Roll of honour

Sometimes people give such great service, you want to shout about it, and today I am going to do just that.

1/ Thanks to my village shop – Caseys – for always being utterly reliable, helpful, efficient, cheerful, and for getting some pork scratchings for me from the wholesalers 

2/ Thanks to Geoff Fisher, sales manager of CPI UK, for being friendly, helpful, professional and unfailingly patient, in the light of all my requests for advice and information about the printing of my new book – BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU. I must be a source of huge irritation to him and yet he has never shown a hint of it to me.

3/ Thanks to Dylan of 121 IT Services in Sheffield, for calmly rescuing me from a fate worse than death yesterday, when I thought all my emails had gone to never-never-land. (I would have rung Isaac, but he was on the other side of the clock, in dreamland.)

4/ Thanks to Rowan Wools for being responsive to a complaint about wool I bought for Zoe, which she knitted up into a jumper which pilled badly. Rowan Wools refunded all the money – a year after purchase  - and added some compensation. Hooray for excellent customer service!

Roll of shame

1/ Boo to Pipex Homecall for providing a crap service and connection speed and then denying it, sending BT round to check the line and then denying they had, etc etc etc ad nauseum. Now we are with Plusnet, who answer the phone and talk good sense and who (so far) have given a good connection speed.

2/ Boo to Chatsworth Farm Shop, who promised on two separate occasions to write to me about a piece of grit which we found in a veggie sausage roll. They did not do as they promised. I am disillusioned, and also aggrieved in the light of the honourable mentions they got in both Zuzu’s Petals and Plotting for Beginners.