This is Money Blog

Most-read stories this week on This is Money

10 most-read stories of the week
(Number of reader comments as of 13.00pm on 02/05)

1. Buy-to-let giant Inside Track goes bust (53)
2. Bank bail-outs to be kept secret (44)
3. House prices now lower than a year ago (53)
4. Is buy-to-let on the brink of collapse? (42)
5. Midas: should you buy in RBS cash call? (5)
6. Mortgages 'to rise by £230 a month' (25)
7. Opec: Petrol to hit £1.50 a litre this year (41)
8. Earn instant interest on new e-bond (3)
9. Abbey's 'bargain' holiday credit card offer (2)
10. Thousands face a £245 road tax rise (13)

Two issues dominated the attention of our readers this week. News on Wednesday that property investment firm Inside Track had gone under drew enormous numbers.

This cheerleader of the buy-to-let boom had made its money running seminars that promised massive returns to punters prepared to buy up strings of urban new-build flats, often well before completion.

Reality often failed to fulfil the promise, and This is Money and Financial Mail have a proud record over the years of warning would-be investors against swallowing the hard-sell of firms like Inside Track - and of airing the stories of individuals who have been scuppered by rental returns and flat valuations well below billing.

Some of our readers' 53 comments, however, expressed little sympathy with those who fell foul of Inside Track's lure. Some also questioned the ethics of buy-to-let landlordism, and others asked if the market had collapsed - our buy-to-let market analysis article was another hit.

Close on the rails was last week's Financial Mail front-page revelation that the Bank of England will not be disclosing which banks dip into its £50bn credit crunch finance. This ran all week and amassed 44 comments, largely disparaging of a perceived arrogance in the Old Lady's handling of taxpayers' money.

This reflects a year-long burgeoning of interest not only in the credit crunch, particularly as it starts to affect households directly, but also in the condition of our big banks' finances, and whether bail-outs are justified.

- Adrian Lowery, Assistant editor

Top stories on This is Money: April 2008

This is Money has just had its best month ever: more than 1.2 million people visited the site in April, a corking 50% up on the same month last year. They looked at nearly 9.5 million pages, which is 37% more than in April 2007.

News and analysis of anxious economic and financial times is attracting most interest, along with advice on savings. The burgeoning number of comments being posted on articles also reflects people's key concerns.

Foremost among which evidently is the property market. Not only were the two most-read articles of the month (see below) on house prices but also these, together with Nationwide's latest figures, have received nearly 200 comments from readers.

Interest in the condition of buy-to-let (taking spots 3 and 4) was redoubled by the news this week that cheerleaders Inside Track have gone bust - a story that comes in at 7th despite being only two days old. You can read our record of warning punters against the rash promises of such firms here.

As doom and gloom appear to descend, more people are seeking advice. Isa-fever set in before and after the tax-year deadline, with four of our Isa advice pieces in the top 20.

Most-read stories in April:
1.  House prices falling faster than 90s crash
2.  UK homes overvalued by 30% says IMF
3.  Is buy-to-let on the brink of collapse?
4.  Buy-to-let novices face mortgage ruin
5.  Bank bail-outs to be kept secret
6.  Are you at risk? The UK sub-prime map
7.  Buy-to-let giant Inside Track goes bust
8.  House prices fell by £5,000 in March
9.  Barclays leads with 6.5% cash Isa
10. How safe is your bank?
11. The top 10 cash Isas of the year
12. Could Kaupthing Edge be the next Rock?
13. Savings bonanza erupts in fixed-rates
14. Revealed: the real rate of inflation
15. HSBC offers to pick up mortgage casualties
16. Former BBC presenter's £40,000 debt
17. Interest rates cut by quarter-point to 5%
18. Will you choose a cash Isa or a crash Isa?
19. How to buy a bargain home in a slowdown
20. Most consistent cash Isas revealed

Not counted above, our best savings rates tables, which are independently researched and updated daily, have gained a web-wide reputation, used by 100,000 visitors this month:
>> Best savings rates tables

- Adrian Lowery, Assistant editor

Ticket to (take me for a) ride

Why, as the cost to companies of administrating ticket sales has plummeted in recent years, has the amount charged to consumers for the process soared?

You might suppose that booking tickets yourself on a website, which then sets off an automated processing and posting system, costs companies a lot less than manning box offices and phone lines. But then of course most tickets are now sold through agencies, which are parasitical, er sorry, profit-making enterprises.

Just as we've got used to being charged 20% of the cover price for the privilege of being sold tickets to various sorts of entertainment, so now the ruse has spread to train tickets. Trainline.com - the ticketing website that somehow has managed to maintain a high profile despite its user-unfriendliness - has just announced it will be introducing fees on ticket purchases.

There will be a booking fee of £2.50: it doesn't say whether this is per ticket or per booking, but you can bet your bottom dollar it's the former - which of course makes it not a booking fee but a ticket surcharge. On top will be levied the amusingly titled 'fulfilment fee'. Fulfilling the obligation to give you the ticket once it has been bought: well thank you trainline.com, you are really spoiling us. Anyway, it's £1.00 for post and 50p for picking up at the self-service machines in stations.

This might not be so irksome if it wasn't adding insult to the injury of grievously inflated rail fares. I'm frankly fed up of train operators each time they raise fares bleating about what great value their discounted advance tickets are. It's rubbish: they are rarer than the red squirrel. And twice as elusive.

Anyway, the solution is simple: don't use trainline.com. The major train operator websites like Virgin Trains and particularly National Express do a better job but aren't, as far as I know, charging for it.

If trainline.com needs to levy these fees to prop up margins and loses its customers as a result, then maybe that's the market's way of telling it that it doesn't deserve to exist as a profit-making enterprise.

- Adrian Lowery, Assistant Editor, thisismoney.co.uk

Amazon: 'We're not just for Christmas'

Amazon founder and chief Jeff Bezos is sending out a message to the company's customers, and indeed anyone who goes to its homepage today: like goodwill to men, driving sober and puppies, it's not just for Christmas.

His open letter trumpets the virtues of Amazon's new 'Prime' membership programme. The idea, he avers, is simple: 'for a flat annual membership fee, you get free unlimited One-Day delivery on millions of eligible items'. The fee? Fifty quid a year. Well, £49, but let's add on the interest.

'If you're inclined to do the maths [yes, Jeff, I am],' continues Mr Bezos, 'that's less than the cost of 6 Express Deliveries (£8.99 each), making it a great value [sic].' If you're daft enough to use Express delivery six times a year, it just might be Jeff.

Apart from the irony that the world's biggest online bookseller really should be able to afford a decent ad-copy proofreader, there's a few things that don't add up.

Express 'One-Day' delivery is emphatically not great value at £8.99 a pop. Not in a country where first-class post should arrive in one day. But then, the only reason Amazon ever got away with charging for its 'first-class delivery', having initially sold itself on free delivery, was that it made the latter so excruciatingly slow, by waiting days and days to dispatch orders, that everyone got fed up with it.

So who knows, perhaps now it will do the same to 'first-class delivery', which is already frequently delayed by slow dispatch, in order to encourage its loyal customers on to Express delivery.

But what would really irritate me if I was gullible or wealthy enough to sign up for Amazon Prime is what appears to be reduced stocking levels. I seem to remember a few years ago there were few items that were not in stock and available immediately (and I have some obscure musical and literary inclinations).

I just scrapped an order for a handful of not-that-obscure CDs, because two of them 'will not ship for 1 to 3 weeks' and one is not available at all. This is really poor, as it's the new album by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - a major release. I'd feel a bit cheated out of my fifty quid, personally speaking.

It appears to me that each of the virtues upon which Amazon promoted itself as a newcomer many years ago (low prices, free delivery and quick availability), has been gradually dispensed with. Then again, if the state of High Street CD retailing is anything to go by (RIP Fopp), the format is doomed - even if some people want to buy them, no one wants to sell them.

Downloads it is then!

- Adrian Lowery, News editor, This is Money

Underfed watchdog can't boss the fat alleycats

The Competition Commission's supermarkets probe resembles the tendency of top-level football referees in the 1980s to admonish 'robust' tackles with an affectionate pat on the perpetrator's backside. (Except that many football-followers secretly lament the passing of the latter.)

However, nobody should be surprised that the Competition Commission has taken a leaf out of the Geoffrey Howe book of savaging. It is in no position to start throwing its weight around among heavyweights of the FTSE 100.

A regulator with little goodwill among business, government or households cannot start interfering willy-nilly with private business without clear evidence of anti-competitive practice or monopoly power. And if we as consumers are left with a barren landscape of grocery retailing towered over by identikit behemoths – think Monument Valley, Arizona – then it is our own fault.

We - as a nation - voted for the laissez-faire revolution of the 1980s, we voted for successive Chancellors straining to impress on business how supine they and their regulators would be. Moreover, the same nation wanted, and wants, maximum returns on stocks and shares and pensions, and believes big business when they claim that any regulation or interference would be ruinous for UK companies and the economy.

We can't do all that and then expect an underfed 'watchdog' to fly in the face of decades of financial and economic orthodoxy, and start tackling the top cats, because our favourite local butcher has closed down. It is a grand form of 'regulatory capture' – a process recognised after the big privatisations of the 1980s and 90s, when the bodies set up to monitor the private monopolies (Oftel, Ofgas, Ofwat, etc) got too chummy with their wards. The best business deals are done on the golf course, it is said: but stand too close on the ninth tee and you can lose all your teeth.

The only thing that will decrease supermarkets' grip on the grocery and the wider retail sector is if we stop using them. And that, for many people, is totally impractical. This stranglehold is the culmination of the Big Four's business strategy – one that was entirely foreseeable ten or more years ago.

But nobody wanted to do anything about it then: we were under the stock market's spell; our funky retail giants were all part of a resurgent UK economy and even Cool Britannia. 

And now … is it too late? I like to think not, but it will take more than a limp-wristed Competition Commission inquiry to help out our small retailers, that much is obvious. Well not 'more' than perhaps, 'more ingenious' than. We need to think how to boost small retailers and local suppliers.

Unfortunately, the fundamental problem is that the grocery shops just aren't there in most town centres or suburban or rural areas to mount a challenge. There needs to be a great range of shops in a locality to negate the draw of the supermarket: if you've got to go there in the end anyway for half your shopping, you may as well simply get all your shopping there.

'It's not perfect,' most people will admit, 'But I can't spend all day driving around the county when I can get it all in an hour at Tesco, even if I don't particularly like the place.'

- Adrian Lowery, News editor, This is Money

Good fare for the common man

To listen to some people in the media you'd be forgiven for thinking that Britain – and in particular London -- was now the best place in the world to eat. Why, with its Gordon Ramsays and Heston Blumenthals, its legions of foodies (more on this ridiculous term in a minute) and its gastropubs, it’s obviously without equal, in Europe or anywhere else.

I beg to differ.

Every sane person’s conviction that most gastropubs – talked up in London anyway by gullibly gushing publications like Time Out - are overrated and overpriced was given credence by the publishers of the Good Pub Guide this week.

And the Times restaurant critic AA Gill in an interview with the Evening Standard this week rightly asserted that London restaurants are gimmicky, pretentious and overpriced, and generally compare poorly – on value particularly -- with their Continental counterparts. And, perhaps a little uncharacteristically, he struck this note for the common man: "One of the things I love about Italy is that you know that the waiters could afford to eat the incredible food they serve. I feel very uncomfortable in restaurants that are just too expensive for the staff ever to eat in."

And he's right. Although he must spend most of his working life feeling very uncomfortable. It must be tough.

The big difference is that, except in the most touristed corners of continental Europe, you can largely wander into a decent-looking brasserie or trattoria and get a good two-or-three-course meal with good table wine for what? 20 euros? Less? If you know where to go, you'll get a great meal for that.

It’s expected that people go out to eat – it’s not an 'event' thing, an occasion that you have to consult the restaurant reviews for and phone up and book. Of course there are plenty of 'occasion restaurants' over there too; but there are many more good local eateries with good local food and wine that anyone but the poorest sections of society can afford to eat in.

And that is where we come to that dread word 'foodie'. Only in Britain would we give a name to some privileged cabal of citizens who 'like good food'. It rankles with me that the word seems smugly to adopt the practice of buying nice food and eating at restaurants as the preserve of a monied middle class.

Well of course, it largely is the monied middle class who do these things here: they are the ones who can afford to shop at Waitrose and Borough Market, and eat where the Times food supplement tells them to.

- Adrian Lowery, News editor, This is Money

Could there be a 'fourth way'?

Tony Blair's 'Third Way' turned out to be suspiciously close to Margaret Thatcher's blend of expanding freedoms to business and markets while restricting those of the individual. In this, both hues of Government fixed their agendas with a lot of help from our so-called 'special relationship' with the United States. In my blog last week I argued that the Northern Rock episode exposes the fallibility of blind belief in free markets.

On the eve of Alistair Darling's Pre-Budget Report, I'd like to state my belief that we must stop looking across the Atlantic for our economic and social inspiration. We've been doing that for 30 years and we've got Kentucky Fried Chicken, 50 Cent and a transport system that's the laughing stock of the developed world. I think we've learned all we can from that direction.

It's about time we started to try and learn more from our social democratic neighbours on the Continent. OK, I admit it, I'm an unrepentant Europhile – not in the sense of a strong European Union. Au contraire, I'm all in favour of localism: I think more policy should be determined at a level closer to where people live. And while many of its inefficiencies and extravagances are doubtless exaggerated in certain sections of the media, the EU nevertheless tends to the opposite direction: where laws are made at a great distance from citizens and uniformities are imposed across nations.

This latter prospect is one that depresses me, although it is globalisation and tourism, not the EU, that are the major protagonists behind it. I returned last week from a massively enjoyable and fascinating 16-day rail trip around the continent, taking several sleeper trains between some of its greatest cities. This diverse collection of societies and cultures within such a small area on our doorstep: we take it for granted at our peril.

In the middle of the trip I read this news piece about fears for the survival of Paris neighbourhoods expressed by the deputy mayor Lyne Cohen-Solal: 'All the cities all over Europe are starting to look the same. London, Berlin, they're going to have the same streets with the same shops,' he said. 'If we don't intervene ... we are going to have only textile shops and fast food. We don't want this kind of future for our city. Culture is a very important thing to create integration [and] a higher quality of life.'

He's spot on. Soon, Europe's monuments and treasures will be reduced to totems of expired national identities, dotted around a homogenous morass of cultural and aesthetic mediocrity. (You might surmise from this that I don't rate shopping very highly in the pursuit of happiness. And you'd be right.)

Just as unfettering markets doesn't seem to stop them working inefficiently and heading in catastrophic directions, zealous lawmaking and regulation in the social arena rarely meets its objectives (take 'the war on drugs'). I believe there are arenas in which socio-economic intervention is justified and could be effective: supporting traditional local industries, proper town-planning and regeneration programmes, and transport policy, both local and national. But these are the very areas that have been abandoned by successive governments to the selfish vagaries of private enterprise and the market.

Which brings me to the trains. My experience of rail travel and urban transport across the continent was that it was superior to and cheaper than ours – by far. Even in those nations supposedly blighted so badly by decades of communism. Polish trains might be a bit shabbier and slower than Virgin's much-touted Pendolinos – but they are affordable to everyone, not overcrowded and their vestibules don't smell of excrement.

I don't pretend to know much about the transport policy of each nation on the continent or have detailed ideas on how we can learn from them. That is the job we pay politicians and civil servants for: to study complex problems and come up with solutions that are of most benefit to the widest possible section of society.

The free market is just one of the more effective means civilisation has found to organise business so that it provides for society's needs. That's all – it's a means, not an end in itself. That's why, when it has manifestly failed to provided a decent solution (as in the case of our rail network), it should be shown no clemency and no respect.

- Adrian Lowery, News editor, This is Money

Northern Rock shows up the market ideologues

I find it rather churlish and hypocritical to blame either Mervyn King or the Government for what has occurred at Northern Rock. The fault lies squarely with Northern Rock, and more broadly with a free and liberalised international money market: it is an instance of what economists call market failure.

As Chancellor, Gordon Brown spent ten years bending over backwards to please business leaders and the money markets with assurances of non-intervention in their affairs.

Business, banks and investors can't have it both ways: they can't on the one hand argue for markets that are as unfettered as possible in order (notionally) to maximise efficiency, profits and shareholder returns. And then on the other complain that government or central banks or regulators do not jump in to rescue them when that market (or those firms) are shown to be not up to the job.

The job, in this case, of making sure constituent firms lend and borrow sensibly and look after people’s savings.

I sauntered off on a rail tour of continental Europe for a couple of weeks on 13 September and the next day it all went off. Which I only realised a week or so later when I picked up an English paper in Vienna.

In it I read this piece by Martin Kettle, which broadly argues that the intervention by the Government to guarantee savers' deposits presents an opportunity to create a consensus for firmer social-democratic style regulation of and intervention in markets.

I agree only in part. 'Intervention' and 'regulation' must not be confused. Surely, intervention is what you do when regulation doesn't work?

So far the intervention on behalf of Northern Rock gives the message – as Mervyn King argued - that banks (and their shareholders) can go on taking irresponsible risks and will be baled out with taxpayers' cash when things go wrong.

I am all for the Government stepping in to guarantee savings deposits: but only if the lesson is learned that the market is far from perfect and requires regulation to prevent crises – rather than ad hoc interventions once the horse has bolted.

- Adrian Lowery, News editor, This is Money

>> NORTHERN ROCK: Latest news and advice

Save me from the Cauldron of Hate

I'd like to nominate my Sainsbury's Local as the worst shop in the country. OK, I can't really substantiate that …. the worst shop that I find myself often standing in even though I and everyone I know locally loathes it with a passion.

It has virtually no loose fruit or veg, and what there is is just shoddy. It stocks the most expensive line possible in whatever you might commonly want. And every day it runs out of a selection of essentials by about 5pm – just when its rush-hour begins and harried straight-out-of-work shoppers fill the claustrophobic aisles. Soon we're all barging moodily past each other, tutting and tersely muttering 'no ******* tinned tomatoes again!?'

My housemate and I have cheerfully christened it the Cauldron of Hate.

It's the one on Battersea Park Rd (south-west London) by the way, just in case the area manager is reading – although I doubt it: he or she is probably busy conducting experiments with monkeys to devise new ways of making grocery shopping more unpleasant.

And you think I'm joking ... well maybe a bit, and only because I suspect every other Sainsbury's Local and Tesco Express provides the same 'quality of shopping'.

I put it to you: when was the last time you bought a punnet of 'ripen-at-home' nectarines and actually had one ripen on you? Did you manage to catch the six-hour window of insipid squelchyness between the three days of 'woodlike' and the onset of mould?

Could it be that they are trying to tempt us towards their wonderful 'Taste the Difference' range of nectarines? – a steal at 70p each? (Or more like 'a steel' if the last one I shelled out for is anything to go by.)

Why would a store cease stocking 500g bags of pasta (the not-very-big ones) in order to stock 250g bags (the laughably small), other than to extract more money? They look like those dinky bags of exotic pulses you see in the world foods aisle. In the world of Milky Ways, they'd be called 'Fun-size'. What marvellous fun I was having, paying over the odds for rubbish.

The most delicious thing about it all (for it is not the food), is that they are no longer cheap. That's the one thing supermarkets were good for, economy, and they’re not even that anymore! Well, not the 'convenience' ones anyway.

You see, I enjoy cooking. And I enjoy going and finding good ingredients to cook with. This is not possible in my immediate locale because we just have Tesco and Sainsbury's. Oh, and Spar. But I live and work in centralish London, so if I have the time and inclination and I remember, then I can go around to a few different shops and pick up stuff that actually tastes like what it's meant to and isn't covered in three layers of foam and plastic.

I know it sounds like such a chattering-class thing to quack on about but the supermarkets really have sucked the enjoyment out of food-shopping for me – and also created the conditions whereby small retailers can't compete or even afford premises.

I can't help looking abroad for comparisons and whether it's France, Spain or Italy, they all seem to get a better deal than us in this, as in so much else. No wonder a thousand years after the Dark Ages we're still the binge-drinking barbarians of Europe: we're better at it than food; and it helps us forget the Cauldron of Hate.

- Adrian Lowery, News editor, This is Money

And so farewell dear pint and fag

The nearer we have come to the smoking ban, the more angry about it I've suddenly become. So I'm going to get it off my tarry chest.

Now, I accept the arguments about the health dangers of passive smoking and the inadequacy of current arrangements in most pubs and restaurants. A ban for all places in which food is served makes sense: I almost always duck out of restaurants anyway for my pernicious post-prandial puff, even if they permit smoking. As for most other public buildings: I can't really think of many which would currently allow you to smoke anyway.

Denying pubs and most particularly private social clubs the choice of designating themselves as venues that permit their customers to smoke is an interference in the free will of both business and individual - that is without doubt. The question is, is it justified?

Some forms of paternalism are both sensible and necessary: the seatbelt law for instance. It has an obvious and undeniable benefit to everyone who drives and it imposes only a negligible restriction on individuals' lives. I'm not swooping in from the wild-eyed fringe of libertarianism.

There is only one meaningful criterion in the smoking debate: no one who does not want to breath in cigarette smoke should be forced to, or even be put in a position where it's likely. Great, fine. This does not necessitate a blanket ban.

A pub or club should be allowed to designate itself a smoking venue. Non-smokers who apply for a job there, or enter the building, are fully aware it will be a smoky environment. They will do so of their own free will. They have made an adult decision that they don't mind the smoke - or at least that they they are prepared to take the negligible risk of impaired health from a few hours' passive smoking.

Those who don't like smoke will have a massive choice from the vast majority of venues that will become 'smoke-free' (god, I loathe the unutterable smugness of that phrase).

People choose to be firemen, people choose to work in zoos, people work on oil rigs and in mines - dangerous places. No, I take that back, they're not dangerous places. Iraq is a dangerous place, the Colombian border with Bolivia is I believe a dangerous place, copper mines in Brazil are probably a bit dicey.

But what we think of as 'dangerous' workplaces in Western societies actually pose negligible risks - getting into a car knocks them all into the shade. People make a rational adult choice that they think the benefits of working there outweigh the risk of harm.

No one thinks the state should ban zoos from having chimps because they might take a dislike to the bloke in the hat and give him a good mauling. I don't think the chances of suffering health problems from passive smoking are so much greater - so why all of a sudden do we think the state can interfere in the way millions of people enjoy themselves?

Our society appears to be succumbing to certain trends: a new intolerant puritanism, a sort of infantilisation, and a slightly miserable submissiveness to an ever-more overbearing and socially controlling state. And some people call that progress.

Adrian Lowery, News editor, This is Money

As long as it's in my back yard

I can't totally agree with defunct beat combo Blur's allegation that 'Modern life is rubbish'. It's just a bit plasticky and garish ... but nice and comfortable - like a pair of cheap trainers in fact. And there's really not a great deal you can do about it, so you may as well try and enjoy it.

For instance, how many millions of column (and web-page) inches have been filled with laments over the state of modern-day professional football in the last ten years?

The Premiership and national game in particular come in for all sorts of familiar flak: millionaire players behaving yobbishly on and off the pitch; ticket prices soaring while fans are milked for profit and taken for granted; lack of atmosphere at matches; fixture lists and kick-off times messed around by Sky; bloated European league devaluing domestic titles; foreign takeovers chipping away at clubs' local roots and turning clubs into 'entertainment organisations'.

It's an apocalyptic picture that appeals particularly to those of the flat-cap nostalgia tendency - and indeed although I was born after the era of outsized headwear (but during that of bare-handed goalies), I'm often guilty of this sentiment too. There is after all some substance in each of the allegations listed above.

But it's a complicated story. The busy Southampton supporters' internet forum has been especially lively this morning, after our sister paper the Evening Standard alleged that Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen is thinking of sticking in a bid for Southampton football club. The mood at least among those Saints fans is 85% positive: of course it is, it means money for players and the prospect of fresh success for a club with perhaps more glory in its recent history than in recent seasons.

Just as it was for me and Blackburn Rovers in the late 1980s and early 90s when Jack Walker began to pour money in. We weren't quite the Chelsea of our day - we had two things going for us: finding a local tycoon and lifelong Blackburn fan to bankroll us, and offering a hope of stopping Manchester Utd winning the league. For a season anyway - but what a season.

It seems strange to recall now though - when a club seems to be snapped up by a millionaire every other day - that Rovers' ascent to glory was far from popular: we were buying success, pushing up transfer fees to ridiculous levels ... but how many of those critics would have turned down their own Jack Walker?

This paradox is expressed on the Saints forum today: there's a feeling of 'I don't like foreign tycoons taking over English clubs in general but I'd love it if this did happen to us'. It's a case of if you can't beat 'em ...

And who knows, maybe the commercialisation and commodification and sanitisation of top-level football is simply the inevitable if unfortunate corollary of its emergence from the dark days of the 1970s and 80s? There's lots of things about football in the 1980s that I miss very much, but something obviously had to change. And what we have now is perhaps the only answer?

- Adrian Lowery, News Editor, This is Money

I survived the Rorke's Drift of Euston

When I consider having a rant about rail travel in Britain, I feel like a hackneyed bore. I mean, it's a little like a beauty queen emphasising that she'd like to see world peace.

It's a case of, 'Yes well, you and me both mucker, but it's a bit too much of a mess for anyone to sort out isn't it really. So we may as well just plug on and hope that people are inconvenienced in the least horrendous fashion possible. Even if that is by death occasionally - or rather more frequently in the case of war.'

But it shouldn't be like that, should it really? We shouldn't tolerate something so inimical to a happy and peaceful life because 'that's just the way things are, and have been for some time'.

On Friday I got to Euston at 18.15 in order to board the 18.39 to Manchester Piccadilly. I should add at this point that I had wanted to travel on an earlier train. But 3pm to 6pm on a Friday Virgin counts as 'peak time', for which the standard pay-on-the-day saver return is not available and those wishing to indulge in this exotic privilege - turning up at a railway station to buy a ticket and board a train for a 200-mile mainline journey - must fork out about £250.

So I'm aiming to get the first Back In The Real World Train. The 'fast-service' ticket machines each have snaking queues of scores in front; and the queue at the ticket office is at least half an hour I'm told. It seems other people don't want to pay £250 too. Funny that.

I jog over to the Virgin chaps on the concourse: 'Can I buy a ticket on the train?' 'You can sir but not a saver return: it will have to be a [Name Plucked Out of Business Analyst's Backside] ticket which will cost [insert fantasyland multiple of £100 ( - I'd switched off at this point)]'

I jog back to the ticket office and the Virgin chap in there trying to keep the peace advises me with disarming frankness to plead with the front of the queue to jump in ('try and pick a girl, mate [*wink*]!'). This I now do and with a little dent in my dignity hand over nearly £60 (you are really spoiling us here Virgin Trains with your 'Saver'), and jog over to the platform with about 10 minutes to departure.

There's a queue extending from the top of the entry ramp down to the platfrom gate, where there's a platoon of red jackets under siege from waves of irate travellers waving pre-booked tickets - much like Michael Caine and friends at Rorke's Drift.

I'll spare you a blow-by-blow account. But: 1. The train was closed to any ticketholder without a seat reservation.

2. This included not only thoughtless types like me who had bought on the day, but also those who had booked onto that specific train .... but who hadn't been given a seat. Fancy that, eh? You make an advance booking online or over the phone for a specific train (which you cannot change or cancel without losing your money, and which is not valid for any other train) and you lazily assume you've actually been given a seat-number!? How foolish and complacent!?

2. People were a bit miffed.

3. We were told to wait for the next train which would be departing from the next platform in 30 mins.

4. New chaos ensued as the hundreds waiting had to either turn tail up the ramp and back down the next one, or, in the case of those who'd been at the front of the queue - and who feared suddenly being at the back of the queue and not getting aboard this train either -  an undignified playground scramble over the partion barrier.

5. The fittest, strongest, most determined and fearless of those on ramp 7 that day - us garlanded few - boarded the 19.30 to Manchester Piccadilly.

And before some bright spark peeps up that I should have booked a cheap ticket in advance: I went on the Virgin website almost every day for weeks. For this is what you must do in the lottery of advance ticket issuing. Have they come out and all been sold? Or have they not been issued yet? The few truly cheap tickets now get snapped up within hours of issue thanks to the average traveller's growing internet savvy.

There is nothing - absolutely nothing - that any Virgin executive can say to excuse this state of affairs. So why do we put up with it, why are increasing numbers travelling by train?

1. It's a monopoly.

2. The roads are so bad.

3. Flying from London to St Albans isn't possible. Yet.

4. We've been inured to this treatment: air travel is just as sordid and undignified and chaotic, and we do that so much now that we've forgotten that train travel used to be (and still should be) an easier, cheaper, more enjoyable and even romantic experience.

But that would be too much to ask wouldn't it.

- Adrian Lowery, News editor, This is Money

Our gracious ambassadors

I'm finding it increasingly hard to take any pride in being English (which is sort of a silly notion anyway - we're all accidents of birth). I went to see Liverpool play Barcelona in the European Champions' League on Wednesday, and if I was the mayor of that city, I’d ban any English football team from bringing their fans to another match there.

No, you might not have seen any headlines reporting incidents of violence or trouble – and that’s probably because these were few or minor (relatively speaking – relative that is to the street warfare of the 1980s). What you could, and perhaps should, have read is 'ENGLISH VISITORS USE CITY AS TOILET' or 'ENGLISH DO BEST TO ELIMINATE BEAUTY FROM THE WORLD'.

I'd like to trot out the old cliché that it's a minority of our football fans that behave badly abroad – and literally, it might still be true, because 48% is after all a minority.

The Plaza Reial in the middle of Barcelona's old town was by 5pm on Wednesday a seething mass of urine-fragranced, beer-soaked ugliness. I've seen this every time I've had the misfortune to be in a foreign city at the same time as our nation's finest: 'take over' the main squares (like an occupying army), put your flags up (to signify your 'victory'), drink to oblivion (insulting and intimidating the local populace in the process, by for instance urinating openly against every available surface), and strike a variety of confrontational postures (with accompanying songs - in the loosest sense of the word).

Whether or not all this is aimed at provoking local police into a reaction, what is absolutely fantastic is that the 'fans' come over all surprised and hard-done-by when it does. The foreign police are singling out English fans for special treatment because of their reputation! When really all along they were just in 'high spirits' and indulging in 'friendly banter'! If it wasn’t tragic it would be hilarious.

And yet they might feel justified in believing that what they do has attained the status of acceptability. Because with massive patience and tolerance host cities' authorities and locals have learned not to react or provoke – like campers waiting in their tents while the hungry bear that's wandered into camp noses through the rubbish.

So the hordes are left to play out their pathetic rituals again in the hope that they’ll finally lumber off to the match without causing too much damage - except to their own country's reputation.

- Adrian Lowery, News editor, This is Money

If you can't stand the cold, get a sweater

In shops, in pubs, in offices, in houses, it seems thermostats are set at levels normally associated with Turkish steam rooms. Well I'm getting overheated about overheating.

I realise there are people who feel it necessary to heat their homes to fainting-point in the winter while wandering around in shorts and t-shirts, and they are probably quite happy with this thermal extravagance.

But they should grow up.

First, there is a basic ethical objection to waste: in a world of scarcity no one has any business using up unnecessary resources. It is selfish and ... well, wasteful. As well as stupid (everybody's wearing five layers for pity's sake, they don't need it to be 26 degrees indoors).

Second, you can add to that an environmental objection, which is pretty self-evident.

Third, there's the financial consideration: why waste money on blasting superfluous heat around buildings? But I suppose that's individuals' and companies' prerogative - to waste their money how they like. According to my moral compass it's out of line, but not necessarily to someone else's.

Fourth, it's unpleasant (subjective, I admit) and it's unhealthy (objective truth).

Fifth, if the experience of Christmas shopping becomes any more appalling someone will surely crack and end up in the newspaper headlines. Me perhaps.

And on that note, seasonal cheer to you all!

Adrian Lowery, This is Money

Don't play the innocent

Think about it. Be honest with yourself. Does it really come of any surprise to you that the big supermarkets and discount clothing stores are relying on Asian sweatshop labour?

How else do they produce shirts for £5 for pity’s sake? Suits for £30? We all know it, we just don’t want to admit it to ourselves.

And you can guarantee that this is just the tip of the iceberg; you can guarantee that most of the clothes that you wear with a 'Made in Vietnam' or 'Made in China' label inside will have been made in conditions which you would find appalling.

We cannot shrink from the fact: Western nations' standard of living is based in no small part on what can only be descibed as a rapacious economic imperialism which forces millions around the world into indentured graft on poverty wages. Labour which is in all but name forced.

Having recently spent six months poking around the remoter corners of the Indian sub-continent, I can assure any doubters that only a small minority of that enchanting regions' inhabitants are benefitting in any meaningful way from the 'economic revolution' much-trumpeted by the likes of the Economist and the FT (and, yes our sister publication Financial Mail too).

And I can also assure you that the people who end up in these sweatshops have very little realistic choice in the matter: faced with a choice between baking cow dung into patties under the sun and selling them for fuel at the roadside in 40-degree heat - and sitting for 16 hours at a sewing machine in 35-degree heat … what would you do?

With the rise of Primark and of supermarket clothing (and not just them but the more fashionable High Street fashion chains), we have grown to expect clothes at knockdown prices. 'Disposable clothing' some call it. And I'm no exception. But as I've argued before in this blog, maybe we should start thinking of paying a little more, and buying a little less if necessary.

Then perhaps nobody else is paying for it too.

Adrian Lowery, This is Money

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Unfairpak

Just a quick note for those affected by - or interested in - the Farepak scandal.

For those who don't know, this was the Christmas hamper and voucher club that went bust last month, taking with it tens of millions of pounds in Xmas savings from more than 100,000 families - some of whom had given as much as £1,500 to the company and now have neither their goods nor their cash.

I personally find this a particularly cruel and unjust blow for hard-working and often low-income families who were just trying to do the right thing and scrimp and save so they could ensure themselves and their children a great Christmas. Accordingly, I've given the affair the highest profile on our website since the scandal broke on 16th October.

You can get all our coverage and advice at thisismoney.co.uk/farepak.

Anyhow, the latest development is the calls to bring HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland) to account for the seemingly abrupt withdrawal of financing which sank the firm - although this by no means absolves its directors and those of parent company European Home Retail of responsibility.

And also I've only just discovered unfairpak.co.uk - an excellent help site set up by one Suzy Hall who lost £1,000 to Farepak. There's lots of info on the homepage and then there's an incredibly busy and helpful forum area that seems to be attracting a huge community - it's very quick to register and join up.

Regards,

Adrian Lowery, News Editor, This is Money

Pushing the envelope

It is a familiar tactic: reduce the quality of a product or service to increase profit margins, rather than risk the more visible price-hike. A colleague of ours nextdoor at the Mail on Sunday wrote an intriguing piece in April on how this effectively means that over the years inflation has been artificially low.

My latest first-hand experience of this is with the DVD delivery service www.screenselect.co.uk. It is actually very good value – particularly if you want to catch up on a lot of films and TV programmes you wish you’d caught, or always thought you should see.

They charge a fixed monthly fee and send you DVDs through the post from your wishlist, which you maintin online. You watch a DVD, pop it in its prepaid 1^st class envelope and 3-4 days later the next one lands on your doormat. This one DVD option costs £10 a month (as it does with most of the rival services).

I pay £12.50 a month to have two DVDs on the go. One of the advantages of this is that they pass eachother in the post: while I’m watching one or sending it back, the other is on its way. If you watch-and-return immediately it means you can in theory receive a DVD every other day (or even two every three days) – but it’s more like one every three days in practice. But at the price, 10 DVDs a month is obviously excellent value.

However, Screen Select has just announced that they will no longer automatically provide an envelope with each DVD separately but would like them to be sent back together in one and they will also send out both at the same time. They claim on their website that this will not reduce the number of DVDs you get and that it is in response to customer feedback …

Now someone might have a different answer to this logic problem, but it seems to me that you must get fewer DVDs this way: one sits around waiting for you to watch the other. Admittedly, ScreenSelect are for the moment offering to provide extra envelopes on request, but it has the whiff of drift to me: and as I forked out a year’s subscription in advance for a discount I’d have to fight for a refund if I didn’t like it.

I’m not particularly fussed, because I’m still getting decent value from the service anyway – but it’s more a matter of principle: don’t entice me into paying for a year’s worth of your service in advance and then start changing the terms halfway in …

Adrian Lowery, This is Money

In vino veritas

A recent expose of supermarket wine rip-offs and our editor's subsequent blog brought a lively response from the This is Money readership. The satisfying thwop of a released cork is a sound not altogether foreign to our offices - so it's comforting to know that our punters are just as alive to the ethics of how this greatest of unprescribed medicines is sold.

But can I venture that some of the comments betrayed a - how can I put it - price-sensitive approach to wine-shopping. Now, I might get into trouble with the boss here, but wine is one of those things where the money-saving mantra doesn't easily apply. A fool and his money are soon parted, sure, but equally, er ... if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. And they taste awful.

A fascinating piece of market research that emerged in the bogus special-offer wine controversy is that £3.99 is a 'magic price' for shoppers, with industry research showing about 60% of New World wine in the UK is sold at, or below, this level. Now I'll stop short of claiming that British consumers are bringing the wine-con on themselves through parsimony. But I think perhaps it's time we re-evaluated what wine 'should' cost, or what we're prepared to pay.

We've started to realise that chickens shouldn't really cost £2.50 - and that the only way they can be sold at this price is via unacceptably intensive rearing methods and a concomitant decline in quality. We've started to realise that our demand for year-round access to cheap, blemish-free fruit and vegetables has led to mass production of tasteless, characterless high-yield varieties and spectacularly wasteful transportation.

I would argue in a similar vein that we shouldn't expect to get a decent bottle of wine for less than £5 - and that if you really like wine you should be prepared to pay more than that. And indeed there are, in my opinion, very few decent bottles of wine around for less than a fiver - whereas there are hundreds for seven or eight quid.

If we insist on £4 bottles of wine we'll end up with nothing but a few large mass-distributors filling the shelves with bland, obvious new world fruit juices with all the structure and complexity of Sunny Delight. Which to a great extent has happened already.

I can sincerely recommend Matthew Jukes' Wine List as an excellent buying guide for the average punter with minimal knowledge of wine like yours truly. And if you have a Waitrose or an independent merchant nearby then do give it a try rather than remain in the grip of the Asda-Tesco-Sainsbury oligopoly.

Our website is indeed about saving money and spending less - but not necessarily to the detriment of the pleasure principle. If we can spend a little less on the stuff that doesn't provide pleasure in and of itself, then maybe we can spend a little more on the stuff that does?

- Adrian Lowery, This is Money

Irene, British Gas, me and ITV

Yesterday I went to talk to an elderly lady called Irene who lives on a south London housing estate, as part of an ITV News feature on rising energy prices - which was of course sparked by the latest British Gas price-hikes.

She had been put on a pre-pay card some time ago, although she didn't seem to understand why, as previously she'd paid bills. Pre-pay runs on the same tariff as paying quarterly, which is the most expensive, with the added disadvantage that Irene finds it hard to keep a record of what she pays.

She 'could' save about 12% by switching to paying by direct debit - although if she had problems paying bills in the past, British Gas might not agree. And she 'could' save even more by switching to a cheaper supplier - if she had the means of finding out what the cheapest option would be and how to do it.

While journalists and experts like to go on about how easy it is to 'switch and save', not everyone finds it so. This is where the wonderful world of competition and choice breaks down: everyone isn't equally informed or equally able to take advantage of it.

So, is it worth Irene grasping the nettle and maybe getting a relative to help her through the process of switching? Is it worth it for any of us if the company we switch to is just going announce a price-rise in a few weeks’ time?

You can read my answer this question here.

Extracting the michael

I wandered out of the dentist's yesterday feeling a little like I'd been mugged. And a lot like the system of charging for dental care, together with the blurring of NHS and private provision, are putting us in an inexcusably vulnerable position.

At the end of my tether (and my supply of ibuprofen) with a troublesome wisdom tooth, I had resisted the compelling urge to go to work, and spent the morning calling any NHS dentist within a couple of miles of my home in south-west London. I found one who could see me in the afternoon.

As far as I was concerned the Yellow Pages advert said 'NHS patients welcome'. The receptionist did warn me that I would be charged for an 'emergency consultation' – but I know that you have to pay for NHS dental care now, so I didn't give it a second thought. I just wanted the bloody tooth whipping out.

It turned out there was too much infection to extract there and then; that I needed to take antiobiotics and return next week, when he would also do some 'deep cleaning'; and that several of my teenage-era amalgam fillings need replacing – with the 'recommended' white fillings.

Back down at reception, I'm billed £35 for the consultation and £15 for three x-rays – not too bad I thought. And indeed it probably isn't compared to most private rates – but I was being seen privately without having been told. Because I had not been registered and had requested a same-day appointment, I could not be treated as an NHS patient.

Now, according to a new NHS three-tier pricing list, £15.00 should get me 'an examination, diagnosis and preventive care, any x-rays, scaling and polishing required as well as planning for further treatment'. I'd paid £50 and hadn't even had the cleaning.

OK, if the option had been put to me of taking this NHS 'package' but waiting a week for an appointment, I would doubtless have still forked out the £50 for the same-day treatment. But the point is, the choice wasn't put to me. And neither was the system of pricing, nor even the fact that I was being seen as a private patient.

Of course, the 'deep cleaning', it turns out, is not available on the NHS, and neither are the posh white fillings. The bill starts to rack up – unless you start asking questions – and you can't help feeling the dentist is 'on the make'.

Now I'm not moaning about paying – I can just about afford it. But I'd make three points:

1. For many people on lower earnings, it must be a massive deterrent to accepting treatment.
2. This means that if you're in need of urgent medical attention, you're forced to either wait or pay – just because it's your teeth. Imagine being asked to cough up at A&E before anyone would treat your broken arm.
3. Dentists should be required to tell you clearly on what basis you will be treated and what it will cost before booking you in.

In the meantime, my colleagues can enjoy a period of relative quiet .....

- Adrian Lowery, This is Money

Welcome to our new home for blogs

So, kind reader, you may have noticed we've made a couple of changes to the Money Blog.

We hope it wasn't too unsettling for you to click unsuspectingly towards it and find a selection of our fizzogs suddenly grinning out at you - but we thought it might make the whole thing a bit more friendly if you can see exactly who it is having a good old grouse or telling you how to go about your financial affairs.

After all, when it's your father doing it, you can normally see him.

Plus we thought it would make our numerous blogs a bit more accessible if we gave you a bit of an introduction, rather than simply a rather large wodge of words, as was the case previously - and also if we highlighted the various ways you can access them by archives and categories.

On the blog homepage (thisismoney.co.uk/blog) you will find links to the most recent blogs from the team here at This is Money, and those from our friends at Money Mail and Financial Mail. If you click on any of the three logos that are used as sub-headings, you'll be taken to the archive of all the blogs by that team. Or you can use the 'Jump to' links at the top of the page to do the same thing.

Clicking on the title of the blog, as you might expect, simply takes you to that particular blog.

By clicking on an author's photo, or on their name in the 'Archive' links below, you'll be sent to his or her personal blog archive. Or if you click on their name where it appears in the blue strip, you will be sent to their biography so you can find out a little about them. You can also read our biogs by clicking on the sign-off at the end of each blog (e.g., - Adrian Lowery, This is Money below).

Finally, clicking on a subject-category in the 'Archives' links will take you to all the blogs concerning that subject.

Once you're actually in a blog (as you are now) or a blog-archive, you can also get around by using the archive links at the foot of each blog, or to the right of the page (as you can see -->).

But most importantly, we'd like to hear what you have to say about what we have to say. So make us all feel popular and wanted and post a comment.

You don't need to register or give any details. Just hit 'comment' on the relevant blog post, enter a name and email (ignore the URL boxes if you wish - quirks of blogging software!) and get writing. You have my personal pledge that we will not use or pass on the email address to anyone.

You could even tell us below what you think of our new-look Money Blog ...

- Adrian Lowery, This is Money

Don't cry for me Argentina Airlines

I accepted the seven-hour delay on my return flight from Madrid yesterday philosophically. After all, Aerolineas Argentinas announced it at the early-afternoon check-in, which meant I could check my luggage, head back for a very pleasant and sunny afternoon in central Madrid, and return less than an hour before take-off.

And despite being a regular (my colleagues would probably say 'frequent') flyer, it's been a while since I was delayed for more than half-an-hour, so my turn, I figured, was probably due ...

You might think there'd be some sort of compensation for a delay of that length - particularly as there was an EU ruling on this last year which certainly upset the likes of Ryanair and easyJet. Not really. It turns out that, because the delay was more than five hours, I could have asked for a refund on the spot, giving up my seat on that flight. I suppose this would have helped if I'd really needed to get home - but who knows what it would have cost me to book on to an earlier flight (or even if there would have been a seat available).

But if you still want to take the delayed flight, the only 'compensation' mandatory under the EU regulations is the offer of meals, refreshments, communication facilities and a hotel when necessary. The lenght of the queue at the airline desk to take up this offer made my decision to head back to the pretty plazas of the city all the easier.

Anyway, enough about me: anecdotal evidence suggests that flight delays and cancellations might reach new pea ks this year, so I'm going to look into exactly what you're entitled to, the best way to go about claiming it, and where travel insurance might help out. And what happens if, say, the delay forces you to take a taxi because you missed your last train - as nearly happened to me last night?

So if you've become a little too acquainted with an airport-lounge recently, let me know by posting a comment below.

- Adrian Lowery, This is Money

Licence to moan

A reader's query, sent to our Ask the Experts section, has stirred up a hornets' nest over TV Licensing.

We discovered that anyone accessing live television in the UK via a mobile phone or PC will be liable to a fine for not having a TV Licence - even if they don't own a TV or access BBC programmes. And this proved controversial enough for our sister organ Financial Mail to follow up the story - published on our site here.

Now that particular debate is in its infancy and will only reach some maturity as more and more people begin to access TV via the new media. But it's a perfect opportunity for a good old national whinge about the Licence Fee - after all it would be rude to let a week go by without laying into the BBC and its indefensible funding system.

So let's get the purple ink out and get it over with. 'What does the BBC do with all our money!? ... I hardly watch it ... it's full of adverts anyway ... too many repeats ... no sports coverage ... too much sport ... too populist ... not populist enough ... too elitist ... too dumbed-down ... it's run by the government ... it hates the government ... right-wing bias ... left-wing bias ... Alan Titchmarsh ...' (OK, the last one's a fair point.)

It is a bewildering mystery to me how anyone can begrudge paying £126 a year for what we get from the BBC.

1. BBC programming is of consistently higher quality than any other broadcaster in Britain and therefore arguably in the world. The easy response is that this is a matter of subjectivity or taste, but I think some things ARE better than others.

Puccini is better than Lloyd-Webber, Rembrandt is better than Rolf Harris, cricket is better than rounders ... Bleak House IS better than Big Brother. There is surely nothing more appalling and moribund than settling for the lowest common denominator 'because people enjoy it' at the cost of creating and distributing something that inspires or challenges or moves or makes people think (god forbid!).

OK, far from every BBC prog is inspiring, challenging, gripping, enriching, moving, hilarious, democratic, thought-provoking - but even if you think its standards have dropped or changed in recent years, that is only in line the rest of the media's output. It still does a damn-sight better job than any other channel.

2. You can't expect to watch programmes without adverts and not pay for it. Sky: you pay for it AND it's full of adverts. And - except for football - it's not very good really is it?

3. BBC Radio: what, you don't listen to it? Can I suggest a rethink then - and a digital radio too. With Radio's 1 to 7 there is frankly too much great stuff even for a radio addict like me to listen to. At the birth of television programming, the radio old guard at the BBC thought it would never take off because you had to be sat still in front of it - you couldn't do other things while tuning in. It seems they underestimated people's love for gawping from their couches ...

4. BBC World Service: the greatest public service broadcaster in the world, listened to by hundreds of millions, for many their only reliable source of news, a beacon of information and knowledge. For me, 'From Our Own Correspondent' is worth the Licence Fee alone. I once listened to Blackburn Rovers beat Arsenal 2-0 on my shortwave radio (a constant companion during a year's travelling) in the remote village of Bundi in Rajasthan - well, the second half anyway. You don't get that with Channel 5.

5. The new digital TV stations: There's lots of great stuff on these and they're free for pete's sake - unless you count the outrageous expenditure of £40 on a Freeview box.

6. The website: one of the best on the internet. Except for the finance and money section, which is of course rubbish.

I put it to you that when it comes to the BBC we, as a nation of penny-pinching moaners, do not know we are born.

- Adrian Lowery, This is Money

Useful links:

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Pillar-to-post for an HSBC card

Happy new year to all our Money readers out there - a new year which will have got off to a predictably taxing start if, as I did, you applied for the HSBC credit card just before Christmas. This is one of the top balance transfer cards at the moment, with nine months at 0% with no fee for the transfer (and the 0% on purchases also).

I began my quest in late November by filling out one of those 'You have already been approved' forms that get flung at HSBC customers on a monthly basis (for I have the privilege of banking with the World's Not Very Local Bank). Ten days later I received the response that the date on that particular offer had expired some days earlier and that I could make a regular application, by mail or online.

I received a letter about ten days after my online application stating that I had been approved, enclosing the contract for signature and return. Now one might think that the card was now signed, sealed and delivered. But I return to London after the Xmas break to find a curtly uninformative letter on the doormat from 'Customer services manager Marie Curtis', asking me to 'call her' before my application could be approved.

Now, you might think that, as I'm a customer of 17 years and trying to obtain another of their products (- why, god only knows), if there's some little snaggle in the process, they might call me. But let's get back to reality ....

It should come as no great surprise that Ms Curtis did not enclose her direct line to call 'her' on. 'Her' of course means 'the HSBC credit card customer services line'. On the morning of Monday 2 January, I was on hold for 25 minutes before hanging up. The sound of a chimp banging on a toy piano in a lock-up garage had started to grate.

On the afternoon of the same day, I flipped my mobile to loudspeaker and got on with some chores as the holding musak delivered its tinny torture for a further 35 minutes, before I surrendered again.

And what arrived on the doormat this morning? 'You have been approved for the HSBC credit card. Simply sign and return ...'.

Today I'm going to try again, so watch this space folks ...

- Adrian, This is Money

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