The Guardian is reporting (ok, ok Ragwert - I know we shouldn't believe everything the sandal-wearing muesli-eaters read) that one-in-five of all High Street estate agents face extinction, due to growing internet sales. So what will the city's Broad Street / Bridge Street area look like in a few years time, where there are currently 17 estate agents? Room to shoehorn in a few more coffee franchises and a couple of tattoo parlours perhaps?

Car crime in Herefordshire

Find out what the car crime rate is where you park your car.

With the help of government crime data, the Park Smart tool helps you to see where vehicle crime is most frequent. Pop your location or postcode in to help decide where to leave your car.
 

Ok.

So this evening I received an email from a very good friend of mine - I've known her for years. They are the sort of person that would do anything for anybody, and is always relentlessly cheerful! (Unlike myself!)

Today she took her daughter in law for a birthday lunch at Thai Gallery. ( I've been on a number of occasions myself - the food is great.)

They went in, and although it was very quiet, were shoe horned onto a tiny table. They ordered. My friend deliberately chose a dish containing no mushrooms, with noodles and a few other bits and bobs. When the food arrived, my friend could see mushrooms...and also bits of egg. A waitress was called over, and my friend explained very politely, that this was not the dish ordered. The waitress insisted it was. My friend pointed out the mushrooms, the eggs and the ribbon like noodles ( not the rice ones expected.) The waitress was having none of it.

Her daughter in law then asked to see the menu again. One was duly produced, and the meal description was read out. At this, the waitress did concede - rather reluctantly - that the mushrooms should not have been there. She said the plate could be returned to the kitchen, the mushrooms removed, and the meal reheated.

"And the egg?" My friend asked. Only to be told that there were 'no rice noodles.' My friend asked for the plate to be taken away. This was not a meal that could be eaten.

Her daughter in law ate hers at my friends insistence. Just then, another dish was bought out from the kitchen to go to another table.......containing rice noodles! The waitress was called over again.

"We thought you said there was no rice noodles?"

The reply was beyond belief. "There are no rice noodles in the dish you ordered." My friend pointed out that had they produced the actual dish that was ordered in the first place, the situation would not have arisen. This logic fell on deaf ears.

So.......a dish is ordered, it's not what was on the menu, no real attempt is made to rectify the situation, and the waitress was unbelievably rude!

My friend went to pay, (Still £25. for one dish, a glass of wine, a glass of water and a pot of rice - uneaten - it's rather bland by itself.) and had one final go at getting through to the waitress just how bad the service had been. By now, the waitress looked bored. She did respond - however, the first word she uttered was 'But...'

My friend was in no mood to listen to excuses and left.

This got me thinking.....

Has customer service got better, worse or has it become indifferent?

Any members have any examples of good, bad or downright ugly?

This MEP is absolutely correct. 

http://www.youtu.be/T7fs-91kDH4

'An embarrassment to the city': what went wrong with the £725m gateway to Cambridge?

Initially planned by Richard Rogers, CB1 was to be a world-class arrival point, with park, piazza, heritage centre and affordable homes. Instead, it’s ‘a future slum’ plagued by antisocial behaviour and sex-trafficking.


This article deserves to be read as it looks a carbon copy for what could happen to our city when the developers and planners get together for the Edgar Street Grid.

The BBC Radio Hereford & Worcester reporter Nicola Goodwin has done some sterling work in her personal campaign to get to the bottom of the true number of fatalities and casualties that occurred following the German bombing of the Rotherwas Munitions Factory, 75 years ago. At a service of commemoration at Rotherwas (attended by three 90-year-old survivors of the raid), the figures given were 16 killed and 27 injured, though there is a suggestion that the true fatalities figure could have been as high as 40. It was Hereford's worst wartime disaster. Ms Goodwin recently discovered that the 16 known fatalities were buried in an unmarked grave at Bullinghope's St Peter's Church. BBC war correspondent Kate Adie will be talking about the brave Rotherwas women at The Courtyard on 8 September. The event will be followed by a book signing.

Nicked from someone else, but a point I have been making for a while.

There are nigh on two hundred thousand Meditteranean migrants currently languishing in camps in southern Italy.

Italy is going the same way as Greece. High unemployment, a Banking system near to collapse and an emergence of populism that wants out of the European Union. Like Greece, Italy is one of western Europes cultural jewels in its crown and yet, despite all that Italy has given the world, nobody wants the migrants and nobody now wants or can help.

Worse, the migrants are going to still keep coming in the hope that they can get a better life in the West and if you take any notice of the socio political and economic forecasts, the movement of people from Asia and Africa to the west of Europe will continue for decades to come. This problem is not going to go away.

I fully appreciate that many of the East European countries will never ever accept these people into their closed societies and whilst this reality is uncomfortable to deal with and problematic to understand to modern western countries, its left to the West to do what needs to be done. And it can be done. Britain as much as any other nation has proven that it can absorb high numbers of migrants within a very short space of time. Difficult yes, but not beyond the extraordinary talents of the British.

You only have to see that since 2004, which is only a short time ago, Britain has received somewhere between three and four million migrants from the EU. Despite it all, despite our limited housing, we have been good hosts to these millions of people allowing them free and immediate access to housing, education, health care, employment and all our other public services. Yes it's a strain and yes at times it's a burden but Britain did it. We managed to achieve its aims and welcome people who wanted to escape their poverty and get a better life in the West.

And so, if we can do all these wonderful good and kind things for that group of migrants, we can most certainly do it for the people now languishing in Italy. Italy needs Europes help and unless we provide it Italy will be destroyed. Like Greece they've enough problems to deal with and we in Britain should help them.

Germany provided the lead on this issue. It's been at a cost I know but better to try and fail than turn your back and do nothing at all. Britain should extend the hand of friendship to our Italian cousins and accept willingly and freely without the use of any leverage or bargaining chips, all the Meditteranean migrants currently left in limbo in southern Italy. Despite the high numbers we in Britain could achieve wonderful things. We've done it with the millions of EU migrants and we can most certainly do the same thing for the two hundred thousand in Italy.

We have just returned from yet another wonderful week in Poland. As in this topic here are we to believe that here are less disabled people in Poland compared to the UK? Or is it that we just have more scammers making a mockery of our benefits system...I took photographs virtually overtime we passed a car park and as you will see, there are only one or two disabled designated bays and guess what, each time they were empty! 

SSAFA Forcesline

Since 1997, we have offered our confidential, free and non-judgemental helpline for the Armed Forces Community. During 2016, the team answered more than 25,000 calls and emails. Contact Forcesline on 0800 731 4880 - lines are open between 09:00 and 17:30 Monday-Friday.

SSAFA also have a drop in Help Desk at Franklin House Council Customer Services . This is covered by SSAFA Volunteers on a Tuesday between 1000 and 1400 . The volunteers are there to help and assist Serving members of our Armed Forces , their families and of course Veterans and their families.

If you know of somebody who needs SSAFA help please tell them to phone the FORCESLINE or phone the County SSAFA. 24/7 help line on 01432 273932

Belmont Rural Neighbourhood Plan referendum
 

Information statement

Herefordshire Council gives notice that a Referendum relating to the Belmont Rural Neighbourhood Development Plan will be held on Thursday 7 September 2017.

The question which will be asked in the referendum is:

Do you want Herefordshire Council to use the neighbourhood plan for Belmont Rural to help it decide planning applications in the neighbourhood area?

I had trouble trying to load up documents. To see all click on link above.

'Stay In Lane' Signs Would help here.

Note: The NEW 3rd lane in Edgar Street is for traffic heading for Whitecross or for traffic wanting to go all the way around the roundabout and back down Edgar Street ONLY! It is NOT for people to cut back across to go over the bridge! Traffic for Ross Road needs to be in the left lane and traffic for Belmont or Abergavenny please use the middle lane.

 

What a shambles - of course it is only our money. 

Blueschool House was after all a perfectly useable building for the previous occupants - if slightly shabby. Now it seems it will be a monument to muddled thinking, poor decision making and failure

http://councillors.herefordshire.gov.uk/documents/s50048737/Cabinet%20Report%20-%20JCSH%20Budget%20Update.pdf

To little or no fanfare the foot/cycle path between canal road and station approach has opened. I'm assuming this happened recently. I used it last week instead of walking up the private road and around Morrisons. Much more direct and very useful but nobody seems to know about it

***** IRAQI & KURDISH owned shops raided again! ***** 

All of these shops hide behind names such as: Polski Sklep, Zabka, International Food, Kubus and Super Sams to name just a few and to be totally honest NONE of the shops that have been raided over the past few years including those in Eign Gate Hereford mentioned above have ever been Polish owned! 

The Polish community have been unfairly tarnished and labelled causing divide within the community unnecessarily.

This topic has been created to highlight these issues and if you click on ANY of the past police and trading standards raids listed below within this topic, you will clearly see that all of the shops and businesses mentioned are not owned by Polish people and the only connection is the produce that they sell, alongside produce from many other nations. Sometimes the staff employed maybe Polish or European to help sell these products.

Some of these shops even have the cheek to steal their names and the logo's from big corporate legit Polish companies and appear to get away with that too! Names like Zabka, Kubus and Biedronka are all large Polish companies and brands.

The ONLY Polish owned shop in Hereford as far as we are aware is Edysia at the very bottom of Eign Gate (opposite Peacocks) 

Here is a list of previous raids in Hereford along with the names of the people prosecuted or facing prosecution.

• International Food Mr Rekan Gafoor 
• Zabka Mr Ali Omar Shukir
• Zabka Mr Zardashit Karem Salh
• European Food Mr Mohammed Bakhtyer
• Mila & Supersams Mr Heman Jamel

The underground subways are so so different in Poland. All of the subways we used (and there were white a few) were all well lit up, with CCTV and spotless! No rubbish, advertising posters or graffiti anywhere! 

What started as a noble cause designed and intended to bring help and protection to minority groups of difference has now evolved into a form of social engineering political correctness madness that's seen our society become obsessed with issues of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

So engrained in our social awareness of this issue and its accompanying odd language that's been introduced to control our thinking and our expression of our thoughts or views, we've managed to rob our young children and young people of their carefree childhood and adolescence years before they reach adulthood. We've sexualised them and confused them all in the pursuit of the perfect world.

The consequences to this madness is instead of playing, being young and hopefully happy, our children and young people are mithering themselves about issues of sexual orientation and it's all been done and achieved by adults who've lost sight of one single inescapable humanity fact. Life ain't perfect and no one person ever is either.

Years gone by one was either heterosexual or homosexual. Perfectly normal in every single species. Whether it crawls, walks, flies or swims difference exists and there is nothing wrong in this. Nowadays we've labelled everything and everyone to the point where the Gay community have evolved into the LBGTQ community with their own flag and in most urban areas, their own office areas.

Indeed, if you simply focus on the lettering LBGTQ, this as much as anything supports my point about political correctness and the language applied to its aims. Not so long ago it was simply the Gay community. Now, so that everyone gets their own letter it's L for Lesbian, B for Bi sexual, G for Gay, T for Transgender and Q, according to the Internet is Questioning and or Queer.

The direction we are going, pretty soon, we'll begin to exhaust the remaining 21 letters of our alphabet to label everyone else who hasn't been aptly described within LBGTQ. There's an emerging group of people who now see themselves as Gender Nuetral. They'll get their own letter soon. One particular journalist activist refuses to acknowledge her birth sex of female and will not respond to the addressing term of Miss or Mrs. This person wishes to be addressed as 'They', which apparently adequately describes the multi layered personality and orientation traits that make up the whole of this individuals characters and nature.

Recently, two Transgender men have been engaged in a tabloid dispute regarding who gave birth to their child first. How did these two men deliver their child into the world in the delivery room? Because they both were equipped with a womb. Why were they equipped with a womb that allowed the foetus to gestate and be born? Because they're women. And why are these two happy men who've delivered their children into the world so worried about who gave birth first? Because our buggered up society repeatedly told them you are a man, a woman or whatever and whoever you wish to be and because of our social engineering creation that is political correctness, we'll see to it that you can ignore your breasts, your penis or ****** and be whatever you wish to be in our perfect world.

Course, not even the establishment or ruling elite who propagate and perpetuate this political correctness have managed to protect everyone in pursuance of their perfect world. Me! Being male, white, English and heterosexual, I fall outside their areas of interest that now leave me alone, afraid and very unprotected by the evils of man, woman and those who are gender neutral.

I was parked in the Welsh Club car park for no more than about 10 minutes early this morning, while I dropped off my son to play football on the meadows, when I got back there was a guy putting a ticket on my car. I have been told by a friend now that I should not pay it because it is not a penalty, can anyone else through any light on this please?