All Blogs articles – Page 23
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Blogs
Thursday: Rats and killer snakes
An early start again and it was roasting at 7am when we left. We had a short coach transfer due to some road problems but were delayed owing to a rat in the coach.Yuk. We cycled during the morning through some beautiful rolling farm trails passing hamlets, and plantations of ...
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Blogs
THE IRRESPONSIBLES
It was great to see Yvette Cooper get absolutely slaughtered on Question Time last night. Mrs Ed Balls – by all accounts just as much as a mini-Gordon as the education secretary himself – even got taken apart by an audience member over her flagrant hypocrisy on inheritance tax. That ...
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Blogs
I wasn't interested in sustainability 18 months ago. What changed?
This is my first blog so I’ll start with scene setting. To be perfectly honest, I have rather stumbled into the climate change arena. Like many others, I have over the last few years read the press, watched news bulletins, and seen the opus on climate change by Al Gore ...
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Blogs
Sing when you're whining
What makes England a good country is that any nut-job is entitled to their opinion. Take the loose-tongued hippies lining the road outside the Tory conference for example. They spend their days screeching through electric cones about how David Cameron is murdering foxes. Now I’m neither a proponent of Conservatism ...
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Blogs
Geoff Egan off-road in Tanzania
This year I will be cycling 400km through Tanzania (off road), to raise money for International Childcare Trust (where I am a Trustee) to help children and their families with HIV and Aids in our projects in Morogoro. Having seen ICT’s projects in Cambodia,Sri Lanka,India,and Kenya, I am expecting ...
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Blogs
Wednesday 7th October - Through the military zone
Another grueling day in paradise. We woke again at 5am and were on our bikes by 6.30. We cycled all day over undulating hills; I would guess about 100 in all and in total our route rose 2000 metres, on some very dirty tracks. There were a few crashes as ...
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Blogs
Tuesday 6th October - 1,000 ft climb
We had a quick swim in the sea, as there were no showers and the water had run out. Another tough day 61km through more of the park and then we started climbing through the hill villages. We rose about 1000 feet in the day, and it was seriously hot, ...
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Blogs
CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVA
As someone with a pedigree in music, my partying background has always consisted of two things: Jack and Coke. With that in mind, there is one notable thing about the Conservative conference. It isn’t that all the prospective party candidates are all petite, female blondes in their early twenties, or ...
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Blogs
UK must try harder at EXPO REAL
Jeremy Helsby, Simon Hope, Iain Reid, Bob Kidby, Xavier Pullen and Ian and Richard Livingstone were in Munich – but where were there rivals and most importantly of all, the British public sector? While some of property’s biggest names were at EXPO Real, the City of London and other UK ...
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Blogs
HOUSING IN A HALF-SHELL
Having been up here since Saturday, I decided to take a break for briefing BBC producers on the virtues of the BPF’s buy-to-let mortgage regulation policy with a stroll to my favourite boutiques around Oldham Street on Sunday afternoon. Being a valued customer of one of these shops, I was ...
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Blogs
The CVA backlash begins
Where do firms draw the line between loving in their tenants without dumping the bodies of others into black bags thrown into Walthamstow reservoir? Transparency without favouritism seems to be the balancer. And with that in mind, Westfield chief Peter Miller has hit out at company voluntary agreements ...
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Blogs
Monday 5th October - Blue Ball Monkeys
Monday comprised 77km of tough dirt track and a small track along a railroad. There were quite a lot of casualties and drop outs with people head planting off the railroad. Maggie our chief exec got a real shiner. In the afternoon we entered the Saadani National Park where ...
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Blogs
Morning after / night before
The news that (literally) woke me up this morning (thanks Mr Pratt) that Grainger chief executive, Rupert Dickinson, had resigned due to health problems was sad but expected. It’s been nearly six months since Andrew Cunningham, their former FD, took the reigns, and thought things now seem on the up ...
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Blogs
Knives out
“The reality is that momentum has stalled,” admits John Lewis’s head of development Jeremy Collins, president of the BCSC. To the mock-horror of Leeds City Council’s leader Andrew Carter this probably means there won’t be a John Lewis in Leeds any time soon. Still, they’ve signed up for Stratford at ...
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Blogs
Jackson revival plans
Conservative regeneration spokesman Stewart Jackson has committed to following through the BPF’s proposals on tax increment financing. This is good news for the industry. Although he did not make any firm commitments around funding, there was a definite nod of agreement to the notion that the public sector would need ...
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Blogs
The BPF's Andy Teacher live from the Tory Party Conference!
Happy Monday The things I do for the property industry. To think, I could be on my way to Mapic or even Cityscape (hello Liz), but no, Manchester it is. Home of football’s richest clubs, the world’s richest musical heritage and, for the next week, our nation’s next government*. The ...
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Blogs
Weak pound makes EXPO REAL painful
Jeepers! Asking for £100 to be changed into Euros at Victoria yesterday I was given the princely sum of 99 Euros 82 cents back. Now I know the exchange booths fleece you, but it shows just how weak the pound has become. It made the Easyjet Seven Up and Mars ...
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Blogs
Sunday 4th October - The Cycling Begins
Today our journey began. I really must try to train more next time. We set out from the centre of Dar Es Salaam and got lost after about 10 mins. Our route took us along some very busy roads through lots of towns and villages before heading off road and ...
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Blogs
Saturday 3rd October - Tea with the High Commissioner
We arrived in Dar Es Salaam, via Nairobi feeling exhausted and met the team, 40 cyclists from all points of the globe and a few colourful characters some of whom were with us last year when we undertook Cycle India. We did our bike fittings and then cycled around the ...
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Blogs
Friday 2nd October - The Flight Out
The flight from London was pretty uneventful. We flew over notable cities like Tripoli, which was once Italian apparently, Entebbe, Addis Ababa and Cairo. I think we were on Coconut Airways as my seat was broken and my TV did not work.
