they were all staying, and it was a bit of a thought to have to drive home again later – takes just over an hour.

Before it got dark we could look across the Firth of Forth to Fife and east to the Bass Rock off the coast just beyond the town.  I tried out the zoom on my newish camera and was amazed! 

On the right is the view from the hotel looking towards the Bass (rhymes with lass), that small lump in the sea just to the right of centre of the photo, and this was the Bass with full zoom!  Not a clear picture without a tripod to steady it but pretty stunning, eh?  As it grew dark the lights of the small towns on the Fife coast came on, twinkling in the distance beyond the dark expanse of water that is the mouth of the River Forth.  It’s very beautiful!

On Saturday night I was just a bit further west along the coast, celebrating Edwina’s 60th birthday.  She went to school in North Berwick, though living nearer to Gullane.  Ween and I have also been friends for years, having first met in Edinburgh’s Waverley Bar which we both frequented for the folk music.  When she got married to Barney from the south of England and went to live down there, we still kept in touch, and met up on occasions when they came north to visit her sister, Jean, or I went south to see them.   She decided to have her “special” birthday in Scotland with family and friends, so there were 14 of us at dinner in the Castle Inn in Dirleton.  Riotous!  What fun!

Here’s Edwina (right) with two of her school friends, Christine and Sheila.  Afterwards, back at Jean’s, Edwina’s  main birthday present – a Wii – was set up and we played tennis and ten pin bowling on  it till the small hours!   It was the night the clocks were put forward for daylight saving so three o’clock in the morning became 4.00 before we all headed to our beds!  It was a late rise the next morning, with a few sore heads – not mine, despite the wine the night before – but  later Jean, Edwina and I had a walk round the garden,  watched Willow the cat playing amongst the plants, 

 

 

 

 

fed the cockatiels….

These are Joe

and Sunny….and managed to explore the Wii some more, trying out baseball, golf, boxing – that was a hoot – archery, table tennis……   I got home to Peebles just after midnight on Monday morning, after a great weekend!

The third  - or rather the first – birthday celebration had been Morag’s on Friday when three of us had a girls’ night out, to a restaurant in West Linton, not too far from Peebles.  The Old Bakehouse has been a tearoom and restaurant for years and years in various owners’ hands, and as the name suggests was originally the village bakery.  In the main restaurant the old ovens still remain and various pieces of bakery apparatus adorn the walls and ceiling.  Here’s Morag.  She had celebrated her actual birthday with her husband the day before and last weekend had had a surprise gathering with lots of her family, including Sandy, her youngest sister, who had come up from London, and Ness, her 92 year-old mum.  I think by Friday she’d already had 6 birthday cakes!

So now things are back to normal, and I think I have a few bits of blog to catch up with from before the birthdays!  So that will be the next posting. 

Talk again soon.