Around New Year, I opened a pot of Rachel's Organic Rhubarb yoghurt. I was just about to tuck into it, when I noticed something on the top of it. I fished it out and ran it under the tap. It clearly wasn't the normal yoghurty goodness I was expecting!

I sent the offending article to Rachel's. They gave an interim response in a couple of weeks, but then took until the 6th March to properly respond (and hand over £10 of vouchers). Read on for the details, but do you think a three month response is adequate? I mean, what if there was some problem that would suggest the issue wasn't related to a single pot?

When I first fished the item out of the yogurt, it smelled really bad, and in my (uneducated) opinion, it looked like the fabric bit of a round plaster (complete with manky mark in the middle).

Rachel's sent the item to a laboratory for testing (South Wales Food Laboratory Ltd). Their report says it's made of something cellular, so is organic, and they even suggest it is derived from rhubarb.

As regular readers know, "I'm not one to gossip", but is it possible I was right, and Rachel's substituted the plaster for some by-product so that it'd pass the lab tests? I dunno, I just wish I'd kept half of it.

So the moral of the story folks is: If you find something in a food product you don't think should be there, keep some of it but tell the manufacturer.

I've been a Rachel's customer for a number of years, and have enjoyed their products a lot. They're all organic, they're all sourced sensibly, and they seem to have a desire "to the nice" (like when they did the 'cows for Africa' appeal). However, I have to say I feel unsatisfied by this. I've agonised over even blogging it, because this may be construed as 'bad press', and frankly, we need more companies like Rachel's Organic. But I still don't feel 100% about them, and haven't bought any of their products since (not now Yeo Valley and others are on the scene ;-)

What do you think? Am I overreacting? Or since this is 'food with priciple', should I stand on principle and avoid them? Is this even a 'principle' issue? Perhaps it's more of a 'yeuck' issue, I mean lots of people don't eat (insert name of fast-food restaurant here) because of the way their food is prepared and produced. I still don't know, but my (emotional?) response has been (so far) to avoid them.

I have to move at the end of the week. For some reason, BT can't get the line switched on at the new place without an engineer, who won't arrive until the 31st March. In other words, Coofer Cat will be down for a week, starting this saturday morning, through to Friday 31st March, sometime in the afternoon.

Aside from downing my server, I'm a little apprehensive about not having Internet access at home for a week. Having no phone will be a bit weird too (although I've still got my mobile, of course).

Update 26/3: We've had a stay of execution. The connection's still up at my old place, so I've left the server there until tomorrow night when I have to hand the keys back. Also, I seem to be scabbing 'net access off one of my neighbours ;-)

Some bloke (a long way out of his box, munching take-away chicken) by the supermarket just asked me this. Not really my cup of tea, how about yours?

I'm moving house. My landlord sold the flat I'm in a while back, so I ended up on two months notice. I've spent the last few days trying to find a new place. The search is over - I'm moving to a place not far down the road. It's incredibly small, but it looks pretty decent. It's been really stressful, so hopefully I can calm down a bit now. I'm not looking forward to actually packing and moving though.

The last few places I've had, I pretty much found within one or two phone calls and visits. Whilst I may have missed a few details before moving in, I've broadly speaking done okay.

This time around, despite half of London being 'buy to let', there are very few places available right now. Having talked to a couple of agents about it, it doesn't seem there's a corresponding rent-increase though.

Still some agents are utter shiesters. For example, Haart charge exorbitant fees, both when you move in and when you renew your contract. Ludlow Thompson charge the equivalent of a week's rent in upfront fees, and demand a £500 holding deposit. I find that incredible - that's such an utter rip-off (but it does pay for you to be subscribed to irrelevant text message 'alerts' and for them to drive around in blue and yellow 'prat mobiles'). LT actually take the biscuit at the moment though - even after I'd paid a holding deposit elsewhere, they were trying to get me to forfeit it and come in with them.

Handily, in the Clapham area there are some decent agents too. My old favourites, Palace Gate are good - they're really friendly, competent and helpful. Their contracts are decent, and they don't seem to employ the stereotypical monkeys that don't know what they're doing.

Armitage Lettings also look to be pretty good. I'll have to see how it goes, but so far, they've shown themselves to be efficient, friendly and helpful. Again, without all the fluff that the LT's of the industry seem to have.

I've also found Black Katz to be pretty good. I'm not sure they've got the best properties, but they seem to be pretty decent. No idea about their contracts, but they don't strike me as the rip-off types.

It's a shame that landlords use agents at all. It seem almost all property is rented this way though. In my experience, the estate agent doesn't really do that much. They do some advertising in Loot and Gum Tree and show people round. I guess their real worth is doing the credit checks and stuff, but they don't offer any protection to landlords - if the tennant doesn't pay, neither does the agent (YMMV). I'd be inclined to suggest landlords simply choose tennants themselves. Just because someone likes the place, doesn't mean you have to let it to them. If they look 'dodgy' then find someone else. After all, we tennants have to do that with agents and landlords, so why not do the same?

Are You Here?

Warning:

- Uses (something).us website name

- Calls itself a 'mashup'

- Somewhat minimal on information or instructions

slashdot has reached a new low. This article is not particularly interesting, and has two pages of comments. The comments are so uninteresting that of all those, only two make it past the default quality filter. Then there's this article with one page of comments, and only one above the filter! It's a slow news day (or something).

And people go on about it having crappy articles and bad write-ups! Pah! Us readers are no better!