Member Info for Bonz1957

Levy says Modric is not for sale to anyone!! We all know what that means, Modric will be off when he gets back from his honeymoon, just Levy wants a few more shekles for him!! It is believed Modric stands to almost quadruple his wages, from £42,000 a week to £150,000, should he move to Stamford Bridge. Who wouldn't move jobs for a 400% pay rise??? Now. What about DeFoe to Arsenal??

Sorry!! :( Was making fun of your comment on Weds that you didn't use the online coupon. I do realise that with the amount you buy you are probably keeping this co afloat single-handedly!! :) Your product knowledge is also way above mine, i'm boring and just go for the same thing time after time. Still have loads of discount vouchers left this year - as they sent me two sets last time - as i never seem to be passing a store these days. Shame there is no-one i can pass them on to. White hot chocolate eh?? My two have had similar in cafes in the past and liked it - while we hit the expressos - so may well give that a try. Daughter now home from Uni so house now crammed full to the rafters with all of her furniture, busy week ahead fitting it all into the garage to give us room to swing the cat!!. No idea yet where she will be in Sept so the move to Devon is yet again on hold. ATB.

With annual water rates in excess of £1200 a year - as much as the local Council Tax bill - it's hardly surprising that they can count on "the steady and predictable income stream" to make them the most efficient water business in the UK. Trust me it's not much fun living in this part of the world and having to pay for all the water that is used by the holiday-makers!!

No wonder this sp is falling if neither of us are buying their products!! Yes, the £10 deal was a special to fill the place as it had over-run. Have visited Wimbledon in the past when rain has forced a final onto the Monday. It's a chance for us ordinary people to get in cheaply as all the 'canape eating suits' have to be at work lol!! As for interest rates, i still have some in ICICI at 4.25% until Oct - although their rates are pants these days - and i still have a small amount in a Halifax ISA at 6.25%!! Best rate around at the moment is 4.0% for a 2 year fix with Santander, or 3.85% with the PO which does give you the option of breaking the fix early for a fee, should the need arise. With the prospect of interest rates rising soon i wouldn't consider more than a 2 year fix, as the extra interest from a 5 year fix at 5% could very rapidly get eroded. For a similar reason we took out Flexible ISA's this year with Santander at 3.3%, as they offer 2.8% above base rate, so it's very likely to go up. Is your Stocks and Shares ISA a self-select one, or do they just invest in a tracker fund? Maybe they knew you had HMV and EO in your portfolio - that makes you very high risk!! With my two now being at Uni we are past the point of having to buy all the school staff little pressies, maybe that's why so many teachers don't want to become lecturers - no pressies lol!! Though have spent most of this week at my daughters student house do all the little handyman repairs to the house that are needed to try and avoid the landlord having any excuse to withhold any of their deposits. Life doesn't seem to be getting any easier!! My pedalling days are long behind me now, but had read that you had a new chopper so best of luck with that venture, just be very careful on the roads. If ever i get back on two wheels there'll have to be an engine underneath me lol!! If it's not raining down here think i might be getting a trip to the Brooklands Motoring Festival over the weekend, of course i'll be doing the driving just someone else will be paying for me to get in. And i've already seen my giant toblerone!! And finally, just so my entire post isn't off-topic, see the Greece thing has reared it's ugly head again and dragged the FTSE back down to levels last seen back in Nov. Guess things aren't likely to improve until that one is finally resolved. Just how many more Euros are required to shore up that sinking ship?? Not sure Greece can be allowed to go bust, as who would be next? Ireland or Portugal? Then it could all collapse like a house of cards. And we think it's been bad over the last 2 or 3 years!! ATB. P.

I didn't use the coupon myself, 'tis the season of being too hot to eat chocolate unless it's kept in the fridge, but then it's too hard for my crumbling teeth!! Hope you enjoyed the tennis yesterday. Couldn't resist the offer of getting in for £10 so went with my son as it's just down the road. We nearly left early to avoid the rush when Murray was struggling towards the end of the 2nd set but glad we stayed as we were treated to some amazing show-boating in the 3rd. I worked at the Queens Club back in '81 as a barman - also worked at Wimbledon - and still have the programme signed by a lot of the players somewhere. Our favourite was VJ Amritraj, a true gent and star of a Bond film!! Once had to tell McEnroe that he couldn't have a drink as the bar had shut at 2.00pm - remember the old draconian licencing laws? - instead of going into one he asked if he could have a coke, to which i replied he could have it on me as the till was shut. Every night for the rest of the tournament he made a point of buying me a 'proper drink', so it was John McEnroe who introduced me to the wonderful world of Bourbon!!!!! Hope your having more good fortune in the market than me at the moment as i'm suffering from the poor performance of BP, LLOY and VOD, as well as everything else difting south with the FTSE in general. Still i had expected a fairly flat 2011 with the FTSE ending quite close to how it opened the year, as well as the usual fall from May and subsequent return in the autumn, so am slightly ahead of where i expected to be at the moment. My Portfolio is about to take a big hit because as i type this the wife is up in London handing in our forms to sell part of our holding in Arsenal. Will look for a good home for the cash rather than re-investing, as our strategy now is to slowly divest ourselves of a lot of our paper assets. Realise we are unable to get anywhere near the current inflation figure of 4.5%, but we can get 4% for a 2-year fix and, as i don't pay income tax and can relaim the 20% tax deducted, that's close enough for me. And of course there's never any guarantee that a share will beat inflation - especially some of the ones i hold at the moment lol!! Most of my gains have come from my UT's, but even they have been at a slower rate that the last couple of years. I always try to keep my posts short, but it doesn't seem to work with you. To coin a Cherryism, i do like a good blether!! ATB.

Think you are missing the point. There is no deadline to owning the shares, you either own them or not. You cannot now buy them at yesterdays price, things have moved on. If you currently own the shares you will receive 315p if the offer goes through, and as a 60% shareholder has agreed to the terms it is virtually a done deal. If you do not currently own shares you can still buy them in the open market at the current price of 310.3p but you will still only receive 315p from the offer. When you factor in the dealing costs you would have to buy a fair few to make any sort of reasonable profit from the 2-3p difference between your purchase price and the offer price. Hope this helps. ATB.

If anyone is taking their phone line from Sky and currently paying £11.25 pcm then you can effectively reduce that to just £9.25 pcm by paying for a year in advance, which costs just £111. But be quick as Sky are putting their line rental up to £12.25 next month. Remember BT charge £120 for a years rental in advance, so Sky are cheaper.

Simply visit the Thorntons website on either the 13th or 14th of June, shop as normal and enter the promotional code TF51 at the checkout to claim your 20% discount.

Congrats on reaching b/e on HMV. Is your philosophy to at least b/e on each individual share, or are you happy to say 'I may be £500 down on THT but i'm £700 up on EO or DEBS, so i'm up overall'?? If you thought LLOY was going to perform well over the next couple of months, would you invest there to make a profit to cover your loss here, rather than trying to average down here in an attempt to b/e?? Dull grey day in London so am spending the day trawling through bank statements and div slips so i can file my Tax Return online and then await HMRC's repayment just in time to tax, MOT and service my two cars. ATB.

Interesting choice of track, but that's probably the worst song they ever did - too commercial. Actually it's one of these: http://www.carandclassic.co.uk/uploads/cars/mercedes/1603860.jpg What happened over on HMV? Looked like all was sorted and it was heading north, then reality kicked in and it fell back again. Hope you were able to make a few £££'s on the way up. ATB.

I wouldn't rush to dive into the markets for a while, there may be further to fall yet. As i've already said i'll be happy if the FTSE is still around the 5750-6000 level at y/e. I would be happy to see some improvement for BP and LLOY, and would hope BT can hang onto recent gains. Of course that is all very well as long as some of my others don't go into meltdown and join the ranks of TNI and THT!! Not a great lover of Hot Chocolate - the band or the drink!! The music reminds me of all those awful Disco's and parties i was dragged to in the 70's and 80's, hated all that pop, soul, disco, tamla rubbish. Always was, and always will be a Prog Rock man. This gives you an idea of who i am, just please try to get beyond the first 2+1/2 mins, it will be worth the wait: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSR5TnNGKmo Greatest Band Ever. Lived close to them in my youth, knew them all personally, seen them in all of their incarnations over 100 times - many backstage, even bought Dave Brock's old Mercedes Estate recently. How sad am i? Or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7tNfyVbNnQ based on the book of the same name by JG Ballard. Robert Calvert, the lyricist and poet with the band was a God. His poetry blows me away. Off to lie down in a darkened room and listen to Centigrade 232. My (Devon) garden has been given over to the weeds this year. Will probably only get to spend a couple of long w/ends there this year, so as long as my sis can keep the lawns mowed and pull out the weeds most likely to flower, it will be all we can do to stop the wilderness reclaiming it this year. If my daughter ever gets her placement year finalised so we know what to do with the London house, then i may eventually get to retire in my beloved Devon before i reach 60!!! ATB.

RNS Number : 0048I, Northwest Investment Group Ltd, 07 June 2011, Result of AGM: The Board of NWIG is pleased to announce, that at the AGM held today, all resolutions were passed. The sub-division of the Company's ordinary shares will take effect tomorrow 8 June 2011. The new shares shall carry the same rights in all respects as the Existing Shares, including voting rights and rights to participate in the dividends of the Company. The new ISIN number for the new ordinary shares will be VGG666521197. From the AGM, Resolution no 9) Proposed Share Split: If Resolution 9 is passed, the Company will authorize the sub-division of each of the ordinary shares of £0.05 each into 10 new ordinary shares of £0.005 each. It is expected that this share sub-division should improve the liquidity in the trading of the ordinary shares on the AIM Market. The new shares shall carry the same rights in all respects as the existing shares, including voting rights and rights to participate in the dividends of the Company. It is envisaged that the admission of the new ordinary shares arising from such sub-division to trading on AIM by 8.00am on 08 June 2011. The directors believe that the proposed resolutions are in the best interests of the Company.

Anyone shopping online until 11/6 can get a 10% discount by entering the code 'AF50' at the checkout. Right now the sp needs all the help it can get so please everyone get ordering!!! ATB.

How did you know i was doing a correspendence course in brewing Science??? http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/brewingscience/course.htm This is uncanny!!! Am beginning to suspect that you know who i am, as some of your guesses have been spot on. Suppose i shouldn't have used a 45 year old nickname as my 'member' ID. It's too obvious. May have to change my name and style, or just not post anymore :( ATB.

A weird day indeed. Knew it was too good to be true!! ATB.

It's all down to personal choice when it comes to beers and how to store them. Most people lump all of the foreign lagers under the general term of beers, which does annoy me, they are completely different and most are served so fricking cold it's hard to tell them from iced water - until you fall over after about 10 lol!!! What is all this Guinness - a drink i adore - Extra Cold lark all about?? It just goes through yet another cooler before being poured so you have to leave it to warm up for 10-15 mins before you can taste what you are dinking!! When the barmaid asks if you want Guinness or Guinness Extra Cold and you choose the former you get looked at as if you are not drinking it properly. IMHO Beers - Bitter, Mild, Brown, Stout, Barley Wines, etc, should be drunk at, or very slightly below, room temperature. They should be slightly sparkling with a flat bubbly head - not the John Smiths gassy creamy rubbish you usually find bars selling as a sop to those that don't drink lager - drawn straight from the barrel without the use of compressed gas, in order that you can taste the brewers art. A drink full of the wonderful flavour of the hops, a divine balance between bitterness and all of the naturally occuring sugars in the grains that were used. Am going to have to lie down in a darkened roon with a glass of Speckled Hen, Tanglefoot or London Pride, Yummy!! Rant over. Isn't it a wonderful world that we each have our own tastes?? THT has fallen so low we are going to need an awful lot of 3-5% rises to get back up to the 100p level, but at least it has, for the moment, stopped falling. ATB.

Saw Tesco's had quite a few Thorntons products on their shelves for Fathers Day, including one made to look like a full beer glass with a white head. Yummy, my two favourite things - Beer and Chocolate lol!!! Knew you were not in EK but didn't want to divulge a more accurate location - i do read your posts. Beer keeps well beyond its best before date, even longer if in glass bottles. There used to be an offy near me that made a very good living out of deliberately selling out of date beer that it had bought in. You could buy perfectly drinkable beer for about 40% of normal prices. If they got in a beer you liked it made sense to buy as much as you could as it never stayed there for long. Back in the mid 90's my best mate had a job working for a marketing company, one of whose clients was an American beer company. Their tag line was the freshness of their beer, and one of his jobs was to collect all the beer that was older than a certain age - seem to remember the bottles had a 'brewed-on' date and they liked all product sold to be no older than 4-6 months - and dispose of it!! All he had to do was collect full bottles and return empty ones, having supposedly opened them and poured them down the drain!!! Needless to say we had some amazing parties for a couple of years!!!! With all of their expansion into China, the Far East and Eastern Europe, along with their up-coming foray into banking, i don't think i'll be losing too much sleep over Waitrose opening a 5th store in Scotland. Tesco are hugely undervalued and are held back by a sentiment of being too big, too overbearing, too much power, etc, etc. They have become just another symbol for the anti-capitalist nutters to bash. Have had a busy week on the phone to a certain registrars who managed to lose one of my Arsenal share certs that i had hand delivered to have split between my two kiddies. It was only for 9 shares, but as they are currently worth £14,000 EACH due to one of the offers that is due to expire soon, i'm sure you can do the maths and work out how much it was worth. Not the sort of thing you want to go missing!!! All happily resolved once i could get through 3 or 4 layers of stalling, and eventually spoke to a really helpful Lady who accepted emailed copies of transfer forms and arranged to have the new certs sent out by registered post the next day - Phew!!!! Guess i really should embrace the whole Crest thing, but old dogs and new tricks comes to mind. Not a real problem for my investment strategy as i very seldom buy or sell, and when i do it's usually when there is an offer on the table or a RI, so there are no dealing or stamp duty charges. Reckon i'll wait until they have an 'amnesty' on the charges involved, in an attempt to drag all of us Luddites kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. ATB.

Well done on using an out of date coupon. I was referring to the stampede at Tesco's in Greenock when 3 cases of beer that should have cost £21 were going through the tills at £11. As you can imagine everybody was calling mates to stock up before the situation was rectified. A bit of a bun fight ensued when people couldn't even get into the car park, police called, etc, etc. I know that Greenock is not far away from you in EK so wondered if you had been in the 'know' lol!! Really poor day on the markets, my portfolio is a sea of red and yellow with only 3 or 4 blues. The only good thing as far as i'm concerned is that there has been a 2nd, and higher, offer for my Arsenal shares. Not expecting anything positive to happen for a while, we just seem to lurch from natural disaster to Eurozone worries to American woes then back to another disaster. And round and round we go with the odd bit of recovery inbetween. I'll be happy if the FTSE is somewhere between 5750-6000 at year end. Then it's just a question of picking the odd stock that is going to outperform. An improvement for BP, BT, VOD and LLOY would be nice, plus it will be interesting to see where the BSY sp ends up as it now looks certain that Murdoch's t/o will get the green light soon. ATB.

Must be a slow day everywhere else!!!

There was a First Bus Inspector or Supervisor on the bus who confirmed that they did not accept Stagecoach tickets. He explained that as Stagecoach stop running at 6.00pm whereas First Bus continue to midnight it would not make sense for them to provide 6 hours of travel for no fares. A point i had to accept. You may well be the most considerate bus driver on the planet, but the one i encountered was an idiot. And if you think that "drivers do not go out of their way to make things difficult for passengers" then you have obviously never been on a bus in London as red lights seem to have a different meaning to bus drivers!!! My wife spent nearly 30 years commuting using buses and you would not believe some of the stories she has to tell, including four major accidents. Two where the bus ran a red light, one where it pulled out into oncoming traffic, and one where the bus driver went off route to avoid an unconnected accident and promptly ran into a low bridge!!! I am just very grateful for the fact that i only ever have occasion to use one or two buses a year. The next time i find myself in that part of the country and have need to leave my car at home i will ask my sister for a lift. The people in your area are indeed lucky to have you as a driver. ATB.