Want to feel young? Go to the opera

Marion and I had a great time last night. We went to The Lowry courtesy of Josephine's Uncle Ric who is a director of Opera North to see their performance of Ruddigore. And what a show it was! Colourful and comedic with a stunning stage set and excellent singing to a first class orchestra. Coupled with a fine pre-theatre meal in The Lowry's restaurant it was an extremely enjoyable evening.The company even managed to take liberties with Gilbert's libretto and put in references to MP's expenses (duck houses, moats, adult videos and all) to bring it completely up to date.



One thing struck us however. We must be opera's last generation. Sitting in an audience made up almost exclusively of people who looked as if they were on a coach trip with SAGA or had come using their free bus passes made us feel positively youthful. So if you look in the mirror and feel that you are starting to look a bit wrinkly, book a trip to the opera. It will do wonders for your self image.(Pic from blogger Dan Meth)

Congratulations to a Mr Cronk of Essex. He has just bought some spare parts and his was our 100,000th order since we set up our sales order processing programme some time ago. We have 98,340 boilers in the field since we set up our computerised serial number book so we will be reaching our 100,000th serial number on the system in the near future. Our historic pre-computer records aren't readily accessible but there have probably been somewhere approaching 200,000 boilers made here in Southport in the last fifty three years.



Our Service Coordinator Max is busy preparing our warranty statistics for January 2010. This is a job that has been close to my heart since my brother Peter left eleven years ago. We monitor every problem that arises under guarantee and then take steps to do our best to make sure that they don't recur. We're doing pretty well at the moment and I think that Max's figures will show another decrease although we still haven't got to the level whereby Nick Neal has to buy us all dinner (bet he's sweating on it though).

I'll close today with something important. When we retire we'll have to get some new mobile phones. I quite fancy an iphone but not if I need all these oranges to charge it.