Harry Peterson

Had an interesting and rather clever scam email the other day. Best I’ve seen. It came from PayPal (and genuinely was from PayPal) and contained an invoice. It’s a known scam (but not that widely) and the only thing that's fake is the person creating the invoice, along with the phone number shown. If you go into your actual PayPal account, you'll see no trace of it. PayPal allows these fake invoices to be created, and because they’re issued genuinely by PayPal they’re pretty convincing to anyone not on their guard. If you phone the number that’s shown, you’ll pretty soon find out where the fraud lies, but it’s probably too late by then. Avril would have reverse searched the phone number, and I’m sure many others would do the same, but it’s a very effective fraud because it’s a genuine PayPal invoice.

This might help. It all became much more difficult and messy after we left the EU: https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/eu-passport-renewal-expiry-rules-uk-aRaVG6j5PpyJ

I suppose it depends on your network, but it's never been a problem, wherever we go. It soon picks up a signal and updates.

Once you’ve adjusted to the change you’ll never go back, I suspect. We ditched our Garmins about four years ago in favour of Google, and it’s much more up to date because of the constant traffic updates. Saved us from getting caught in a 10 mile jam a couple of weeks ago.

My father too - though he rarely talked about it. I wish now I’d asked him about it, but children rarely do and time moved on. What was interesting though was the discovery some time after he and my mother had died that the British soldiers did at least get quite a lengthy time in Italy at leisure. Obviously, after the initial defeat of the Axis forces, they had to keep Italy under Allied control, but it was very, very different from the fighting they’d endured since entering Sicily from North Africa. We discovered some delightful photos of my father and other young British soldiers obviously having the time of their life in Venice and other places. The Italians were delighted they were there, and obviously they had money to spend.

Brilliant, Damian!!!

Sadly, correct. It’s a specific exclusion.

Good question. Looking at the website it appears to be free, including collection from home.

Apologies if this is totally irrelevant or utterly useless, but there are a few here, I think, who rely quite a lot on home deliveries. We do too, and rarely buy now from some companies because of the delivery charges when you can’t pick up instore. Noticed from an email that M&S are offering, via their Sparks card, a year’s next day delivery for £20. Not on my wife’s card, but it is on mine. How they decided that, who knows, but there must be an algorithm at work. Might be useful to some? Bought it yesterday and used it today for delivery tomorrow. Well, I didn’t (I’m a scruffbag and rarely buy clothes) but someone not a million miles from me did. M&S will now have me down as a transvestite though, so my emails should shortly be changing content!

“Mr Peterson, as you are a Saga Car Insurance policyholder, we're sending you some quick tips to help you prepare ahead of the storm forecast. Plus, we remind you what to do if you need to make a claim.” Received the above email from Saga this morning. Storm forecast? Are they reading the Express?

That’s the one big downside of grocery shopping online. We’ve found Tesco to be about the best combination of reliability, price and availability but it still has its problems. We’ve not been able to enter one single shop now since March 2020, because of a compromised immune system, but it’s been quite remarkable that despite that every single thing that we’ve wanted or needed, food or otherwise, has arrived at the door by van.

Thought not. I’ll start a new thread. Nice to have an entirely new discussion point.

They're bringing in a new style of wine waiter to suit the modern cruiser:

It’s too sensitive a matter……..we tend not to talk about it for fear of upsetting him.

Close! Spinach, ham and Gruyère flourless muffins. And an excellent lunch!

Home baked (not by me though!) for today. But what?

That’s a really great phrase! Passing it to my wife now. She can add it to the list - which includes, when I deal with some legal or financial issue (my only skills) “I have staff for that - I’ll put him on.”

Likewise, mrsgoggins. I take your point entirely about the hearing issues though - our hearing's OK, but we did find conversation across the very large tables problematic. Always opted for a 6 or 8, which was fine. 4 was great, but risky if you didn't happen to hit it off with the other two!

The SMETS 2 meters are in a different league from the old SMETS 1 ones. That's what was going to be fitted today until British Gas decided to cancel mid-morning with what I suspect was a spurious claim that they'd run out of meters over the weekend. There are some downsides to smart meters, but it's a requirement for a particular tariff I want to shift to that's linked directly to wholesale prices, and that's a huge plus at the moment when retail prices are so far out of synch with wholesale.

Absolutely! Agree with every word. It's a holiday - live a little! My dear wife and I eat together twice a day, most days of the year. It's great - but even better to meet new people on a cruise, and we're still in touch with some of them many years later.

And now, following on from the great cucumber and tomato shortage, we get the great smart meter shortage. British Gas were supposed to be fitting smart meters this morning. Phone call partway through the morning - can’t come because they’ve run out of meters. To be fair, they’ve only had a month to plan for this, and obviously their growth will have been stunted by the bad weather in Spain and Morocco, but really………😠

I'm sure Which? would love to have the resources to take the opinions of 'an extremely large group', but since it's funded by its 600,000 or so members and doesn't purport to specialise in cruises that was never going to be possible was it? It did what its resources permitted it to do, it chose to allow the general public to view the results, and as always people are perfectly at liberty to make their own decisions and draw their own conclusions. Frankly, it's better to have the survey as it is than not at all - there's nothing else, is there?

You have the view that the survey is statistically flawed, which is of course fine. But others will take the view that for the conclusions it draws (bearing in mind that it is just a survey) the views of 1727 members and non-members of Which? are perfectly adequate. I take that view. You don't. That's just two of us. I think you'll agree that that's far too small a sample from which to draw any statistically valid conclusions, so let's all just draw whatever conclusions we wish to draw from it without criticising the organisation that took the time to produce it - and publish it without charge to non-members. It's limited in its scope, certainly, but it's genuinely independent research, it's cost non-members nothing, and it's better to some information out there than none at all. You can of course just ignore it - others can form their own views.

Unfortunately, you’ve clearly not read the actual report. Just, presumably, the article in the Mail or elsewhere. If you’d read the actual report you’d understand that the allegations you make have no foundation in fact.

Just spotted this in the full report in Which?: "Using the table: In November 2022, we asked 1,727 members of Which? Connect and the general public about their experiences of cruise holidays in the past two years. For star ratings, n/a means too few responses to be awarded a rating. Indicative price/night Based on the brochure price of a Med/Norway cruise in a balcony cabin in June/July 2023, not including flights. Passenger-to-space ratio Number of people on ship compared with its size. On-board facilities Quality of communal facilities, such as cinema and gym. Cabin quality Cleanliness, condition of furniture, comfort. Port excursions quality Examples include organisation, availability and price. Value for money Price in relation to experience. Customer score Combines satisfaction and likelihood of recommending brand." I'd assumed it was just Which? members they'd surveyed - obviously it was wide than that. I can't think of any other genuinely independent UK survey of cruise lines that's been undertaken with that number of people giving their opinion. It's obviously not a definitive outcome - it couldn't be, given that so much of it's based on opinion. But it's certainly useful as a guide, and since it also shows indicative prices it's easy to spot why certain companies might sit at the top. The comparison between Saga and P&O is an interesting one, since quite a few members of these forums have switched to Saga from P&O as the one has kept up its quality (increased it, even) and the other has ditched it. It is fair to say, though, that the pricing does reflect that.