Hotelympia The Final Countdown

Don't forget to make time to come and see me, Marion, Peter, Nick and perhaps one or two of our new Zip colleagues at the Hotelympia show at Excel next week. The show starts on Sunday at 11am and runs until Thursday. We are on stand 1959 and it will be the last opportunity for me and Marion to see some of our customers before we retire at the end of the year. It will be a strange feeling doing our last ever exhibition.



Before I started working for Instanta I would take a week's holiday from the bank and help my mum and dad out on the Instanta stand at the original Hotelympia. In (of all places) Olympia. I can remember in the seventies when times were hard in the catering industry and, in order to save on exhibition costs, I shared a room with my dad and my sister in law Val who, for her modesty, had part of the room in a B&B partitioned off with a curtain. We could not have dreamed then that thirty years later we would actually have a hotel room with its own en suite bathroom.



Then the show moved from Olympia to Earls Court.We had moved up in the world by then and could actually afford to stay in a nice hotel in Kensington and even go out into London one night. But exhibitions were still a grind in those days as, on the day before, my poor dad and I would be lugging heavy boxes and exhibition materials up flights of stairs to get the stand ready and then when the show finished we would have to do it all again in reverse. No fun at all.




Now, thanks to the wonderful Barry and Mike of Silverwood Exhibitions, we arrive to a fully set up and ready stand.I can't stress what a difference this makes as, instead of starting day one exhausted and fed up, we are relaxed and ready to meet the customers. We can also leave the minute the show closes and Mike and Barry dismantle the stand and take everything away.I can't recommend them highly enough.

One thing I am not sure about is how I will cope this time in view of my need for a hip replacement. We don't have any seats on the stand so I may be skiving off from time to time to take the weight off my hip.


We met Paul's bride Josephine's uncle Ric at the wedding. He is operations director for Opera North and he has kindly invited us to see their performance of Ruddigore at the Lowry tomorrow.Here is the audience reaction from when it was performed in Leeds.