The NIA

Why is there always a fly in the ointment? My wife and daughter are going to the NIA on Saturday, which is nice. The tickets arrived today and we were surprised to see the warning "People around you may stand!" Notice it doesn't say that my wife and daughter may stand, but I guess that's the implication. The problem is that my daughter is 5 and won't be able to see much if an adult stands up in front of her, and my wife is unable to stand for prolonged periods.

So I rang the NIA, who immediately and rather brusquely transferred me to the ticket agent. The young lady told me that in her experience people don't stand so there shouldn't be a problem.

My questions are, if someone does stand in front of my wife and daughter, what can they do about it? And why is the NIA allowing standing on the upper tier?

Plonk

Sorry for being such a cheapskate, but having got use to paying £1 a bottle for wine when I lived in Hungary, I don't like paying more than £4 a bottle in England. Good news, then, that Tesco have a not-bad Chilean cab sav on offer at under a threer. Shame I'm not a middle-class pisshead.

Nescafe

Last time we ran out of instant coffee, my wife bought Nescafe. All I can say is, it's a triumph of marketing over taste. Terrible stuff.

The OJ paradox

Judging by Aldi and Tesco, there seems to be a trend to having from-concentrate fruit juices in the fridges and not-from-concentrates (NFCs) on the open (a.k.a "ambient") shelves. I quite like Aldi's 750 ml NFCs, and it's good that they don't take up fridge space at home until they're opened. Tesco have started stocking Eager ambient NFCs - I've tried the grapefruit and I'm not that keen.

But what's with stacking the cheapo juices in the chiller cabinets? It must just be to mislead the punters into thinking they're getting something they're not.

Tesco Tuscan Bean Soup

☼ I can't believe how much they're expecting us to pay for soup these days - more than 80p a can! I'm loath to buy any at that price, but I noticed that Tesco sell their Lighter Choices soups for half that, and this variety is nice 'n' spicy. (I had a similar experience to this reviewer: a shopper put half a dozen tins of it in her trolley while I was contemplating my selection...)

GranArom coffee

☼ At £1.35 a jar (from Aldi), not bad at all.

Alliance and Leicester

I opened an Alliance and Leicester account last year, with a view to switching from First Direct, and I've been reasonably satisfied, but not satisfied enough to cancel my First Direct account!

The most unsatisfactory thing about A&L is the amount of time they take to deal with complaints. The complaint I made last summer still hasn't been resolved! Part of the complaint relates to something that would be funny if it wan't so inconvenient.

On 13 April last year I phoned A&L to make a payment to my A&L credit card account. But when my next bill came the payment hadn't gone through. Within a few weeks my credit card account was suspended (and I've never been able to get the suspension lifted!) The penny (or I should say the £524) finally dropped last month, when I got a credit card bill stating I was £524 in credit. The guy I spoke to last year had put the transaction through for 13 April 2008!