Well apart from waking up and having to cancel my bank card it's been good.
The schools have broken up for end of term which of course means no maniacal women on the road in their ridiculously big 4x4's, (which was an absolutely necessary purchase after the birth of baby Horatio) doing their make-up and texting their therapists.
I mean how can a 43 year old first time mother possibly cope with with the lack of room provided by a BMW convertible, plus the fact that all the other ladies at the tennis club have them.
I'm joking of course, I really do love it when I almost get run off the road by a perma-tanned, pink terry towling clad psycho in a Range Rover sport trying to avoid a puddle, it's a hoot.
I just don't get this "Chelsea Tractor" thing. I mean my mum did perfectly OK with the 3 of us and a metallic blue MK II Ford Cortina with the black vinyl roof !! Oh actually the blue one was a MK III, the bright yellow one was the MK II.
Also I didn't see one "Baby on Board" dangly sign or the even wackier "Princess on Board" or perhaps even the stupendously amusing "Little Angel on Board" variety. What are they all about anyway?
Are we to assume that the average driver wakes up one morning and thinks "Ooooh it's a lovely day, had a great weekend too. What shall I do today?........I know I'll go out for a drive in my car and purposely crash into the back of someone.......Oh best not crash into that car as they have a baby on board, I'll have to choose one without one of those very informative dangly things."
I'd like to see other ones done in the same design. Things like "Chav in Training on board" or "Potential Thug on Board"....I think you get my drift :-)
So I'm grateful for school holidays that I didn't come across any of this and that makes me happy.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTT.....I've just found out that schools don't infact break up until Thursday.............I'm a plum. I apologise for my previous rant although I'm not going to delete it because I think it's mildly amusing.
Well still it was a nice traffic free journey......... (DOH)
In other news my upcoming weekend plans have been scuppered by the closure of my local pub (RIP - Sad times) however I have already tendered my interest in taking it over and becoming a Restaurateur and Publican but to be honest the brewery that actually owns the pub (Enterprise Inns) are notoriously difficult to work with and because of the tied lease there is no real incentive to make a healthy business out of it.
I'd need them to allow me to at least earn what I do now to make it worthwhile and I cannot see that happening especially after reading that one of their pubs had a turnover of £500,000 and the tenants got a return on that of £15,000 !!! Absolutely outrageous profiteering. Not sure a village pub in a suburb of Reading is going to be able to make a turnover of £1m+ in a year.
Making people buy stock at over 60% more than other wholesalers and then increasing rents when profits are made is just completely unreasonable and cannot be an effective business model.
Seems to me and probably many others that the people running these business models have absolutely no interest in preserving the tradition that is the great British pub.
They are probably more interested in getting the places bulldozed and ready to be replaced by very expensive and incredibly mediocre blocks of flats that can then be sold to people without enough money to repay their mortgages.
Have a great day readers :-)
One assumes that the main reason why the pub companies do this, is that they themselves have probably taken on ridiculously unaffordable mortgages on some of their properties.
ReplyDeleteUntil property prices crash properly, there is no hope.
I can understand them charging as much as they can for beer because as a business you want people to be paying the absolute maximum they will be prepared too for your product.
ReplyDeleteWhat I don't like is the ludicrous rent increases. Most Pubco's have the policy of "Increase Only" rent meaning that if you overvalue your business from the start, which many novices do, there are very limited ways for you to recover from it.
The Pubcos themselves then offer very little support because as soon as they can get you out they can get someone else in who is ready to pay another premium.
The pubs do these rent increases to cover themselves for the inevitable fall that is going to come. I just wish they'd look at other ways to do it such as letting the tenant choose if they want to be tied for sales of not.
That would make the whole thing far more appealing and there are companies such as the Wellington Pub Company that do such things and they have a vast portfolio of successful pubs and a very steady financial performance themselves.
Shares in Enterprise Inns have never been lower and they are making a year over year loss meaning having to sell off pubs freehold to recoup some cash. They've recently auctioned of several pubs in London to raised £12m.
Wellington haven't had to do this so there has to be something going on there and unfortunately I think it's just greed.
Just as mortgage lenders were selling deals to people that they knew couldn't afford the payments I think (and I only think, no evidence to prove it) Enterprise may have deliberately sold tenancies to people they knew would fail so that either they could get new people in paying large deposits or flattening the pubs for housing projects.
Been contacted by both Enterprise and the previous tenant.............this is getting interesting ?!?!
ReplyDeleteRight, cars: 3-tone Austin 1300, sickly cream/brown vinyl-roofed Cortina MkIII c/w 8-track stereo, metallic blue/black vinyl-roofed 1600 Sport Cortina MkIV that went like poop off a shovel,white Cortina MkIV Auto Estate that your brother chose to reverse through a fence, red Nissan Micra. That just about covers what you rode in as a Benskini. No stupid "Baby On Board" stickers on any of them although a few should have had "This is well overdue for the scrap-yard" stickers on.Mummyx
ReplyDelete