Mother and Son

You cannot mistake his parentage. At 2.30am this morning, went to bed at 11pm, couldn't sleep so got up and had a cup of drinking chocolate, I was looking through some of Sarahs family photos and I came across this one, and noticed a startling resemblence between her and James, it's quite scary. There is even a resemblance between Chris and James when Chris was a child.

A frustrating day. We went to close our bank accounts, we were with CAM and they have been taken over by Sabadell. We did have shares with CAM which we lost when the takeover took place, however, Sabadell offered us some of their shares, only about a third of the original ones, but we thought, hey ho, better than nothing. So last week Roy went to the bank to enquire about our new shares, to be told, you are now with Sabadell and you have no shares, you have lost them all. Well you can imagine how we felt, so at that point we decided to close both accounts and open up new accounts with Barclays. Today Roy went to Sabadell, handed them a letter, informing them of our intent to close the accounts on Thursday and we would withdraw all our money on that day. We were told we couldn't close the accounts as we had shares, a lengthy conversation ensued, somewhere along the lines of "no we don't have shares, we lost them in the takeover" "yes you still have them, but they are worthless, and you cannot close the account, because you have these worthless shares" !!!

So what we have done, is closed my account, kept the joint account with 10 euros in it, so technically we still have an account with Sabadell. We then went and opened up two new accounts with Barclays, very helpful young lady, but we have spent the afternoon phoning all the different service providers we have to inform them of the new bank details.

The main problem with the Spanish ones was trying to get someone who spoke 'some' English, although our Spanish is okay talking face to face, over the phone it can be problematical, with dialects and the fact that they speak very quickly, however, we have managed to get all of them done, apart from my Vodaphone mobile, which will be sorted out tomorrow.

Finally, a big thankyou to all of you who commented on my 1000th blip yesterday. I will get round to replying to you all.