Katie Butcher

Five days after seeing it, and I still can’t get the songs from Starlight Express out of my head. It was such an amazing show, I really, really enjoyed it. I was slightly worried it might be disappointing compared to the London production, but it wasn’t at all, in fact, I think I preferred this show. The singing, dancing, lighting, effects are absolutely stunning. The songs from ‘Starlight Express’ aren’t the best known of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s, but I don’t really know why as most of them are very catchy. I admit that one or two did sound a touch dated, despite the updates to the show (the original Starlight Express show opened in 1984).

I thoroughly recommend this show for absolutely anyone. You leave it feeling on a complete high (albeit disappointment also that the show is over).

Am I the only person who gets irritated by people who phone in on radio/TV shows and ask the presenter ‘How are you’?. It’s so pointless and just wastes time. The presenter has already welcomed us to the show and has possibly been there presenting it for perhaps a couple of hours, so we all know that they’re well. There is absolutely no need for everyone that phones in to ask the presenter ‘how they are’. Why do they do it?

You get it a lot on the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 – even callers who are on in the last 10 minutes of the 2 hour show are still asking Jeremy how he is. FOR GOODNESS SAKE, HE’S FINE, HAVEN’T YOU BEEN LISTENING?

Example-
Jeremy Vine: Now, Mark in Swindon, what are your thoughts on this issue?
Mark in Swindon: Hello Jeremy, how are you?

AGHHHHHH. There’s absolutely no need for the pleasantries, just get on with it and say what you called in to say.

Finally we have a living room back! Photos of the process can be found here. After a few days we’re just about getting used to it now – it doesn’t really feel like our room yet and we need to sort out some finishing touches like pictures.

We had the underlay replaced on Friday so it was the one we actually ordered and not a cheaper lower quality one. That was all fine in the end.

The replacement fire arrived at lunchtime on Friday. I had been told by Shop4fires.co.uk that the courier who delivered the new fire would take the damaged fire, but when he came the courier said he hadn’t been asked to collect anything so couldn’t. I called Shop4fires, they apologised and said it would be collected on Monday morning. So today I worked from home, but planned to go to the office after the courier had been. Nobody came. I called the fire shop at lunchtime to ask them to chase why nobody had turned up, they promised to check up but I didn’t hear back. When it got to 15:30 I called them again but a BT message said the number was not accepting calls! I’m really not impressed. Shop4fires have had terrible customer service from the start. They’ve offered no communication at all, and I’ve had to call them every time to find out when we would be getting the fire we ordered (and paid for when the order was placed). We had to wait 4 weeks for the first fire which arrived damaged (which appeared to be due to poor packaging), and then 3.5 weeks for the second fire (which we’re still not 100% about but it’ll have to do). If I hadn’t kept pestering them we would have been waiting longer I’m sure. Now I’ve decided I’m not going to call them any more. If they want the first (damaged) fire back they’ll have to call me, explain to me why it wasn’t collected today and arrange a new collection out of working hours; I’m not staying home waiting around for couriers for what will be a forth day. Definitely not recommended.

Marks and Spencer delivery men turned up at 6pm on Friday with the new furniture. The delivery men came in and laid out blankets to protect the carpets and so there wouldn’t be any mess, they were very careful and wore gloves and put protectors over their shoes. I was delighted with the furniture, which they set up and put in place, they even took all the packaging away. Unfortunately when they lifted the blankets, we found out there must have been something on one of them as there was muck on the carpet. I promptly vacuumed, but a dark shadow remains on my nice new carpet. I’m now waiting to hear back from Marks and Spencer to see if they can do anything about it.

It seems nothing has gone right in this project!

Here are the photos.

I just received letter today from GE Money telling me that the from the middle of November they will be withdrawing all GE Money ‘Food & Fuel’ Everyday credit cards and closing all accounts. It’s such a shame, because it’s a very good credit card. I use it for all our everyday spending and pay it off in full every month (which means I never pay interest), but the great thing with it is that it pays a generous 3% cashback on grocery and fuel purchases, and 0.5% on everything else. So almost certainly why it’s being withdrawn is that I suspect most of their cardholders, like me, don’t pay interest and just take all the cashback. I’ve had the card nearly a year and in that time it’s earned us nearly £300, just for simply paying for our grocery shopping and petrol using that card.

Now I’m going to have to look for an alternative credit card for everyday spending; I prefer to pay for everything by credit card because it means you can keep the money in your current account for longer (and when your current account pays 6.5% interest that can make a difference), plus you get added consumer protection on larger purchases. I’ve got my eye on Barclaycard Platinum with Cashback which pays 2% on fuel and food up to £15 per month. That means we could in theory get £180 a year.

Meanwhile, I will be making the most of my GE Money card for the last 3 months I can use it.

So Nigel got home last night and noticed that the underlay under the new carpet wasn’t the one we ordered and paid for, it was about half as thick. I hadn’t realised since underlay is rather boring and I’d not paid attention to which underlay we were ordering; I chose the carpet and left the underlay to Nigel. We went straight up to ‘United Carpets’ to tell them. The chaps there were very apologetic and laid the blame on the carpet fitter saying that he must have muddled up the underlay and another customer now will be delighted with their carpet with a great underlay instead of the cheap one they ordered. I do think it was the genuine mistake. They offered us our money back for the difference, but we said that having the cheap underlay would annoy us forever so asked if the fitter would come back and correct it. So, he’ll be back tomorrow and will have to lift the carpet, take up the underlay, replace it with the proper stuff, and stick the carpet back down again. {Sigh} Why can’t anything ever be right?

The carpet is now fitted and the new sofa is being delivered on Friday evening. Yay! At least we’ll have at least some sort of living room back for the weekend. We have a horrible hole in the chimney breast but our new fire is finally arriving on Friday too. We’re nearly there!

We’re finally nearly there with decorating the living room and I’m delighted with the results so far. Nigel’s sister very kindly gave up practically her whole weekend to help us, and now there’s just the finishing touches to go. We’re having a new (beige) carpet fitted on Wednesday and after having to make an excuse to prevent M&S from delivering the sofa yesterday, they’re now due to ring me again to arrange delivery next week.

Most of the room just has lining paper which I’ve painted ‘orchid white’, but on the chimney breast we’ve made a bit of a feature and gone for a bold patterned paper from Laura Ashley (see picture above right). I wasn’t totally sure about how it would look, but now it’s up I love it! It’d be a bit much to have all over the room (and pricewise too at £25 a roll), but just on the chimney breast I think it looks fantastic. The pattern we chose is called ‘Oriental Garden’ and is duck egg blue on cream. I had been led to look at blue patterns due to the fabric for our sofa, which, although overall is taupe coloured, it has a strand of blue if you look very closely at the weave.

So now I’m looking forward to the fun bit of finding the finishing touch accessories like ‘duck egg’ cushions and decorative objects will complement the feature wall and sofa. I’ve already bought a table lamp from Laura Ashley which incorporates a bit of the Oriental Garden pattern and we’re looking at getting a mirror with a bird from the pattern sandblasted in the corner. We’ll see though, we don’t want to get too carried away with any ‘themes’… I’m going to wait until we’ve got the sofa before making too many decisions.

I’m getting excited as in a few weeks we’re going to see Starlight Express which is starting at the Bradford Alhambra Theatre later this week. I saw it a couple of times when it ran in London, but the last time was nearly 15 years ago, so I was keen to get some good seats to see the show again in Bradford when I heard it was going to be on. A great show for all the family (although possibly not Granny if she’s not too fond of loud noise, and as from what I recall this musical is pretty loud).

For anyone who is interested, I found a promotional Windows Media Video for the same show but at another theatre here.