Here's Harvey

Yet another Instanta baby on the blog. Here is Assistant Director Gavin Ford with his new grandson Harvey.(Although the photo is dated 2005 I think that Gavin has just forgotten to set his camera up). Congratulations to Gav. Marion and I are quite jealous as we still await our first grandchild.



I was delighted to see Theo Walcott's fabulous performance for England last night. Having invested my £12.99 per month in Setanta Sports for some time now, it was good to get my money's worth at last.

Although I lost money on Zola's appointment at West Ham (managed to cut the loss from £65 to £35 when rumour mongers started saying that Bilic was back in the frame), I do hope that he brings some of his own style back to the Premiership. If West Ham start playing like this I might even change my allegiance from the mighty reds.



Well. Enough about football and betting. On the work front we are continuing to work flat out although suppliers do seem to be trying their best to thwart our progress. I just don't understand how, in the name of cost cutting, suppliers can cut quality. We have had one or two components that have not come up to scratch lately. Fortunately we do have very rigorous Quality procedures so we can spot things very quickly. Unfortunately, when we reject items this sometimes leads to delays in sourcing replacements but so far we have not let anybody down. In 1994 our element supplier decided it would be good business to save themselves 5p per element by reducing the insulation powder (without telling us). We bought 1,000 of these elements and 397 failed costing us over £20,000. Fortunately we were compensated by the supplier and managed to get customers' boilers sorted very quickly so rather than damaging Instanta our reputation actually improved.

No competition winner yet. The competition will close tomorrow and we will start a new one next week.