woollies

Having been brought up in the Middle East, I only ever knew one type of 'authentic' Tabouleh and that was always made with bulgar (cracked wheat), soaked and then you simply add lemon juice, loads of chopped mint and double the amount of chopped parsley; tomatoes, spring onions and seasoning...call me a purist but I've yet to taste anything as delicious and refreshing any other recipe’s seem to be a bit of a compromise. But what do I know?!

How kind of you but if you check the date, that was over a year ago and we did eventually go in September...but thats another whole story altogether..suffice to say...we laugh about it now but it was a really terrible chambre d'hote we found on the St Emilion tourist website that really should not have passed the most basic inspection...ah well, at least the sun shone way back then!!!!

And there's me thinking that I was the only one wanting to scream at the total inapptitide (?) of the staff and even worse the management at Geant! We were in the Niort store over 2 weeks ago wanting information on the only electric bike they had on display..after looking for a member of staff for at least 15 minutes, we did eventually suceed only to be told that he knew nothing about this 699€ electric bike and the bloke that did was on holiday; we then asked to speak to a manager as surely there must be a  manual with it in order for us to establsh the type of battery it had with it let alone how many kms it did before needing to be charged etc etc etc....'oh no, sorry no manual with it.' Well, perhaps you could kindly phone the comapny who make it to find out more information..'oh no sorry, we're only on the intranet here and we cant do that'..in sheer frustration, we left the store having asked for it to be reduced in price should we consider buying it and went and called a freind who kindly looked it up on the internet thus providing us with the info we needed. When we went back in store, I jokingly said that I had asked for 10% off but as I'd had to do my own research perhaps 20% was more appropriate...'oh he said, is that what you want off?'...der' silly question...of course I did...he agreed and we did the usuaul queing at various desks to establish where we needed to pay..but did end up with a bit of a bargain, however, how Geant survive with such appalling customer service, goodness knows..this certainly is not the first time we've experienced this but we found this to be the worst example.  

Thanks so much Fil, I was begining to think nobody had an answer judging from the replies I received!!! Your's was 'spot on' and exactly what we needed to hear as we have our grandchildren coming over middle of August and as they are quite small, we feel we need to take the edge off the 20 degrees it is at the moment without having to be faced with a huge bill! Will let you know if it works out, W  

Last year we put 6 kw pool heater on 24/7 for our above ground 8 metre x 4 metre x 1.3 metre pool. We had it on for about 10 days and it worked well but obviously we had a heafty bill at the end of it. This year we were thinking of doing it slightly differently; putting it on during the off peak (heure creuse; 1.30 pm to 4.30 pm and 2.30 am. to 7.30 a.m. - 8 hours in total), from now until perhaps the 22nd August. we have worked out that it should cost about 120€ extra but are not sure whether it will be false economy as maybe it will not be on for a long enough period to make a difference and that during the on peak when the heating is off it will be counter productive. Any thoughts much appreciated!

We own 6500sq m deemed agricultural land north of Charente Maritime. Our question is this; 1) Can this land be changed to building land? 2) If so, how do we go about it? In anticipation! Woollies