I JUST GOT MY FIRST WAITROSE EMAIL!!! lolol, we have hit the BIG-TIME up here!

[AitchTwoToTangOh]

(it says 'if our lovely pictures aren't showing, click here. how hilariously twee).

so, has anyone been in yet?

Oooh is it open??

How hilarious. LOLOLOL at the idea of le tout West End flocking to Waitrose. I am even considering a Haj from Burnside (though we have a new M&S food store opening up the road, so feeling a little less left out).

Was down south last week and spent much of the week in Waitrose. My top tip is that their Essentials range is about equivalent to Tesco Finest, quality-wise.

I did, however, baulk at paying 20 smackeroos for a small birthday cake for ds1 (and yes, I know I should be whipping out the wooden spoon, but anyway).

we really did, it was hilarious. i bumped into everyone, and but one thing was on our lips... 'ooooooh, the prices..."

What made me larf down south was that even wee old wifies who up here would be coming out with a packet of ham or a little bit of fish were swanning out with nice tubs of fat olives and a brioche.

It's a different world, I tells ya.

lol Midnight. I was down South a couple of weeks ago visiting my cousin. Waitrose is just her normal supermarket. She just didn't get what I was excited about.

Do they have the zappers then? I was very taken with them.

I might wait til payday a couple of weeks for things to calm down if there's no freebies to be nabbed. [déclassé].

Oh I don't know Shona, I quite fancy a bit of a scrum round the cupcakes myself.

yes, and those olives cost well over four quid!

and the essentials ham was pretty pricey too,
i thought, and also noted that a lot of their packed hams had a sneaky 85g only.

i did get some crumbed ham off the deli counter for 99p per 100g and some pork for the same. i was there at 2.30 and they were the only offers and i finished them both, lol.

what else? some clotted cream ice cream, one pound off but still £2.99 (again, i got the last tub) and it was v delicious.

marmite was £1.32 per small tub. i only buy it once a decade so no comment on going rate.

How the heck are you, btw (you are bookthief, aren't you?)?

shona I mean.

Blimey Aitch, you have done a very careful analysis I see, particularly in the cold meats dept. Impressive.

It's bloody lovely though, as supermarkets go. Do they have the green token things where you put your token in the charity box and they give money to local charities?

i did, i really did. me and dh stood there open mouthed, working it all out and feeling mugged just for being in the same room.

oh but it was lovely and all the san-serif signs were so clean and refreshing and the staff looked so happy and dapper in their lime green neckties.

yy tis the poster formerly known as bookthief. We're fine. Still chuntering on about moving. Still not managing to take any actual meaningful steps towards this goal. Ds is three next week

I do worry for Roots & Fruits and similar, but I was through visiting my parents this afternoon in Edinburgh and they reckon Waitrose/M&S hasn't affected the independents in Morningside negatively. Arguably has brought (even more) people with money to spend on food to the area.

Aitch, did you see that Lost In Fiction has closed down ?

i did, i feel very sad for her but really, who wouldn't have predicted that, she had no stock...
we are talking about moving too, god knows to where. you?

I know, but I can't help thinking about how pleased and excited she must have felt when she opened, and Byres Road should have been able to support a bookshop. Wrong location, wrong time I suppose.

I think we're going to stick to this area actually, or roughly this area. They're building a new primary on the edge of Kelvingrove Park, we like where we live basically but just need another room, preferably not achieved by shrinking the size of all the others.

We talked about moving further out for more space and a garden but I dunno, we love the park and use it a lot, it's easy to get about using public transport, do we actually need a garden? Maybe we should think about an allotment.

I'm a bit scunnered though. We need to do so many little and not so little jobs around the flat to get it ready to sell, dh's job not v secure. Bah and humbug!

totally hear you on job security, but then there's the other thing of maybe moving before losing jobs so that at least the mortgage is in place. it's a nightmare.
and we're in exactly the same place re garden etc. i don't want to move out of the area, but a house with a garden here is a half mill minimum.

I know someone with one of the big houses up in Hyndland. She & her husband have lived there forever, bog standard Uni lecturer/healthcare jobs when they bought and it's mindboggling what it must be worth now.

You're absolutely right about the mortgage. Must get finger out. It's getting ridiculous.

my pals bought theirs with laaaaahndan money. och well, i should have worked harder when i was younger.

btw some funny valuations going on at the mo, apparently (acc to surveyor pal of dh) there's a bubble cos of lack of stock on market. we saw a place, looked great etc but apparently 15k over valued on hvr.

Weird given banks' reluctance to lend/caution. Are there really still people out there with the ready cash to pay over the odds? Obviously are.

I had hoped that this would put pay to stoopid offers over, and I have noticed that fewer places say o/o now. Seems to be worded "in the region of".

(Laaaaaahndon money again probably)

I am noticing masses more For Sale boards about the place in the last few weeks actually.

yep, but nothing good according to the estate agents. all keech.

there are about six ways to buy these days, all a load of rubbish. and with the hvr's being swung just the same ways that the old surveys were, we're getting back to square one.

I was just thinking the same as I drove through Clarkston this morning - masses of boards up there.

Deffo consider doing that moving thang if yer DH's job's a bit dicey: we moved last spring (2008) and DP was unemployed for almost a year from the autumn - since I'm freelance and he's a contractor we'd have been laughed out of the bank after that (and probably still now) so glad we did it when we were a wee bit more flush.

I bought my first flat up here with aforementioned Lahndon money, but laughing on the other side of my face now, as DP has had to go back to feckin Lahndon to find work. So it's either me up here with the nippers all week or move down there to a place the size of a postage stamp. That'll learn me.

As far as gardens are concerned, we moved to the edge of civilization to get a graden, but it is such a feckin tip (big, but in the way that mudflats are big) that we rarely take the DCs up there, and when we do they end up looking like Stig of the Dump within about 30 seconds.

Ha, check us out: from Waitrose to house prices, almost seamlessly. We could be living in Islington, circa 2005.

lol. we are so backward up here, it's taken us four years to get round to it.

lol and I managed to get in a mention of schools, albeit obliquely, so we've got the full set.

Glad your dp's found something midnight, but shite for you that it's so far away. That's hard.

oooooh so it has finally opened!!

Will have to take a trip over next week.

long time no see!

I am a total southside convert having been a committed west ender for a long time. We got good parks here too!!

yes, but they're all full of southsiders.