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Month: January 2024
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Week 202 – Jan 28th – By the Thames – Part 2
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Week 202 – Jan 28th – By the Thames – Part 1
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Week 202 – Jan 26th – The moon over shopping
As I walking back to the car this morning, after doing the weekly shop, I noticed the full moon, well its one day after the full moon to be accurate and I thought that I was nice clear picture to take.
So a couple of pictures, enjoy.

The moon as I came out from shopping this morning. 
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Week 202 – Jan 25th – Excellent customer service
Earlier in the week, I tried to order some clothing from English cricket board.
As mentioned in a previous blog late last year, I had been offered a discount voucher due to the issues with delivery of the previous order.
I tried a couple of times with this order, but the discount wouldn’t apply.
As seems to be common these, I could only contact them via email.
During the communication, they asked for the email with the voucher discount, I had kept this.
I have to admit, the service provided was excellent, keeping me in formed throughout the issue, which was resolved today by them applying the discount on my order.
So never delete useful communication.
I just wished you could pick up a phone to speak to someone.
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Week 202 – Jan 24th – No fault found
After the incident on Friday with the car, I had been communicating with Kia, even had the engineer call me that had been dealing with the issue so he could hear what actually happened on the day.
All the testing they had done, whether with the computer system or manually, they found no fault.
They had searched there knowledge base and it hadn’t been reported before.
I was kindly taken down to the garage, by Ziya.
When I was at the garage, I enquired how they got the car started again.
An engineer saw me and took me to the car and on the driver’s side, there is a button that you can press that will reset the car. So they are becoming more and more like computers. (Reboot – lol)
I wished I had been told about that, when I purchased the car.
Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again. At least it was all covered under warranty.
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Week 202 – Jan 23rd – Financial feedback
Always good to hear good news regarding finance.
Some feedback from my financial advisor.
“We’ve had quite a turnaround in Market sentiment this last few months, led by inflation and therefore interest rate expectations (which have dominated everything for a couple of years now). Very positively for November and December, which gave us overall a very good 2023 and we arrived into 2024 with a good outlook, albeit a slightly poor start in January has restrained some of that positivity.”
Just need the inflation rate to come down to force the interest rates down.
Plus all the war madness to end too, to make the markets even better.
As posted before, always happy to recommend my financial advisor.
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Week 201 – Jan 20th – State pension
I received an email overnight, as I mentioned in a previous blog posting, I had signed a petition to have the state pension, tax free. There was a meeting in the house of common regarding this earlier in the week and this link takes you to the meeting –
After reading the meeting, I don’t see any mention of stopping the tax on the state pension. So what was the point?
If you sign a petition and it reaches a certain total, you expect that to be action, don’t you?
Be interested to see what other people think, feel free to comment, but please keep it civil.
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Week 201 – Jan 19th – Not a fun day
Well, not the day I was expecting that. Today I was meant to have been my bi-yearly eye test.
That didn’t happen, as what was meant to be a simple drive to Costa to get a coffee, ended in a nightmare.
I was parked opposite the Costa shop and got my coffee, after getting back in the car and pressing the button to start the engine, I went to turn the dial to reverse and nothing happened.
I tried various things over next 20 minutes, but nothing would respond and I was getting warning lights on the dashboard, that when I looked them up, said a malfunction, but not with what.
I rang my break down cover and they advised they would send a vehicle out to pick it up. I rang the KIA garage, which was only about a mile away, but they said they were booked for a month. So I rang the KIA where I purchased it from and they would take it in. The issue with this, was that it was about 30 miles away.
By now the car had lost all power, I was lucky as I parked on a slight slope, but I was last car, so it just rolled back into the kerb and not another car.
I was able to speak with one of my sisters and she was happy to come and pick me up from the garage once I had got there.
Just over an hour after I had called the break down service, the recovery vehicle turned up, but due to the issue with the car, he would have to park right in front of me, but there were two cars parked in front of me, one I knew was in the café, but the second car I had no idea. You could only park here for an hour, thankfully the recovery driver had no issues in waiting, which was good as it was about 35 minutes, before the other driver turned up. So he went and the driver of the other car allowed it to be moved. I had to stop another car trying to park in the spaces in front as the recovery vehicle was trying to move in front of my car.
Once the car was on the back of the recovery vehicle, we had a good journey to the garage and booked it in. I have to admit the recovery person was great.
My sister, came and got me and I finally got back home, mid-afternoon.
Now wait and see what they find.
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Week 201 – Jan 16th – Royal Lancaster Hotel
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