The family of an eight-year-old girl suffering from a severe life-limiting illness say their dream of giving her a playhouse has been left unfulfilled. Nicole Parsons suffers from a rare condition known as Aicardi syndrome, which has left her blind, unable to walk and allergic to sunlight. She also suffers regular, violent fits.

 

In the past year the St Just youngster has fallen severely ill twice, requiring lengthy stays in hospital. Her mum Sherry, 31, and partner Daniel, decided to build a playhouse for her birthday which would house her medical equipment so she could spend time outside.

 

After hiring a local firm at a cost of £630, work began on the 10ft by 10ft structure in her back garden. But after a dispute with the building firm, the playhouse remains unfinished and Sherry has been told by another builder it will need to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. Now Sherry and Daniel, who are unable to afford to complete the work themselves, are left with an incomplete structure in their back garden. Nicole is still stuck indoors.

 

Sherry said: “Nicole’s illness means all of her medical equipment is with her all the time which means her two brothers and two sisters can’t touch or play with her. She spends a lot of time in bed because she can’t go outside. We recently moved to a house with a garden for the first time so the kids are always outside. She can’t hear them playing while inside so we decided to build her a playhouse for her birthday on October 3. We wanted to build the house for a reason – it was her birthday and she’s not going to have many more.”

 

Sherry says she has received hundreds of comments supporting her cause after she wrote about it on Facebook.

 

She has since written to Trading Standards and been in contact with the police over the building work, but her house is still a building site. A local tradesman, Paul Harvey, has offered to complete the work for free and has borrowed some materials but can’t afford to buy more.

 

Sherry says he informed her that the original structure would need tearing down and rebuilding as it was not built on a concrete block, which meant the wood could rot away.In a bid to raise the money needed to complete the work, friends have begun fundraising. So far they have collected £74.

 

A police spokesman confirmed they had been in correspondence with Sherry about the incident. He said: “We are aware of the allegations and have advised her to contact a small claims court and Trading Standards as it is a civil matter.”

 

A spokesman for Trading Standards added: “We always advise consumers to get several quotes for the work being considered; to ask friends and relatives for their recommendations if possible; to inspect work that they have done in the area before you make your decision and to look for recognised logos of trade associations which can be verified for the standard of work carried out.”

 

To donate to the playhouse appeal log on to paypal.com click on the send money tab and enter the e-mail address jader2@hotmail.com

 

thisiscornwall.co.uk

If you have a few quid to spare and want to help them out then it’s a pretty good cause. They have set up a facebook group here where they are informing people how much money is left to raise.

The Cornishman did however print the paypal address wrong. The actual paypal address is jader2uk@hotmail.com.

We run our taxi service 24 hours a day. If someone is after a taxi to get home in the late hours or to get one of the early morning trains then we are available. The only condition is that [blue]we need to get it booked in before midnight[/blue].

As always, we can pick up throughout the whole of West Cornwall. Our most popular trips are taking passengers to get the first trains from Penzance in the morning or the first flight from Newquay Airport but we can take you to where ever you would like to go at any hour.

For the local taxi trips we only ever charge the rates set by Cornwall County Council. [blue]We don’t charge any call out fees[/blue]. For anything further afield we can arange a discount depending on where you would like to go. The best thing to do would be to contact our office on (01736) 78 74 73 or use the chat box on the bottom right hand side of our website.

With one of the most well known and iconic tourist attractions in Cornwall scheduled to fully open soon, we wanted to write a quick post to let everyone know about getting a taxi from Lands End.

01736 78 74 73

We will have taxis available 24 hours a day from Lands End. The most popular trip is from Lands End to Penzance Train Station which works out just over the £15.00 mark, but we can obviously take you anywhere. All of our taxis are on the local council approved meters, so you know that you are always getting a great price.

From Easter until the end of October, the Visitor Centre, attractions, shops and restaurants are open daily from 10am. Closing times vary between 4pm-5pm, later in August.landsend-landmark.co.uk

There are a few ways to get hold of us. You can get us by calling 01736 78 74 73, or by using the live chat at the bottom right of this page. there is also the live chat on our facebook page. If you would like to pay by credit or debit card before you leave then you can via the website, or you can pay the driver in cash at the end of your journey. We have mapping software at the office so we can find you if you want to go out for a walk and want picking up from a specific location.

Lands End have spent the winter revamping the hotel so we are looking forward to seeing the improvements. So if you are going out there for a walk, to see the attractions, or if you are doing an end to end then give us a shout.

• 7 seater taxi available
• Never any call out charges
• 24/7 service

• Good, safe, responsible driving skills are an absolute must – This is the single most important thing that we look for when we take someone on.
• Smart appearance - We operate a shirt and tie policy at all times throughout the whole company.
• Friendly and professional manner – We have customers from just about every walk of life that you can think of. One minute you could be taking a little old lady shopping, and the next moment you could be taking a group of lads to a rugby match. You need to be able to get on with them all and make sure that they would recommend you as a driver and us as a company.

Other than the things listed above, you just need to be keen. We don’t need anyone with any experience of driving taxis as we train you. Sometimes it is better if you haven’t done it before, especially if you have worked for every taxi company in Cornwall because we run things a lot differently to everyone else.

You need a licence from the council to drive a private hire vehicle and a taxi which you will have to get at your own expense. We have the forms that you need to fill in at the office, and we can help you with it all and can show you how to get funding for it, but the financial cost of it is your responsibility.

We supply the cars and equipment that you need other than a bluetooth headset, which you will need to get yourself.

There are a lot of misconceptions about driving taxis. A lot of people think that you only make money in the weekends, or that you are always dealing with drunk people. Neither of these are true with us. You’ll make as much on a Monday morning than you will on a Friday night. You also don’t need to know ever street in Cornwall. We have the technology in the cars (GPS trackers, Google navigation etc) so that we can direct you anywhere. It does help if you know your way around, but if not then we’ll get you there. We cover such a large area that there is no way you can know every street, but we are set up in a way that we can deal with the navigation in the office for you.

If you are interested then either shoot me an email, give me a call, or pop in and see me in our booking office.

The taxi also has a “hackney licence” which gives us a bit more freedom to pick up customers where ever we like.

Both our new Peugeot Expert as well as our faithful Ford Modeo are available for bookings now, just please state when booking if you require our 7 seat taxi.

If anyone has any other ideas of how we can improve or provide a better service to you then as always feel free to mention it to us.

The advantages for a taxi compnay like ours are as follows:

• Dispatching becomes a hundred times easier because I can see exactly where my cars are. As long as I am aware of what is going on then a quick glance at my screen is usually enough to handle every call.
• Customer service improves dramatically. I can call customers when there car is outside or pulling into their road which stops people waiting outside for their cab or the driver having to wait for the customer to come out to them.
• Insurance  claims. There is a growing trend of people claiming that taxis are bumping into them. I guess they think that it is an easy way to get a quick insurance payout. I can look back and see exactly where my car was at any time and date.
• I can see how fast my cars are going. Although this isn’t any kind of indication if they are being driven carefully, it certainly helps.
• Settling disputes with people not paying. The police are a lot more helpful now when people refuse to pay for their cabs. A quick combination of CCTV and instamapper can show them exactly when they entered the car and where they got out.

It’s a tool that we use constantly to the point where I don’t think we would be able to run efficiently without it. Since we have been open for business we have has it running 24 hours a day on multiple cars. There was some downtime for a few hours which was really hard to work around, but it is generally a sturdy piece of software.

The only costs are for the handset itself and the data package. We have a £12.00 per month package that covers all the calls (no need for radios) as well as 500 mbs of data per month. even with it running 24 hours a day, updating every 5 seconds, we don’t come anywhere near the 500 mbs.

You can download the instamapper software from their website or from the android market.

I’ve been meaning to use this section of the site to use as a blog for some time now but never got around to doing it, so I thought I’d write about our first month in our St Just office and our first month in business.

There were a few reasons why we chose St Just to open up our taxi office. For a start, we could see that there was a definitive gap on the market. Penzance town centre can be flooded with cabs shooting about, but getting a taxi from St Just can be an absolute nightmare sometimes and impossible at other times. Drivers aren’t usually willing to come out to St Just because it’s a long way to come out from town. If the customer either cancels or isn’t there to be picked up then it’s a long way back without getting paid. It’s just easier for them to stay around Penzance or to charge a premium. We figured that if we provided a dedicated service serving St Just and the surrounding areas then people will use us to bypass these problems.

Another reason that we chose St Just to set up base is because the town is on the up and up when a lot of places are on the downward swing. There is a lot going on in St Just and a lot of businesses that are doing better and better each year. Comparing it to a lot of other places in the country and you can see that the growth in the next few years is something that we want to be a part of.

So when we found a premises for our booking office we were over the moon.

The building itself is perfect for what we want. It’s in just the right location so that we are a walking distance from The Square, but far enough from The Square that we don’t get turned into a waiting room for people. It’s not on a busy road which would make it impossible to stop outside and there is a car park right around the corner. There is a good bit of footfall from Shellys Salon next door as well as the primary school. We are also ideally located to launch a car in any direction.

So all in all we are extremely happy with our office and where it is.

In the first month of trading we were really surprised with the amount of support we have received from local residence and businesses. Everyone was happy to see a professional taxi company at reasonable prices open up. By all accounts it was damaging the local trade, which is heavily reliant on visitors, by not being able to guarantee to their customers that they could get out and about. Pubs, restaurants, hotels, guest houses, camp sites etc can now tell their customers that they can get a cab knowing that they can rely on it being there and exactly how much it will cost them.

We are starting to build up a lot of regular customers too which is the back bone of any taxi company. We always said that if someone uses us once, they will use us all the time. As long as we keep an eye on our customer service and professionalism, then we’ll have a good shot of retaining them.

As always if there is anything that you would like to see us improve, or if you think that there is something that we need to add to our company then please please please let us know. We are looking for as much feedback as possible and are always looking to improve in what we do.

So all in all we are very happy with our first month and are excited about January. We would like to thank each and everyone of our customers during our first month and hope to see you all again soon.