Mattski

And I think the last £34 tickets for seats together have just been bought...by me!

When working as a kitchen porter part time when I was at university I never saw any of the tips. In fact, on a couple of occassions when a customer was allowed into the kitchen to congratualte the staff on the meal they sent out it was quite clear that the chefs were to be receipient of said tip to the exclusion of waiting staff and other kitchen personnel. If you think that restaurant owners have no involvement in colelction and distribution of traditionally left tips you clearly haven't had much experience of the industry.

This is a very common misperception. Everyone I know in the service industry would much rather have couples or groups of four in their restaurants. They are generally better behaved, less demanding, easier to find space for, take up less time and don't disturb other groups. Oh, and research shows that they spend more per head! Large groups are generally not what restaurants want unless they are desperate for customers. It is quite rare to see large groups in good restaurants as their reservations wouldn't be accepted. I have always got the best seats when i've just been with my missus, the worst when i've been with five or more people. It's also not true that service charges are less likely to get to staff than change left on a plate. Of course, all this depends where you go and I would suggest that we have yet to get the standard of restaurants in Sheffield where such practices are common. If we are talking about the likes of Frankies and Bennies then I wouldn't really know.

Well I don't know what the wages are like for Strada staff but I know other chains, such as Carluccio's, make up staff wages to just above minimum wage by adding tips. So they don't get as good a deal as you may think. Also, in the States a 10% tip would be seen as an insult. 20% is really what most people would pay. I can't remember the last time I went to a restaurant and didn't see 10% or above added to the bill. In most places in London they add 12.5%. Of course, if the service is really awful you should ask for it to be removed but I think it's mean spirited to ask them to take off the descretionary service charge just out of principle. You'd be better off supporting union movements to get the minimum wage jacked up.

I'm all for speaking out about injustice but the intial post was about lamenting a past that has never been. If you support personal accountability over a safe and prosperous community then i'm happy for you to live in your alternative reality.

Well as all of those examples you mention have yet to become common practice should we assume that by your definition common sense has not yet died? Which way do you want it or do you just fancy having a moan about all the victims of inequality, crime or accidents who have no one to blame but themselves.

So presumably the OP thinks we would be better off without Health and Safety legislation and child protection policies. Perhaps he also thinks that the class system is fair and the underlying inequalities relating to class, gender, race and age are a myth. Perhaps we should always accept what our elders and betters tell us becase clearly the system of accepting one's lot in life without challenging those in power has always proved so successful. And how is descretion more favourable than fairness? how will responsibility save us from injustice? what defence from discrimination will reason provide us? And whose truth is it that we should live by?

What we also need to remember is that, at a guess, around 50% of the apartments going up around sheffield are for student accommodation. Interesting guy that I am, while waiting to go into a meeting the other day I was flicking through 'facilities management' magazine and it had a report on the amount of independently managed student accommodation in British cities. Sheffield was still way way down the list. And I can't see many people disagreeing with the need to give some of our nicer suburbs back to owner occupiers.

Because Sheffield is the biggest kid on the block and all the tiddlers want a pop at it. A number of these posters have a long history of championing both Doncaster and Leeds at the expense of Sheffield and the lack of objectivity on this thread is evidence for their myopic perspectives.

Hi Medusa, Don't feel the need to apologise for disagreeing. If it works for you then maybe that's enough. I agree that critical assessment of your thought processes is important and a useful step towards changing perceptions. But it's also a bit like saying that recognising you have a drink problem is the first step to recovery from alcoholism. This may be true, but it may continue to be a stalled first step. It's subsequent treatment that can help recovery and this treatment is nearly always seperate and different to that which helps define the problem. My main issue with both CBT and NLP is that there is an element of pyschology that has been incorporated mistakenly into a healing approach. I feel that the mechanistic and highly goal orientated structure both treatments emphasise neglect the highly intimate, personal and subjective forces that shape perception and feeling.

I can see how NLP can owrk for some people and in the right circumstances it can be an appropriate measure against self defeating thought habits. In someways, it has similarities to CBT in the structure it imposes on people's approaches to life problems and has the same benefit of being a simple system that anyone can get the hang of fairly quickly. However, I don't belive that it is effective as any sort of therapeautic tool. NLP can encourage you to form more positive patterns of thinking but it doesn't get to the cause of peoples' problems. I can repeat the mantra 'it will be OK, it will be OK' over and over again and feel better and rationalising my problems will help clarity of thought, but an individual's susceptibility to negative mental states is shaped by life events and underlying emotional states that NLP doesn't adequately address. In this sense, NLP is just another quick fix for those without the will or time to be emotionally challenged by more conventional therapies.

I sense a personal aggrievance here, well it does account for the lack of objectivity. By the way, who would have the greatest spending power, a local businessperson or the Wetherspoons chain?

And the Fat Duck was just another modern European restaurant in Bray, a small town that already had similar style places nearby. How do we know until we give people a chance?

Wow, it's such great fun to run a new business into the ground before it's had a chance. You must feel so fulfilled. I remember hearing an interview with Heston Blummenthal about his first year in charge of the Fat Duck and he recounted the story of a little old lady who approached him on his first day of trading. Poking her walking stick at the restaurant she said 'we shut down the last one and we'll shut down you too'. Luckily, the restaurant survived to become one of the best in the world but it shows how the greatest enterprises spark a nasty streak in people who have such little joy in their lives they want to suck it out of everyone elses.

Even though the Polestar investment should be welcomed, I think we should qualify what this means in terms of jobs. OK, there is alot of money being poured into the site but how much of this is for construction and machinery? I suspect that the number of jobs created will be fairly small compared to say, the £10m or so that has been invested by Currys to build a call centre. Sheffielders have an overly quixotic view of heavy industry. We need to get over it or face becoming irrelavent to the modern world. For most people, working in a facory or a call centre has little financial difference, it's just the male Sheffield population has had to make a painful adjustment to the service sector. I don't think male pride should get in the way of regeneration.