Cheltenham & Gloucester
Invest Direct
PO Box 115
Fareham
Hants
PO15 5UR

9th May 2001

Dear Sir,

C&G Direct XXXXXXXX [my account]

Thank you for your letter today, which acknowledges both my request to close my account and the notice to do so without financial penalty.

I read the following parts of your letter with interest:

"please complete the tear-off slip below and return it to us in the reply-paid envelope provided to arrive either on or up to 10 days after the "due date" shown on the slip." [8th June]

"If we do not hear from you we will automatically cancel the notice 10 days after the due date."

One of my reasons for writing is to ask for confirmation of my interpretation of these statements. I am assuming that, if I send the slip to you too early, you will return it to me (as you did last time) and ask me to wait until the 8th of June, and if I send the slip to you too late, you will force me to go through the whole notice procedure again.

I am assuming that your systems have not changed since I last withdrew money from my account, and I would like to draw your attention to the correspondence we had last time, in which I clearly stated that this is a silly system. I would also like to inform you that I wish to discuss this matter again. When I received a slip to sign today, my instinctive reaction was to sign it and return it immediately. After all, if I leave it gathering dust somewhere, I cannot be certain that I will remember to post it at all, never mind within a 10 day window some 30 days in the future. I cannot think of a good reason why you cannot look after the slip until its due date if you receive it sooner.

So, please write back, perhaps filling your letter with patronising and complacent attitude, like last time, and we can continue discussing why you have this unusual procedure where we left off.

Yours faithfully,

Ashley Frieze.