Having coffee and a cheese scone at Crimples, Harrogate, while the car is charging. Pleasant but as usual the drink and food arrived separately and the hot scone was almost cold by the time the coffee arrived.
Must throw out these tights, just noticed a hole in the right thigh, it's about three centimetre in diameter!
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Charging again because I want to be able to drive around at my destination over the next week without having to drive 20 miles each way to charge.
Doing it at the Scotch Corner Holiday Inn. Very irritating, had to register the car at reception. Never had to do that before. Loads of signs threatening 100 pound fines for non-compliance. That's something I only see in the UK too.
@ninalanyon That registration thing might only be that company's. I wonder why they do it, and if they have a genuine legal right to threaten big fines even though your car is on their property.
@ArishMell I have no idea if they could make it stick. But I knuckle under like most people because I don't want to risk the hassle. I suspect that they do it as a way of getting you into the lobby in the hope that you will buy a cup of coffee; there is another notice saying that coffee is at a discount for Tesla drivers. The UK seems to be the only country that has this threatening behaviour. I stop at a Van Der Ball hotel to charge in The Netherlands and there are no signs at all.
@ninalanyon I don't how widespread that is but Holiday Inn is a very large firm of rather confusing ownership (British? American? I think it was Dubai owned at one time!) so can afford to turn very nasty if it wants.
We've a lot of trouble with car-parking companies, I do know that. Rip-off merchants only just within the law!
@ArishMell Oops silly autocorrect: Van Der Ball should be Van Der Valk of course. Someone else told me that Holiday Inn is also a franchise so many of the hotels are branded Holiday Inn but owned and run by someone else. No idea if it's true.
@ninalanyon I tried to find out but Google have made research via itself into a hellish morass of advertisements rather than straightforwards facts. Nevertheless, from what I could find it seems Holiday Inns is a trading-name used by its owning company, and seem to be run directly, not as a franchise.
(Trading or brand names are handy for fooling people into believing they are seeing lots of individual companies. The supermarkets have been doing that for years. Now, at least 8 of the rail passenger-service franchises around the UK, and notionally the future HS2 services, are owned by the First Group, which uses badge-names and liveries to hide the fact. Yet is displays the First name and badge on its buses.)
It is not illegal though because it is not actually lying.
It is naming the trade-marked branch of the company - the company itself probably [i]is[/i] named but in the small print, not necessarily openly proclaiming something like, "[b]ACME[/b], proud to be part of the Thury Group".
Only most customers don't ask awkward questions...
I encountered something like this when travelling by train from Bristol to Leeds, using the so-called [i]Cross-Country Railways[/i]. A map in the coach vestibule, showing that company's routes highlighted in the network generally, revealed in its small-print footnote that CCR is only a brand used by [i]Deutsche Bahn Schenker[/i], part of the German state-owned railways organisation.
Effectively I was travelling across England on UK-owned rails, but in a train operated by the German state!
This led to my digging further to learn that Great Western Railways, South-Eastern Railways, Docklands Light Railway and several other supposedly separate service franchises are all merely First Group badges. And that DBS operates most of the UK's rail goods services and oddly, the steam-hauled charter "specials".
(PC - want to but shares in First? You'd be richer than me, at around £100 a share!)
@ninalanyon well, yes, sort of! The lines, stations and signalling etc are still state-owned by the services are run by private companies renting track access. They also hire the rolling-stock. So all told, a mess!
Prior to being nationalised into British Railways in 1948, I think it was, the railways were all privately-owned, in four huge conglomerates enforced by a government in the 1930s "Grouping" the many former separate companies. The big difference between them and indeed BR, and the present situation, was that they were self-contained. The "Big Four" and BR did use some contractors but generally they built, maintained and operated all their own locomotives, rolling-stock, track, signals, buildings, etc. themselves. It wasn't all perfect, nothing is, and it was desperately labour-intensive with working conditions that could be physically grim; but generally it worked well. No profits going off abroad. No importing trains we were perfectly capable of building in the country that invented the concept.
Oh, and anyone buying their electricity from EDF is propping up La Replique. Electricite de France (apologies for the missing accents) is owned by that country.
My water and drainage services are courtesy of a Malaysian hotels-developer and cement manufacturing group.
Chelsea FC has just been flogged off to some rich American after some years as the property of some rich Russian, though at least he did seem actually to be a fan of English football. Unlike the Wall Street spivs who wanted to cherry-pick several top-flight European and English football "clubs" and corall them in a hermetic pseudo-league, until the fans rightly told them to get lost.
Not far from me is a factory making that plaything of the "filthy-rich capitalist pig", the big luxury cruising boat. Oh the irony - after being in the hands of a bunch of Irish money-traders it now belongs to a nominal-company in... the hard-line Communist, People's Republic of China.
