Shopping and a result

After a peaceful night at High Lane we made a leisurely start this morning, and chugged the short distance into Marple, taking just on an hour to do so.

There was nice time for a cup of coffee before we headed for the shops with a slightly odd shopping list in hand. On the way we stopped for a longish natter with Paul Balmer of Waterway Routes, who showed us the mapping product he’s added to his well known DVDs. Running on an Android tablet, it looked most impressive – it’s also available for any other device that will run Memory Map.

We popped into the jewellers to ask about getting Sheila’s wedding ring stretched; the actual jeweller wasn’t there, but will be tomorrow, so we’ll call in again then. Then a visit to Boots for T-gel shampoo was followed by buying a new plant trough from the superb hardware store near the Co-op.

Finally, on the way back we called into Harrods the motor trade outlet to get some more de-ionised water for battery topping up purposes; I’ve finally used up all the output from the dehumidifier.

I’ve had a reply from David Baldacchino about the rubbish at Poynton:

Thank you for your email relating to our site at Lyme Road.

 You have drawn attention to a difficulty that we have been experiencing with collections from this site in the last few weeks which has fallen well below the standard we expect  to provide.  This started when our contractor changed the organisation they used to service the site, up to that point there had been no problems.

 After the first round of difficulties the site was fully cleansed and we received assurances from our contractor that the service would then continue properly.  It became clear at the beginning of last week that this was not happening as promised.  There were further discussions with the contractor and promises that the site would be cleared again,  we were let down again over the bank holiday weekend.

 That now being the case we are requiring that this sub-contractor is removed from our contractor services and will take whatever measures are necessary under the contract to ensure that we do not suffer a financial loss – we have had to bring other contractors in now to cleanse the site and will keep doing this for as long as is necessary to ensure a proper service here.

 Our reputation is our most important asset and it is hugely important that we are seen to be managing sites like this competently.  Thankfully situations like this are, I believe, relatively rare and I hope that you can see that we are taking positive action to ensure the problem does not persist.

 I will be recording your email formally as a complaint and will write to you again with the details of that, I thought that it was important to reply to you quickly though so that you could see what we were doing.

Peter Mason tells me that the excess was indeed cleared yesterday and that the skips should be emptied today. A result, then, though I think matters were probably in hand before I emailed.