Consuming Interest
On the Move
By LESLIE ADRIAN THE business of moving house seems to be full of dangers, judging by the correspondence I have had recently. A reader who had to move house from Manchester to High Wycombe (just under 200 miles) got five esti- mates for the removal of the belongings of a family of six and found that they varied from £105 to £48. I ant grateful to the many other readers who have written to give details of their experiences.
Estimates do seem to vary a good deal and there are satisfactory and unsatisfactory reasons why this should be so (as one reader points out, it would also be highly suspicious if all estimates turned out to be the same or even very similar). The solution to this part of the problem is to get estimates from as many firms, small and large, as you conveniently can and don't let anyone charge you for giving an estimate.
One of the reasons why costs vary so much is that removals can be and often are from, say, Norwich to Aberystwyth rather than from Man- chester to London. The removers will be very lucky indeed if they can be sure of a return load in the first case, whereas they may be able to arrange for one in the second because it is a 'trunk route.' If you can so arrange your date of moving that your contractor can be sure of a return load you will find that the cost will be lower than it would otherwise be. It is for this reason that some firms will quote two estimates, one if you have to move on a given date, which means a special journey for them, and another it you are prepared to move at their convenience rather than your own.
Small firms may well offer lower estimates than large firms, but this can be because they cut their overheads by carrying little if any in- surance. If they damage anything, you may find it very difficult to make them pay for it.
The things you will want of a removal service arc these: safe packing and unpacking; no damage to the goods in transit and no damage to the house at either end of the journey; punctu- ality, since the length of time it takes to do the job to some extent affects the cost; and no difference between the estimate and the actual cost. Generally you cannot find out in advance whether any one firm has all or any of these qualifications and the most you can do'is to go on the recommendations of other people. Firms which have been recommended by correspon- dents are Messrs. W. Boote of Elizabeth Street, Liverpool 3 (for shipment abroad, too); Elloway & Co., 19 Salusbury Road, NW6, who have a foreman with the happy name of Mr. Siripp and who did an excellent job for one reader 'even to preserving the six eggs which were overloaded in the door tray of the refrigerator'; John Lewis of Oxford Street; Joseph May of 31 Whitfield Street, WI; and Baker's of Tunnel Road, Liverpool. Several readers said that Pickford's gave far higher estimates than other firms, though Pick- ford's themselves deny this.
A point or two to watch: you may be tempted to do some pre-packing yourself in the hope that you will reduce the time on the job and so cut costs. This may work if you arc packing books, for example, but I advise strongly against your trying it with anything that damages easily. No removal firm will take responsibility for anything you pack yourself. After all, you might have broken that piece of Dresden before you packed it and, anyway, plenty of people are fairly ham-handed at this sort of thing. Do check in advance whether the removers want cash on delivery. Some do, most don't and it may be a nuisance if they do.
- When you have made an arrangement with a remover, ask for (if you are not offered) a leaflet which the removers' Association has prepared. It gives plenty of sensible advice about how you should prepare for the arriyal of the removal van. When the removal men arrive 1 suggest you keep a kettle handy, see that it is packed last, and ply them with cups of tea.
Have you ever gone through the crisis in a child's life when he loses his favourite teddy bear? No amount of new teddy bears will console him. Anything else he will regard as a spurious substitute. The Otway Toy Shop (41 Knights- bridge, SW1, BEL 8159) may be able to help. They will do their best to copy anything. Obviously, a photograph, if you happen to have one, would help enormously but they'll have a go if you will only describe the lost bear or what- ever as accurately as you can., Their best effort so far was When they made a copy of a live pet which a little girl had to leave at home when she went away to boarding school.
1 went out the other afternoon to see a friend off to America from London Airport, North. Is there nothing that can be done to make waiting a little more tolerable in this dump? To begin with, there was nowhere to sit, the few benches being occupied (what happens when planes are delayed I do not care to think). Eventually we found some unoccupied chairs in a tiny lounge, if you could call it that, beside the restaurant, between the terrace and the Gents; every time a door opened we were treated to a freezing or an odorous draught (I thought there was a law against lavatories in public places of this kind opening directly on to rooms where people are congregated; evidently not). And the loudspeaker system did not reach this lounge. The final annoyance was when my friend, an American, asked for some coffee. There was no coffee. I would suggest to the omniscient Mr. Forte that if London Airport North departure lounge does not attract sufficient trade to justify installing two coffee machines, the least he can do is em- ploy assistants who can make the stuff (it is not really all that much more difficult to brew up than tea); or, failing that, have some Nescald handy. It could hardly taste worse, anyway, than the stuff provided in the main building.
Reporting on credit cards some time ago 1 warned against their use in restaurants, for example, on the grounds that they tend to en- courage expense account spending and so can spoil restaurants for peqple who want value for money. Credit cards do, of course, have their legitimate uses too and one which can't spoil the market for anyone else and can be a simple con- venience is the new GPO credit card. Now that we have to find four pennies to make a local telephone call what could be more convenient than a credit card which allows you to make telephone calls and send telegrams from any tele- phone to anywhere in the world? You can also us d the system to' call home from fifty-one countries abroad. To get a credit card, call your telephone manager. The operator will give you his number.
The only complaints I have about the system are, first, that there should be a charge for it (5s. a quarter, though this does allow you as many cards as you want for your staff and family) and, secondly, that not all members of the GPO staff by a long way, I find, now about the service. If the GPO wants us to use the telephone more often, its staff should be able to give us all the information we need about the telephone service —and credit cards should be free.
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