I said yesterday that Marion and I were not particularly fans of Elton John but, after last night's Red Piano show at the Echo Arena , we are now. His Las Vegas show has been brought over to the UK for the first time and it is a real musical and visual spectacular. Elton's performance is powerful and note perfect and his backing group prove that you're never too old to rock and roll. I was not too sure about the gigantic inflatable banana(flanked by two enormous cherries) and the mustard oozing hot dog but perhaps here's a guy who just enjoys his food.The show was performed against a backdrop of incredible moving images and finished with some of the audience welcomed onto the stage joining in Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting. A totally excellent show.
Back at Instanta we are starting to wind the factory down for two weeks. We've got the Christmas lunch on Tuesday afternoon but apart from that, the lads will be away now until Monday 5th. The office will be open until lunchtime on Christmas Eve. We are re-opening the office on Friday 2nd January. I know that a lot of offices are closing until the following Monday but we want to make sure that the customers get the very best service and are not affected by too long a shutdown.
It's been a strange end to the year. After all the successes of our new product launch at Excel back in February we had the setback of the thief in the factory and the last three months have been a catalogue of customers going bust. Coupled with the bank's marvellous interest rate hedge that means we pay a rate over a base rate of 6.75% rather than 2% we are looking forward to a fresh new year with plenty of good news and signs of the green shoots of recovery. Our sales for the first three months of our year to 30th November still show a small growth on last year so we must be doing something right.
We just raffled off all the gifts that our suppliers kindly sent us this year. We had quite a lot of bottles and are really grateful for the generosity shown. We like everybody, not just the bosses, to share the suppliers' kindness so every one's name (except mine) goes into the hat and we draw them out.
The doctor increased my blood pressure medication and changed the timing for taking the tablets yesterday so I hope that I will have a low blood pressure Christmas. I just hope it doesn't go too far the other way and I end up keeling over and fainting.
Anyway before I go. Here's Sir Elton's bananas filmed by someone on a mobile phone.
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