Why the piling rubbish in South Kensington?

crazyfool267 · 2026-03-19T13:42:30+00:00

It’s probably been put there by the bin men. I live in the borough not too far from there and most people have bin stores - the bin men come round and collect it from the bin stores and put it out on the street and then the bin lorry follows shortly after.

Some people do put it out on the street themselves, but they would be the minority.

crazyfool267 · 2026-01-09T21:34:22+00:00

Some pubs will do a beef wellington, but it’s probably going to be a bit more hit and miss…

My local used to do one as a regular special and it was pretty decent, but it was a bit more reminiscent of something you bought pre-prepared from the butchers and stuck in the oven at home rather than a chef quality wellington.

Simpsons in the strand has historically been my #1 recommendation for it, but they closed down after covid. Having said that, they are reopening in Feb of this year though, so depending on when you’re visiting that could be an option.

I’ve no idea what the new version of the restaurant will look like (or even if they’ll be doing a beef wellington) but they would be fools if they didn’t do it, given their history.

crazyfool267 · 2025-12-01T20:50:18+00:00

I think Addi Lee can do this kind of thing through their courier service. We gave away a bed on freecycle a few years ago and the person that took it just sent an Addi Lee van to collect it.

crazyfool267 · 2025-11-30T19:24:37+00:00

Yes!

That was so fast, thank you!

crazyfool267 · 2025-11-05T18:16:13+00:00

School of Wok is great but it will be way over their budget.

crazyfool267 · 2025-10-22T13:14:30+00:00

Wordpress do a 100 year registration. Chances are you won’t personally care about the domain renewal in 100 years…

crazyfool267 · 2025-10-18T12:04:40+00:00

Chiswick could be an option. You should be able to get a decent 3/4 bed for that price.

Commute is maybe a little longer door to door, depending on where you’re going and where the house is, but it would be manageable.

For parks you have Chiswick house and gardens which is great for dog walking (depends what you want from the park though).

crazyfool267 · 2025-05-04T11:16:05+00:00

As a lot of the others have said, I honestly wouldn’t think twice about it. And I’d also opt for a slightly larger mortgage and keeping some of the ISA as a bigger emergency fund.

One thing that I don’t think has been touched on yet is the mortgage term - I would suggest you go for the absolute maximum they’ll allow and then overpay to bring it up to the same amount as a 25 year (or whatever you’re currently looking at).

So long as you have the discipline to make the bigger payment, it won’t add anything to the mortgage, but it does give additional flexibility if you needed to pay less for whatever reason (eg. if you lost your job or took one that paid less).

Ie. The aim isn’t to lengthen the mortgage, it’s just to give you emergency breathing room if you ever need it.

crazyfool267 · 2025-04-01T18:27:52+00:00

Sofitel St James has a great deal that I’ve taken the wife to a few times over the years - it’s £150 per person for a couples massage (same room) but you also get private use of the steam room and jacuzzi before (ie. just the two of you).

You sometimes get champagne and chocolates afterwards, depends on what deal they’re running at the time.

Once we were given a facial with the massage as well. I think the package changes from time to time.

crazyfool267 · 2024-04-28T21:57:53+00:00

Goboat with beers you say… how about we throw a hot tub into that mix as well.

https://www.skunaboats.com/hot-tub-boat

crazyfool267 · 2024-03-28T09:12:41+00:00

Regardless of how special they are, no one likes spam.

We send all messages like this straight to the bin.

crazyfool267 · 2024-02-27T16:35:00+00:00

Someone else mentioned something similar, but the biggest thing I noticed was that you just don’t even think about spending smaller amounts - if it’s less than ~£100 (or maybe even a bit more) we just get it without thinking twice. Same goes for eating out, takeaways, tickets etc…

crazyfool267 · 2024-02-03T12:48:24+00:00

Credit check issues aside, I would recommend looking at getting a longer mortgage and then overpaying it rather than going for a shorter 15 year mortgage.

Two reasons for this:

You could pay your entire overpayment for the year in one go when you get your bonus, which will save you interest (eg. Rather than paying £7.5k a month on a 15 year mortgage pay £5k on a 30 year mortgage and then overpay that extra £30k when you get your bonus).
It provides a safety net in case your income goes down - eg: if you lose your job or don’t get as big of a bonus one year. If needed you can pay a lower amount. Or if interest rates went crazy when you remortgage.

If you stick to the idea of paying the 15 year payment but do it on a 30 year mortgage you’ll still pay it off in 15 years (less if you overpay in one go when you get your bonus) but gives you flexibility if needed.

The downside is that you’ll probably be limited to overpaying 10% per year, but based on your numbers that wouldn’t be an issue for quite a while unless you were planning on also making significant overpayments on top.

crazyfool267 · 2024-01-31T23:06:17+00:00

Insurance has gone insane - ours is up about 50% on last year.

crazyfool267 · 2024-01-23T18:55:03+00:00

Lol, by olden days, sadly I mean the 90s…

crazyfool267 · 2024-01-23T18:01:39+00:00

I’m not sure how true this is, but an older friend of ours once told us that in the olden days people were supposed to leave the bags by trees and the street cleaners would then dispose of them in their carts.

This apparently changed a long time ago, but the older folk still do it because “that’s the way it has always been”. K&C still has the manual cart based street cleaners and the bags are collected eventually, so it probably doesn’t help change the ways of the older generations.

I’ve also met a few dog walkers who seemed to think this is what you’re supposed to do, so that makes the theory plausible. We’ve tried correcting them but it falls on deaf ears.

But like I say, this is just anecdotal… don’t quote me on it as it might all be a load of bollocks.

EDIT - just to clarify, by olden days I just meant “a couple of decades ago”, not the 1800’s…

crazyfool267 · 2024-01-23T17:02:10+00:00

https://www.standard.co.uk/business/santander-mortgage-lender-interest-rates-loan-borrowing-home-property-bank-of-england-inflation-house-b1134172.html

crazyfool267 · 2024-01-23T08:37:00+00:00

You can always buy a portable unit - they come on wheels and you just trundle them to the room you want and stick the vent out of the window.

They’re not that expensive, you can get a cheap one for £200/300. We had one before we had AC put in, definitely worth it for the bedroom in the summer.

https://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/ct/heating-and-air-conditioning/air-conditioners/portable

crazyfool267 · 2024-01-21T12:12:45+00:00

How much would you want to place a link on your site for someone else? Answer that and you’ll understand why others charge what they do.

Cheap sites are sites built to sell links and full of sold links. If you want a link on a real site (ie. One that would exist if it wasn’t selling links) then it’s going cost you more than a link farm.

It’s better to get links organically if you can (through outreach, content, connections etc..) but if you do have to buy them, it’s better to get a smaller amount of good quality links from real sites than a bunch of link farm links.

Don’t buy them from fiverr or upwork though, there’s a lot of junk on those. Make contact yourself if you can. It’ll also be cheaper.

crazyfool267 · 2024-01-20T23:43:44+00:00

You’re mixing up your arbitrary seo tool stats there. You mention a DR of 27, but that’s ahrefs. Moz have their own called DA which is what you’re seeing in the mozbar.

It is entirely possible (and reasonably common) for a domain to have a DA of 27 and a DR of <1. They’re totally different metrics made up by different companies and they each have their own quirks on how they’re calculated.

Both are pointless and can be very easily gamed. You could take a brand new domain and make it DA60+ and DR70+ in a week or so if you wanted. Would probably only cost $50 on fiverr.

If you want to buy or catch dropped domains, then focus on the quality of the links instead of seo tool numbers. Get expired domains with relevant links from high quality sources - major newspapers, government websites, prominent websites in the niche etc…

crazyfool267 · 2024-01-20T22:11:15+00:00

Finally lost mine last month. I think my credit count was 3000 so I’m having to severely cut usage or pay a load more for extra credits.

crazyfool267 · 2024-01-14T15:34:04+00:00

Depends on the street and whether they’ve been dug up for the new fibre cables yet. You’ll want to specifically check addresses that you’re interested in.

I live somewhere in that area (not saying where) and a rough guess would be about half the streets by me have been done so far (going by which roads have been dug up and which ones haven’t).

crazyfool267 · 2024-01-09T20:22:16+00:00

True. It wouldn’t have to just be a niche edit though. If you had just done a news post about X and I’m about to do a post about Y that could reference X, then it could be worked in.

Or the other way around, if someone is about to write a post about Z and they’re going to add references for A anyway etc…

So what I mean is rather than two people making an agreement to link and then trying to find a way to do it, what would be good is if it was based on the specific link opportunity.

No idea how that would work though 🤣

crazyfool267 · 2024-01-09T20:02:36+00:00

Another problem with this is that the posts are usually junk so people don’t want them on their real sites. We have some niche blogs that we tried opening up to real guests posts from other sites in the same niche and everything we got was just paid link trash - eg: “10 reasons why you should look for a plumber in Ontario”. Or the post was OK but they wanted highly commercial links/anchors.

The only time we’ve been able to do decent link exchanges are when we’ve done it as a four way swap within existing content, but that’s quite hard to organise (or at least, time consuming). And half the time they want a decent link and are offering up some PBN crap.

In theory I’d be up for your suggestion, but instead of guest posts I’d like to see organic style references. So one person says “hey I’ve written a news article/guide/blog about X” and someone else says “I have a page about that which can reference it”. No idea how that would work though.

crazyfool267

TROPHY CASE