Ok done with the game now on to the subject of fish ... loch fyne by name loch not so fyne by nature.

Having waited in anticipation for a meal for 3 we went for the much advertised daily specials .Daily left overs more like.After an acceptable starter of fishcakes and  calamari,the childrens meal didn't arrive as promised.

Eventually after prompting a goujon of fish (more like a stumpy thumb) with pre salted chips arrived.SaLTY but still prepared to give the benefit of the doubt.Maybe an enthusiatic chef with a heart condition trying to get rid of all the spare salt by hiding it in childrens chips. 

......Forgot to mention .! It was waitress changeover time as we were informed , so maybe that excuses our problems.

Then having emptied the bread basket,woo hoo a surf and turf !A  medium steak (i.e no blood) arrived loking like it had done an olympic opening ceremony and got stuck in the flame with a few overdone soggy nasty shrimps  in shells.(£18)

Then a lovely (or so you might think) lemon sole .I think they had mis spelt the menu and it was really a melon sloe with extra spiky bones and a few nasty bruises on his way to the oven.(£18)

Luckily our manager Sarah ...(aka yts trainee) was prepared  to give us some useful antidotes to our problem,so we wouldn't feel scared to visit again.

The options;

.....Coffee on the house

...Desserts ,

or money back.

I ask you dear readers ,

Which one do you think we chose! 

Under the microscope I thought the creature bore a a slight resemblance to Tesco CEO, Sir Terry Leahy, but it may have been a trick of the light. Gosh, I hope he's not doing anything despicable on the food.

The message is simple. It's a girls product. Guys don't eat it. I am a guy, I shouldn't eat Activia yogurt. I wrote to Danone for clarity. A spokeswoman from the UK Danone Careline responded to my email saying it was "fine for men as well". Rather than being assured, the reply made me more apprehensive as it read more like "you shouldn't have any side effects you freak".

I have dropped Activia from my shopping list since seeing the advert. The email did not attempt to get it back on there. I guess men eating Activia is something they can't be seen to condone. If you are male and eat Activia consult a specialist, you need help.

The response from Danone:

Good afternoon

Thank you for your e-mail. Activia is fine for men as well as women.

The core target audience for Activia is women aged 30-45+. This is why we advertise with women only, around this age. We are aware that men also consume Activia, but understand this is low compared to the number of female consumers; hence our advertising is targeted at women. We have not ruled out men in advertising and this is something we may do in the future.

If you don't upgrade your phones you're meant to get a discount. I've never had one. Occassionally my monthly bills top a £100. Am I on the right plan? Who knows, all this marketing gibberish about Dolphins, Racoons and Panthers is just too confusing.

In any case, the issue is international calls which are normally out of plan and where the Mobile companies rake it in.

If I'm away in Cork it's 38pence a minute to make a call, 19pence a minute to receive a call and 25pence to send a text message. From the UK I call Irish mobiles and at the end of every month I am left with unused minutes and unused texts which only roll over a month. Orange keep the rest.

The good news, I found a way to do it for free. All I get charged is a local rate call which gets swallowed up in the unused minutes I lose every month. Mobiles in all the countries listed below can be called for free...

Ireland, USA, Autralia, South Africa, Canada, Belgium, China, France, Spain, Argentina, Austria, Bahrain, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Poland, Romania, Slovnia, Skovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK

The company doing this are called Rebtel. With a name like this they should come from Cork, but they don't. They're based in Stockholm, and it's easy to get started.

Next thing I need to find is how to make free or very low costs txts, anyone out there in Neverland know the answer?

I decided to carry out a little analysis of my bills to see if I was getting the best value for money from the tarriff that I was on. When I was reviewing the data that I could get my hands on from Vodafones website I noticed that I was calling and continue to call 1890 numbers.

1890 numbers are shown on many advertisements and documentation to be low cost numbers, well they are not if you use your mobile.

My tarriff gives me a monthly allowance of 200 minutes of calls to any network and landlines in Ireland, and I find it hard to meet this on a monthly basis, and usually have minutes carried foward to the next month, yet I still get charged for calls that I have made to 1890 numbers at 25c per minute, which does'nt meet my defination of cheap or low cost.

When I called Vodafone to ask why this is the case, "Its always been like that" was the response, I asked could it be ascertained why 1890 numbers are not part of my monthly commitment? "I'll need to find out and get back to you" I'm still waiting, and have a feeling will be waiting for sometime to come.

Another thing I noticed that Companies and Government Agencies, such as the Revenue Commissioners, print these numbers so that you can contact them cheaply, but they never print an alternative number ie an ordinary landline number, which I can assure you is part of your monthly flat charge and you won't be charged extra.

One would have thought that 1890 would be part of "any network" but it would appear to be apart of "some other network".

www.charlesletterman.com

So what's the problem? They're animals! There are plenty of starving people in Africa who'd be happy to eat them! This probably isn't a response you'd expect, but would it be more acceptable if I was talking about chickens?

They live for thirty nine days, never see natural light, constantly feed to make their commercial weight, are overcrowded, get painful lesions on their legs from sitting in their own faeces ("hock burns"), and are starved for eight hours on their last day to have a clean gut before ending up on our shelves in Tesco at two for a fiver.

This is the story Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been describing on Channel 4 this week as he tried to convert  Axminster into Britain's first free range town. His experimental chicken farm contrasted differences in welfare, and in taste, between factory reared and free range. The free range chickens, he said, are "out here in the grass, doing what chickens want to do."

I would like to think, and I'm probably in the majority,  the surviving horses in Amersham would have a similar fate and were free to run around a field, but when it comes to chickens people just don't seem to feel the same. They're chickens, they'll buy two for a fiver.

Having been saturated with the TV advert I stopped in front of them in Tesco only to be perplexed as to why there is a bag of chicken which  tastes like Chinese spare ribs. Are Mattesson set to expand the range into the rest of the crisp flavours so that we can eat chicken that tastes like beef or prawn or bacon?

What happened to eating an apple or dunking a digestive?

This morning I had the good fortune to collect a colleague from a flight from Franfurt so I arrived at the airport with about 30minutes to spare. The intention being 'have a coffee and a sandwich'. More like have a brew of insipid Latte and a semi frozen semi soggy concockion of rubber textured smoked ham, wilted lettuce, some slices of tomato that a Parma Ham carver would have been proud of they were so thin and what was suppose to be butter on the bread.

Well for starters, I do understand that food must be kept in a refridgerator so yes it should be cold, but this sandwich was so cold there was no give in the bread, it had the consistency of soggy cardboard (probably attempted to butter the bread straight from the freezer ?) and tased as tasteless also, not that I'm given to eat cardboard (soggy or otherwise) on a regular basis that I should be able to make a comparisson, but I do know these things. I opened one side of the sandwich No Butter or even spread or mayo on board. Then I looked at the wilted lettuce the rubber ham and the practically non existant tomato. I hesitantly took a bite - well I was hungry !!!!.

As my body tried to digest the offering , I tried another bite to see if it got any better NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. So there was €4.95 into the bin. I learned a long time ago no point complaining to the girls working in the coffee shop in DA, they tell you the sandwichs are bought in ready prepared and packed and then their english isn't quiet good enough to carry on a heated argument and you get more frustrated and the old blood pressure rises. So back to the counter I goes, I'll have a scone and some butter and jam. Hhhmmmmmmmmmmmm. The scone could be bounced off the wall it was that hard. Whats the f**king point, your better off starving.

Ok I said the coffee was insipid latte, I probably should stick to the black coffee like Blacksheep is doing, but hell a nice hot latte is nice every now and again.

So here we go again, DAA, please get the resturants to do something about the quality of their produce.

1. Previous Balance €147.34, the second invoice that I received, To be fair to me I did call them to ask which bill I was to pay, the response "Vivaldi".

After that there is no point in detailing the finer points as it only contains shite

So to summise never have your bills paid by Direct Debit....

Still no news on my invoice for all the calls that I made during the Dec. so when they pay me I'll pay them, with a bit of luck they'll sue me, as I have all my bits, somehow I d'ont think they have.

When I was putting sugar into my coffee I noticed a lot of well dressed people lounging about in Starbucks chairs reading newspapers or working on laptops. I began to muse does anybody work in offices anymore, or has it come to pass that Starbucks is now the preferred office workspace in the world?. Another thing struck me why is the coffee in Starbucks 80c more expensive that all other convience stores, you dont get served any quicker, and the coffee does'nt taste any different, well I only drink black coffee, so I dont know about the sexy coffees, but feel free to have your say.

This to me is marketing gone mad, we are systematically being homogenised by these companies, Apple with their "I mac, I'm PC" campaign to if you want to be sexy you'd better buy this coffee. Well I for one will never go into Starbucks again I am happy to go into an ordinary shop and fill my own cup with coffee, walk to the checkout, say good morning to the shop assistant, pay for my coffee, and leave, I have a life to live.............................

Now if like me (and before someone suggests it I am NOT a Green Nut), I am concerned for our environment and alos the future of my childrena nd grandchildren and their children and so on.

Whne the wife an I go shopping to one of the above named stores we invaribly return with at least 1 of these bottles if not 2. and both with spray triggers. What have the empty ones got More f**king triggers!. What do I put in my recycle bin ?. I rinse out teh bottle and put it in, the trigger I'm afraid goes in the land fill waste bin because it is not acceptable recycleable rubbish.

Why of Why cant the manufacturers offer 'Refills'- An Eco Friendly Solution for thier product. We can reuse our existing trigger, and when the spring is eventually worn out we can buy a new bottle with a trigger on it. Think what else, we could save ourselves a few cent on expenditure - probably not a lot. I would prefer to pay the current price and have the savings passed on into researching more biodegradeable containers for the detergents.

One fella stands outside a pub and screams in a high pitched tone for 1 minute to attract his buddies to the pub. What is it about? Occasionally I drink budweiser, but from now on I will never touch the stuff. This ad is utterly stupid, I hate it! hate it hate it hate it!