![]() So, a week later (I didn’t want to hassle the guy), I rang up and was put through to the new manager, a Monsieur Tournissa. To cut a long story shorter, it turned out that my email never made it to the manager, as he had moved on, and it remained unanswered. So, in making my request, I did have a name, an email address and an email chain which might suggest that I wasn’t in fact a drugs smuggler who had hidden several kilos of cocaine in a lawnmower’s petrol tank. The staff are always smiling and cheerful and seem happy to see you – remarkable for a supermarket chain. This is a place where the fresh fish counter will gut and clean your fish for you if you ask them, relieving you of the most unpleasant task associated with cooking fish. In fact, so pleasant are they to deal with that a few years ago I sent an email to the manager to congratulate him on his staff and to ask him to thank them on my behalf for providing such top-notch customer service. I have always found the staff in this smallish supermarket to be extremely helpful and polite. All I needed to do now was to convince the ATAC supermarket in Jougne, not far from the border at Vallorbe, to sign my pallet into its warehouse. Why couldn’t I have it delivered to a supermarket just over the border 30 minutes away where I go for a major shop several times a year (mainly for the cheap fish)? A supermarket is constantly receiving pallets of stuff and presumably has somewhere to put them. The only question was, who could I have the Ransomes delivered to? I do know a couple of people who live on the other side of the border, but one is somewhere near Geneva – not really that handy, but workable – and the other has a holiday home even further away and they probably wouldn’t be in it when the lawnmower was going to show up. That way, Palletways would have no qualms about doing the job. It seemed to me that the best option was to get the lawnmower to within spitting distance of the Swiss border but still just in France. It was clear that I was going to have to do some creative thinking. Ironically, although Timberland Europe is based in Zug, Switzerland (for tax reasons, obviously), they refused to send me any shoes as they won’t ship to Switzerland. A few years ago, I wanted to buy some Timberland shoes on the Timberland Europe website. So there are probably bits of paperwork required and administrative hassle that means that although, perhaps, companies are happy to transport goods through Switzerland – to Italy, say – they aren’t prepared to drop goods off in Switzerland. ![]() I can only assume that this is because Switzerland is not in the EU, although it has bilateral treaties coming out of its ears. There are a lot of companies that are happy to send you stuff anywhere in the EU that won’t deliver to Switzerland. The second problem was potentially more of a deal-breaker: they don’t deliver to Switzerland. I suspected that we’d be able to get over that problem as The Old Lawnmower Company had used them in the past, so they must be amenable to having their arms twisted. ![]() The first was that they said they wouldn’t transport engines. I had a look at their website and the prices seemed perfectly reasonable. You get yourself a pallet, put whatever you want on it, give them a ring and they will come and pick it up and take it to where you want it. This is a company that specialises in transporting pallets of pretty much anything. John Gregory told me that in the past, they have used a company called Palletways to move lawnmowers around. ![]() #Abricotine schnapps for sale how to#Thus, the next task was to work out how to get the thing sent over to me. It was sitting in Buckinghamshire in England whereas the grass I wanted to cut is in Switzerland. ![]() So, there was my restored Ransomes, all ready to cut grass once again but sadly, in the wrong country. For this to make any sense, you will want to read parts one and two of this story of a mechanical Lazarus. ![]()
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