Life for one Woman in Windlesham

If you read my earlier entry I was having a chocolate teapot of the day. Until I took the advice of one of marketing guru's Arjan Dijk. When under pressure, see who needs to work to take off the pressure and schmooze them. So actually three departments need to work together, the challenge was with no starbucks within 20 miles and on a business park with only fountains to look at I had to be creative.

Jump in the go get it galaxy of a vehicle and head to sainsburys. It turned my mood totally around leaving the building was like an adventure.

Hit the biscuit and cakes aisle, and begin 'biscuit' profiling people and this is what I decided:

Head of Legal- double chocolate fingers- branded - cadburys of course
Head of IT- 20 sugar donuts to share
Product- Chocolate digestives in the tube with reselable lid- they will like the design.
Website- chocolate finger.
Channel- rich tea fingers,no fuss ability to dunk and no guilt attached.

So armed with two sainsburys carrier bags and with a spring in my step i head to business park heaven.

Suddenly the two biggest problems were resolved over a cup of tea, the biscuits went down a treat and the mountain of a project feels human again.

Friday tomorrow, if your morning started like mine did then get off to the supermarket and do some executive biscuit profiling It works.

I am trying so hard to succeed with this current project I know it means being willing to fail; I am trying not to let a fear of failure hold you back. But today so many set backs, a boss who totally disengaged and deluded we times are suffering so many setbacks due to his total incompetence. I do remember, it takes commitment and persistence to achieve your goals. I'm not going togive up, I can succeed no matter but there are so many in my way.

While my current boss swans about talking about painting a wall I am managing every other aspect of this global project.

I would like to go home and never come back, but I won't!

Off to make tea or coffee, or find vodka.

I dont watch much television but I wanted to see how Heston the perfectionist would approach the Little Chef demise.
I have fond memories of Little Chef, cups of tea and as a teenager the ultimate hangover cure. What a treat little Chef was, I don't remember a 4 fold menu with ridiculous sudo european offerings, it was just platefuls of comfort food.

Now having a family of my own we have dived into one for a meal, and found the staff miserable, the restaurants filthy even though they are empty. Heston you are so right they are serving up the cheapest food, it may be fast but it is tasteless.

Ian Pegley has supposedly been given this second chance to help the ailing chain, from what I saw last night he is hammering nails into the coffin of Little Chef. Where has he been for the last five year, some one should send him the DVD's of Gordon Ramsays kitchen nightmares, as his chain is perpetuating a great number of mistakes. The menu is to big to ambitious, the ingredients cheap and the settings miserable.

Little Chef food, is overprocessed muck. Start again, serve real chips, good sausage see what Jamie Oliver did with Ministry of Food. Send all your staff on basic cookery courses, put in ranges so they can cook. Hoover, clean up and repair restaurants.

Jamie Olive or Gordon Ramsay may have turned this around, Heston deserves a prize for taking on the challenge as Ian Pegley really is out of the retail loop.

Old School Cafe Longcross

Ian get in your car go down to longross, to the Old School Cafe, I worked with the fabulous owner Miepe Boyd to market this small cafe where she serves the best bacon sandwich in Surrey, dare I say south of England. She keeps it simple the ingredients are local, fresh, the specials are on the black board and you can have your eggs anyway you want.

Ian and team, my advice:
Visit Fego's chain
Visit Old School Cafe
Make you restaurants more welcoming- stay on brand, red booth seating for families, table for grown ups.
All of you to work one week in a Little Chef and talk to your customers, eat from the menu every day! Maybe then you will concentrate on what is important.

I will be watching tonight, how can a management team not have their ears on the customers.

Good Television, shame the it may completely kill off little chef, Ian Pegley you are the weakest link.

Loupie

This weekend we had a Sunday lunch party for Auntie J, the girls and I pinked out the kitchen table, pretty table cloth, very kitsch kitson table runner, lilies and candles and pink balloons. The final touch was the bunting which we hung from the uplighters looked fantastic.

Lunch went well the freerange, had a very nice life saw sunshine chicken (that had a security tag) tasted great the gloopy chestnut and mushroom stuffing tasted suprisingly good.
The candles on the cake ingnited and extinguished in a birthday fashion.

We all retired to the sitting room to play Britains got talent the chocolate version that is now £1 in M &S well spent £1. I had to play mercy on a saucepan, Uncle J had to an irish jig while singing happy birthday the teenies had to do a cha cha all very lively.

Then Scarlet save the day, literally the house, she goes into the conservatory and rushes back in there is a fire... well as she has spotted badgers and deer in out 10ft square courtyard the husband gets up to check really to keep her happy. Oh yes the lightbulb was now on it had burnt through the bunting and the flag was on fire. Scarlet is the heroine.She is saying it was the kittens that alerted her. The smell is still with us, but luckily so it the house.

Husband now has to put a smoke alarm this week on the ceiling of the utility room as this part of the house is remote and this could so easily happen again.

Update on weight loss, I took the weekend off so I did eat Chocolate Caterpillar cake and the gloopy zillion calorie chestnut stuffing and I didn't exercise so today it is back on track. Monday is Special K Monday.

I don't want to be bah humbug, but why did the snow wait until the day we all have to drive to work. The M4 grinds to a single lane of hell. My Galaxy takes over 40 minutes to start to warm up so have resorted to a blanket on my lap, my ski hat and fleecy gloves so I can get off my home drive. GREAT just loving this snow.

Shoes, even my sensible heels become a death trap on the slippy bits that appear just out side the office window so the whole of development can witness me fall on my amply padded bottom region.

Snow should stay in Europe, where they are used to it. I love ski-ing, well lets just say I am very good at apres ski, quite possibly not so hot on two planks of wood facing downhill.

Also this flaming cold is not helping my diet one jot, a piece of celery on a cold day has no worth whatsoever. A hot cheese and onion pasty from the cornish retailer however would go down fantastically well at this moment. Happy to say I am 20 miles from any such
retailer on a business park in reading.. so those cornish calories cannot get me.
Signing off now and hoping for a defrost.

Friday 2nd January

As per my new year resolution we go en mass, 2 adults, 2 teenagers and three children to Hyde Park to the Christmas Fayre ( the outing was idea of husband mine was more retail orientated but got a zero vote.)

Hyde Park Winter Wonderland

I was sceptical about the whole thing, but on coming into the park we are greeted with authentic european looking cabins selling various german sausages and hot wine. The hot wine certainly defrosted my hands and mood. The teenagers did not thaw out and managed to have that look for the entire time in Winter Wonderland.

The mirror maze was the greatest fun I have had for ages, possibly the mixture of mulled wine and no glasses mixed with moving floors, spinning pipes and mirrored mayhem. Good old fashioned fun. I watched the various other rides, the roller coaster, the wurlitzer, the reindeers, and the really high slide. All the rides were good and the atmosphere great, just the cost with five children £80 of tokens lasted precisely 20 minutes, then hotdogs set us back another £26.00.

As I was totally frozen we moved on to Harrods.

Harrods- New Pet Kingdom

Now that I work in Theale on a business park with only a sainsburys for company I don't get to indulge my relationship with retail at the higher end. So just breathing the air of the perfume department and seeing the fantastic new Armani make up counter was a hit for me. The kids headed straight to Toy Kingdom and Tom purchased a remote control car with his christmas money. (Vehicle 19 in his collection, expected life of vehicle 2 weeks before it has fatal accident and then joins the various other bits of christmases past remote control cars in the garage.) Pet Kingdom, where do I start, it is now bigger the accesories for cats are not wackier, we purchased three very gorgeous collars for Big Cat and the kittens. Their is a whole department for 'animal outfits'  furniture from beds to waderobes and of course the puppies and kittens on view to purchase if you have several thousand to spare.

Cost Zero- entertainment value 100% Harrods wins again!

Chicago Rib Shack

Having followed the resurrection of this eatery I thought It would be a great place to take the kids to regale stories of how it was, when I had a curly perm, wore Laura Ashley with double string pearls and spent many an hour at the bar during the promotional time. (well I was a student nurse)

Firstly it is not in the same place, it is up the alley and next to Mr Chows. The familiar pigs are on the wall and the greeters were happy and that is where my memory stop. The bar is not humming it is friday and it is fairly dead, but it takes the bar tender 10 minutes to serve, 1 tap water, 1 diet coke, 1 San Miguel in the bottle and a very mediocre mohjito... the smoothie and chocolate milkshake comes from the kitchen and takes a further 10 minutes for the chocolate milkshake and the smoothie is only tracked down after five requests and we are seated at the table.

Everyone is really polite the waiter the duty manager, but the place is dead and the food is ordinary the chips not even as good as McDonalds..and that is saying something.  The tap water even takes four requests to come, and the kids have drawings but the pencils are blunt and there is now sharpener.

The highlight of our Rib Shack experience was the very beautiful, and she is that in the flesh, Girls Aloud star Nicola Roberts entering with friends for supper. (No security, no press, no fuss just a lovely girl with friends.)  I am very proud to say my kids recognised her and did not do anything to infringe her privacy that is how it should be.

Weight Watcher-revisited

Having purchased the wi fit for Christmas I had a go a last night, and it told me I weighed 9 stone plus a bit, god and I am not pregnant. So tonight I have enrolled on the online version, which it totally whizzy fab, I put in my points for the day and no wonder the pounds have appeared without dinner and tonights wine I have consumed 45 points, to those of you who don't ww thats over double the 18 points I will survive on for the next three months. So I best stop blogging and go consume the red wine plus the remaining champagne truffles.

After all tomorrow is the first day of my three month diet... need to get into a dress for the child-line ball on 13th Feb.