Give me you email and I'll send you one.
Hi Brian.
My wife has just received this form in English. I need some translating software as Google wont translate it properly.Can you recommend one or two please .
Thanks Maurice WOOD
Remember that RSG business. There was one somewhere around our way which would have picked up everything Proud Sellafield had to offer :)
No use them counting on Irish Sea shrimps as fodder though...
Like sheep? Mind you, I can think of worse. It also allows them to list all the ones who pop off so that they can be included in the statistics of an older generation living longer, look how old this one was that we had to support and of that caper. It is not that I don't trust them simply that I do trust them but in an entirely negative sense in anticipation of their next cunning plan.
Why am I irressistibly reminded of 'factory farming'?
We are supposed to inform them so perhaps we would get it rather than randomly. Illogical of course, but is there any logic in how they are doing it?
I went for property. I was left money when I was 19 and had a house when I was 20. Tricky because if you remember, we were not allowed to own them until we were 21 until 1 January 1970. I was lucky, our bursar pulled off a scam for me. I sold that one on for a bit of a profit and had the next one from 1972 until 2004. The thing is that actually appreciation was only apace of inflation. Thus together the two of us had enough for what we have now and some work. Just in time for the financial crisis, minimal work, thus income and that was that.
Any and all bankers are barclay's bankers as one says, having known plenty of people who became them from fellow students then later ones I taught. Most of them would study anything then go to the job Daddy has arranged, mostly with mediocre to rubbish degrees. Mind you, there is worse, some became politicians...
It might be interesting to see if changing your address during the year, affects whether you get one next time around.
I think that you have described well the situation that has come about. Maybe I am looking at the world as it was through rose coloured glasses but what the heck. I do think that my maternal grandfather who was a shop keeper in Wales (from a line of saddlers and bootmakers) who advocated that the best investments were bricks and mortar. When we allowed others to intervene it was they who took the money and left the customer with little. If I had just steadily invested spare cash into property instead of fancy insurance vehicles, start up schemes etc I would be much better off. I was appalled one day when I was asked to play golf by some bankers and before the first tee they wanted to agree the stakes which were in the thousands of pounds. I made some feeble excuse and no doubt they put me down as a wimp. Certainly when I was working in London many of my clients were bankers and there were some awful people among them. Some of the money slipped through their hands by their insatiable desire to show everyone how well they had done and that often involved massive expenditure on London houses which I was doing for them- at a percentage- so maybe I did get some back!
David, I rather think your father was an exception rather than the rule, or maybe your social background was better than mine, but my memory goes back to opening my first bank account in 1958 (or thereabouts) when it was the earliest age to have one. Wages in those days came in envelopes and in cash, and what we put in was what we needed to live on and not make great wealth for the bankers, and I was made every aware of the fact that Ias merely an oik who by the law of the land was entitled to an account.
Only once in my life and it was in Australia did I ever have a bank manager who fitted your father's description. I never really saw the difference between Bank Managers and Civil Servants, and as they all had/have their little hymnbooks to recite from.
Despite the crap advertising of 'The Listening Banks' and 'Your Friendly Bank' and as I stressed during my Marketing Courses banks are NOT your friends, they are there simply to make money (ditto with insurance companies). Working on any other assumption is plain naive.
Yes, we knew one. It was so well disguised with the fence and MOD sign in among the rampant weeds that the average civil servant would never have found it but all the locals would have cracked the steel doors and squatted long before they got there.
That's me and proud of it! However I thought it was the public who paid such people? We used to train our staff, including management, in customer relations as we wanted customers to be happy and come back and give us work! If we take most of the traffic wardens (or whatever high falutin' name they have been given) unless my eyes deceive me most in London appear to be newly arrived to the hallowed shores. They are paid on a commission basis to make life hell for everybody, take their customers photos (perhaps from remote video camera)s and generally harass people it's no wonder the public have become fed up! Next thing the Pensions Office will insist we all wear those armbands linked by microwave to a central control room so they know immediately you've croaked and they stop your pension on the spot. They can tax you if you are having fun too! I don't know if you remember the Cold War but the most terrifying thing was that the government built some places called RSG's (Regional Seats of Government). At the first sign of a nuclear wall all the civil servants were meant to toddle off to these places to ensure their own protection and survival. After the war they would be required to procreate and produce more civil servants. You think I'm joking - no this is so incredible because it's true! Hundreds of thousands of Jobsworths would be extruded over the land- worse than anything Orwell or Lindsay Anderson could have imagined. And BTW most MP's are petrified at the moment. The RSG's have been turned into mushroom farms or similar.
The irony is, one could jump through the hoops and get it signed, pop it in the post and fall down dead on the spot. When they next ask if we are still alive and that might be in two years time, then they will get no reply which will mean eight weeks more anyway to whoever is reaping the benefits of that bank account. In my opinion it is not the best thought out scheme.
Yes, he had the bowler ! However my Grandad, export manager at Leyland Motors, only ever wore a trilby. That's how you could tell who were management and who were hands, either skilled or unskilled ; they wore flat caps.
Along with the obligatory bowler? My father wore one every day at the office save Saturdays when he made off in a trilby!
Sad story, David. I can only remember "the man from the Pru" who was the only person to actually knock on the door in our street - everyone else just walked in. You knew when he was coming, any other knock on the door would make Gran pale with apprehension - who could this be? Obviously no one of any good import...
I searc
Funnily enough I knew a little about Gurney's as a friend of mine married one of the Norfolk ones. I see from the article that they were dealing in "bills" mainly. I have a pretty poor view of banks myself these days, having suffered at their hands. I was given a lesson by a manager of The Bank of Scotland in about 1996 on how to run a business as they withdrew my substantial and guaranteed business facility. They got all their money and I lost my house. We all know what happened to them of course- I would love to meet that guy now- but I reckon he will still have a rather nice pension. Speaking of pensions most of mine was in Equitable Life where I lost 58% without compensation. I had three repayments from various banks for misselling, one after the ombudsman intervened. Currently I am not battling banks, just SFR and a firm of solicitors in the UK! I'm still here!
Ah, found it, it's Low Fell on the south side :)
That's Newcastle is it, David? Trying to identify that railway junction, would it be Scotswood? "To see the Blaydon Races"