“We will not tolerate protesters harassing our customers”, said a particularly assertive BAA spokesperson. Which is hardly surprising since, as any poor sod who's travelled through any BAA-run airport will tell you, that's their very own speciality.

I received e-mail confirmation of my order, but there was not detail of the order itself. Some time later I received a PDF invoice, showing a charge of nearly £50 for a large canvas print - just about the last thing I would ever consider ordering. Immediately I saw that, I e-mailed them to say that they'd gotten it wrong and to cancel the order. I sent four e-mails in total, all of which they ignored until a week later, AFTER I'd received an e-mail from them saying they'd shipped the print. Since then, I've had nothing but arrogance and stonewalling from them - they have completely ignored every individual point I've raised with them.

From their behaviour and attitude I can only conclude that they're either a) technically incompetent and have deliberately poor customer service and attitude or b) are a complete bunch of shysters.

So I can only recommend that others learn from the mistake I made in dealing with them and have nothing to do with them in the first place.

There's a 'however' there: despite having my car serviced religiously by them, I was always left with the impression that private buyers came a very poor second in their customer care priorities to corporate customers - that people who actually looked at the bills they paid and knew about the cars they drove were in fact something of an irritant to them.

That came to a head several years ago, after multiple attempts by their 'service' department to fix a couple of very simple problems: when it takes them seven attempts to fail to fix a simple loose door trim, it was time to file them very firmly in the category of 'semi-trained monkeys' and eventually end up using a local specialist garage where the word 'mechanic' is still honoured in the act. I wish I'd done that much earlier: Beacon Hill Garage are highly competent, completely helpful, unfailingly friendly and actually charge considerably less per hour than a London barrister. Which makes a bloody nice change.

Technorati Tags: Bad, Baron's of Hindhead, BMW, Rant, service

One such recipe is the famous Scots dessert of Cranachan. While other modern recipes make this from large quantities of double cream and little else, this is my own, slightly lower-fat, variant, which starts with the fancy that mediaeval Scots would have had more cheese than cream lying around, and so eschews the crudity of cream for the subtler taste of soft cheese. Here I'm using the traditional (Viking-era) Scots skimmed milk soft cheese, Crowdie (Gruth if you're a Gaelic speaker), updated for modern tastes with a proportion of slightly sweeter Mascarpone. If you can't get Crowdie, Ricotta makes a passable substitute.

Preparation time: 10 minutes;
Making time: 15 minutes;
Chilling time: overnight, by preference.

Total preparation time: 20 minutes;
Cooking time: Main course 20 minutes, rice 45 minutes, mushrooms 5 minutes;
Zen time: About two hours.

Then there are those wines which you approach on tip-toe and preferably from behind, to catch them unawares, and hopefully in a state still more fit for drinking rather than for use in hand-to-hand combat. These are the ones where you can have no idea whether they'll come roaring out of the bottle after years or decades of confinement, looking to slaughter the innocent and drink their blood, or which will slide smoothly forth, with a casually doffed cap and a cultured 'good evening', in best Leslie Philips intonation. The mere opening of such requires commitment, nerve, and a brief offering to the gods of viniculture that they haven't turned to purest paint-stripper over the years. The drinking of them requires both physical and mental preparation, and a clearing of both mind and palate in hopeful anticipation of joys to come.