NLMarch2007

Hi Everyone

Welcome to the March Newsletter. Our first online newsletter which alows us to make the the newsletter more funky and include more graphics, not to mention speed up the process of sending it out to the 1000 or so people on our mailing list.

We hope you are all well and looking forward to the warmer sping weather. We have been getting ready for the coming summer season and stocking up with lots of new goodies. You can see all the new stuff on our 3 what's new pages www.lavenderpillow.co.uk/Whats_new.html

We have also been doing a bit of decorating inside and outside of the shop. However there has been one slight problem. We decided to repaint the outside walls of the shop. We got the Dulux colour charts and found a nice lavender colour we liked and had the paint mixed at the local DIY store. However (as allways) the colour we got is nothing like the one on the colour chart....... It is in fact pink.... not a nice subtle pink.... but a knock your eye out bright luminous shocking pink...... and you all know how much we love pink......... We were not impressed. People walk round the corner, gasp in horror and drop their shopping in shock.
There are now three manmade structures visable from space. The Great Wall of China, Hadrians Wall and The Lavender Pillow. Oh well, if any of you pay us a visit this summer, you will not have any trouble finding us. Just look for the pink glow.

Thank you to all of you who have purchased Bazz's 13 Moons CD featured in the last newsletter. And to all of you who have emailed saying nice things about it. You may be pleased to know that there are now three CDs by Bazz available.

You can find out more by clicking on the button below and hear several tracks from each CD.

And yes that is Rose on all the covers..........

All 3 are now selling like hot cakes and getting rave reviews from everyone who hears them. They are available in the shops..... but they are only £9.99 each if you buy them from us and we can provide signed copies if you ask nicely.

We would like to welcome all those who are recieving our newsletter for the first time and hope you enjoy your first visit to the wibbly wobbly world of The Lavender Pillow. We hate Spam/Junk mail as much as you do and it is not our intention to add to this growing problem. So, we only add people to our mailing list who have asked to be added or have expressed an interest in our products. However if you do not wish to recieve further newsletters just email us with the words "No more wibbly wobbly stuff for me please" in the subject field and we will not bother you again.

If on the other hand you enjoy wibbly wobbly stuff, you can catch up on our previous newsletters by clicking on the button below

So moving swiftly on to the ever popular Bazz rant of the month section..... This month we really have good reason to get steamed up....... And I'm sure many of feel the same way about this particular subject...... Local Government. Oh I can just see you all going red in the face and starting to seethe just thinking about the subject..... Any of you who who work in local government had better skip the next few paragraphs as we are sure you are lovely people (you must be if you shop in the Lavender Pillow) and none of this applies to you as I'm sure you are very dilligent and provide a wonderful service......... However.....

Those of you who have visited the shop know that we are a very long shop and one of our outside walls runs the full length of the Restormel Borough Council car park. This wall was starting to look very scruffy with bits of rendering falling off (where car park users had hit it with their cars) and lots of black stains all up the wall (from the exhaust pipes of car park users) and the woodwork was flaking a bit as well. So we employed a local painter and decorator to do repairs to the wall, clean it all up and paint the woodwork for us. We chose to do it in February as the village is very quiet at that time of year and the car park is usually empty. We thought we would do the right thing and phoned the Council to let them know that we were going to be doing this work and that we would try not to inconvenience car park users any more than was necessary. What a mistake that was......

We spoke to a very officious Lady (who shall remain nameless for legal reasons) who informed us that we couldn't do any work in the car park without them issuing us with a license. OK we said, please issue us with a license..... that will be £100 she said.......... When I picked myself up off the floor I tried to explain to her that rather than sue the Council for the damage their customers had done to our building, we were prepared to do the repair work at our own expense. Also as far as I was aware, I had a legal right to go onto their property to carry out essential maintenance to my building and there was no provision in the law that said they could charge me £100 for the privelige. She just said if you don't pay you don't get a license, if you don't have a license, you can't enter our property. So I grudgingly agreed to pay £100.

I then told her we would be starting work in two weeks time. Oh no she said you have to give a months notice...... Why I asked.... So we can inform all the Council emplyees who work on the property what's going on...... Surely that only takes one phone call to the car park ticket inspector which takes about 5 minutes. Oh no rules is rules....

I then told her that it would take about a week to complete the work but obviously our decorator couldn't paint in the rain so if the weather was bad that week, we might need two weeks to complete the work. She said Oh no, your license is only for 5 days. If it takes longer than that you will need to apply for another license which will cost another £100 and you will have to give another months notice. I said can't we be just a little flexible on this and she said..... No we can't, thems the rules.

I asked if the Council had any cones we could borrow to close off the area we were working on. Oh no she said you must provide cones and barriers and you must cone off the entire area you will be working on. So we had to hire the stuff and cone everthing off.... more expense.

She then informed me that anyone working on the building would need public liability insurance of at least £5,000,000. Mike, our decorator, has been working for 35 years as a decorator in Cornwall and has never been required to have anything more than £1,000,000 worth of public liability insurance. It's a small car park and if every space had a Lambogini parked in it and Mike accidentaly wrote all of them off..... and if he inadvertently splashed paint over the Yves St laurent suite of every Lambogini driver... had a mishap and trashed the ticket machine, and negligently set off several tons of TNT which reduced the whole car park to a smoking crator it wouldn't take £5,000,000 to put things right. I am sure that there is also an ancient japanese martial art that teaches you 7 different ways to kill someone with a paint brush..... but Mike assures me that they they didn't teach these skills where he was trained. So I can only assume that they were planning to hang the Mona Lisa in the car park that week and were afraid that Mike might put his foot through it. Anyway mike spoke to his insurance company and got his insurance changed. This Put his insurance cost up which we had to reinburse him for..... yet more expense.

So after forking out about £200 with the threat of having to pay another £100 if it rained, Mike actually got to start doing the work on Monday morning. We coned the whole area off as requested and I stood talking to Mike in the car park for 5 minutes, making sure he knew what was required. Then the very officious car park ticket inspector came up and asked Mike how long we were going to take because he wasn't happy with losing all those parking spaces (there were 4 cars in the car park at the time). Mike explained that we had a license for 5 days and it would take as long as it took. The ticket inspector then told him he would get it done a lot quicker if he didn't stand around chatting so much. Mike's response, as you can imagine, is not printable in a family oriented newsletter.

We then got a call from the woman at the Council telling us that one of her customers wasn't happy because the space he usually used was coned off and no one was working on that section of the building.
She was most indignant about it. We tried to explain to her that we had paid £100 to have access to the building and had coned off the entire area at her request and that her customer had the choice of about 40 other available spaces..... and that asking mike to run up and down the carpark applying one brush stroke every 10 yards so he looked like he was working on the whole building all of the time wasn't an efficient way of working..... but she still wasn't happy.

On Tuesday Mike put the first coat on the fascias along the length of the car park wall and started work on the front of the shop while he waited for it dry. We then got another indignat call from the woman at the council who said "My car park inspector tells me your painter is working on the front of the shop and he still has the side coned off" We tried to explain to her that our shop had more than one wall and we were having it all painted at the same time. We tried to tell her that if Mike removed the cones from the car park, when he went back to do the second coat there may be a car parked in one of those spaces and Mike might accidentally do £5,000,000 worth of damage to it with a paint brush. And anyway we had paid £100 for the right to acces our building for 5 days and the 5 days are not up yet, so bloody well stop moaning and leave us alone to get on with the job...... But she was most unhappy.

And then the heavens opened....... Mike got himself a set of waterproofs and struggled on through the rain doing his best to get the job done by the end of Friday and despite further indignant phone calls about nit picky trivial matters and the lady at the Council being extremely unhappy. And the car park inspector telling Mike that he couldn't park his van in the coned off area without buying a car park ticket...... Mike got the job finished in 5 days.... What a star. And we thought that was the end of it.

We arrived on Monday morning to find a message on our answerphone from the most indignant woman from the Council saying "My car park inspector tells me that your workman has left a pile of masonery lying in the car park and the terms of the license state that the Councils property should be left in a clean and tidy condition. But you obviously didn't read the contract properly did you." We went outside to search for this pile of rubble and after much walking up and down and peering at the ground we found it. The pile of rubble consisted of 3 small peices of paster, the biggest of which measured two inches long by half an inch wide by a quarter of an inch thick. They were located 6 feet from a litter bin. If the car park attendant was so upset about them, surely it would have been easier to pick them up and put them in the bin rather than leave them there all weekend and call the Council to complain about it.

We didn't respond to the answerphone message which is probably just as well... If I had, the woman at the Council would have at last had good reason to be unhappy.

The most annoying thing about the whole episode is the fact that I pay my overpriced Council tax and extortionate business rates to pay these people's wages. I must admit, I don't feel my money is being well spent.

Anyway, rant over.... and on to other things....

We have updated lots of pages on the site, so it's worth a look around the site if you haven't done so for a while. The fashion news page has all the latest crimes of fashion from the catwalks as the top designers launch their spring/summer collections. Lots of new faces on the Goth Gezzers and Goth Babes pages. and lots of new places to visit on our links page including a brilliant new site called the Image Vault. If anyone is looking for top quality profesional photographs or artwork for use in publications or on their websites, this is the place to go. Lots of stunning images here. It is run by a very nice man called Geoff Milner who is also doing a great job of marketing Bazz's CDs for us. The site also features some stunning photographs taken by Geoff humself and also some amazing lanscape photography by our good friend Gerrald Sables. It is worth putting this one in your favorites as it is constantly changing and worth visiting at regular intervals. Even if you are not looking to license any images, it is worth haveing a look anyway just to see the great stuff that's on there.

Now that Spring is on it's way we will be back to opening 7 days a week after Easter and look forward to seeing all those of you who will be visiting Mevagissey this summer.

So until next month(ish)

Bright Blessings

Bazz & Rose
The Lavender Pillow

Where Do you want To Go Next

Information

Products