Back In The Old Routine

After a very quiet time here at Instanta last week things are back in full swing again today as the factory reopened after the summer shutdown. And bang on cue the sun has come out and I have been driving the car with the sun roof open for the first time in weeks.Sadly for the men here, the sun arrived a week late and nobody has returned looking like they've spent any time on the sun loungers. Oh well. It's a short week and the sun may stay with us until weekend.



With Marion and me into our last ninety one days working at Instanta we are handing over the books to Liz tomorrow to carry out the end of period for August completely on her own. Don't worry Liz we will be here to help if you have any problems. Craig will be doing our monthly return to CEDABOND and a couple of other buying groups and Max will be doing our guarantee reports (all of which leaves me with very little to do). As there will only be three period ends before we go it is important that we make sure that things go smoothly when we have gone so we reckon that three months should be about right. Mind you if the new computer system arrives before we go that might throw a pretty big spanner into the works.



I've been taking Nytol sleeping tablets for a few weeks now. They're available over the counter and they work really well. If I take painkillers before I go to bed I can almost get a full night's sleep but the Nytol give the extra edge of letting me doze off more quickly. However when I went to buy some more from the chemist on Saturday, the young lady behind the counter gave me such an interrogation you would have thought that I had been asking for crack cocaine. How long have I taken them? Am I taking anything else? And so on and so on. The result? I decided not to take either painkillers or Nytol last night. And the outcome? Didn't sleep a ****** wink.



The Times and Sunday Times Internet pay wall has been running for a few weeks now. I never visited either website so I don't know what effect the charges have had. I do know that by logging onto Twitter and following all The Guardian departments that I am interested in I can keep up with the news as it happens. It is a fantastic service and still completely free to use. I am not sure how they make money from it as almost all my favourite pages from the paper are online to read. Of course, being a loyal Guardian reader, I wouldn't dream of stopping my daily delivery but in these austere times, how many will? Just a thought. I hope that their website pays them handsomely as it is a credit to the newspaper.

A couple of weeks into the football season. Charming chaps these football managers aren't they? NB Bad language warning.

A Magnificent Gesture?

If proof were needed that not all Premier League Footballers are narcissistic prima donnas who spend most of their spare time seeking super injunctions to stop the tabloids writing about their sordid private lives look no further than West Bromwich Abion's Gonzalo Jara. Before the kick off at Anfield on Sunday the announcement was made over the PA that, in support of the trapped Chilean, miners Jara was to donate ... cue drumroll and hushed silence around the ground, wait for it............ his match worn shirt. Wow!! Has there ever been a more generous gesture in the history of the Premier League - the PA might as well have announced that I bought a copy of the "Big Issue" outside Lime St Station on Saturday. Why this noble act was announced to such dramatic effect is beyond me. I may be being unfair to Jara. He may not be one of those footballers who are paid tens of thousands of pounds every week (although he almost certainly earns more that 99.9% of those in the crowd) and that shirt might have been very precious to him. Maybe he was also donating some cash but was keeping quiet. But whoever thought that announcing that a Premier League player was going to give up a shirt would be viewed as an act of magnanimity worthy of mentioning proves how out of touch with reality those in the higher echelons of the game are. I know that around me the announcement was met with laughter. No doubt the shirt will be auctioned so that an ordinary fan can dig deep in his pocket to be the true (and no doubt anonymous) benefactor.



Here's a very rare Bank Holiday sight -our garden in sunshine. I've had a wonderful Bank Holiday sitting in the garden reading the Saturday, Sunday and Monday papers all in one go. My only misgiving is that the Observer still hasn't recovered from the loss of Kathryn Flett whose TV reviews were always the first thing I turned to and whose musings from her home town of "Random on Sea" the second. I'm following her on Twitter but, however witty her 140 characters are they are no substitute for her clever and highly accurate take on life that guaranteed a smile every Sunday for many years. Sorry Observer but you haven't found a replacement yet and when David Mitchell is away, as he was this week, the newspaper is not half the read that it used to be. If you can't entice Ms Flett back why not poach Sam Wollaston from The Guardian? He's about the best there is at the moment, along with Charlie Brooker and Grace Dent.



I wonder what they would have had to say about Saturday's Magic Numbers when Stephen Muhern gave one viewer an enormous prize of £310,000. The odds against winning this amount were huge but in a suspense filled couple of minutes a man from Kent who is getting married in a fortnight managed to choose five boxes containing huge sums of money whereas on each pick there was a near fifty fifty chance of winning nothing. The show went from strength to strength and got bigger and bigger each week. Marion and I enjoyed it very much and have taped all seven episodes for posterity and addition to our son's virtual scrapbook.



Tomorrow used to be the last day of our financial year but it is now just the end of month two. However, I will be looking with interest at Craig's spread sheet to see if all the right columns turn green as we hit sales targets. Lets hope that caterers have had equally pleasant Bank Holidays to ours and their coffers are ringing with record sums to go out and spend on new boilers tomorrow to bring a record end to what would have been our year.

Got 15 Minutes To Spare?

Regular visitors to the Instanta blog will know that I usually end with a short video. I find these by trawling through the offerings on the web looking for things that are likely to amuse. I also get an email every Friday from Unruly Media who send me details of the most popular virals. Usually they are either full of Lady Gaga or Justin Beiber but this week's chart was full of surprises and a great range of videos that are crying out be shared. So today, for a change, I am devoting the blog to them. And thank you, Unruly Media, for bringing them to my attention.

In a week when friends lost their lovely dog here is a reminder of how a dog can make itself part of the family.



That dog was watching "Family Guy". Tomorrow we'll be having a look at "X Factor" for the first time this season. Here's a guy who would be a massive hit on that other Simon Cowell hit "Britain's Got Talent". If he was British.



Bank holiday beckons and I hear that the sun's going to come out. Perfect for going to the beach and blowing giant bubbles for the grandchildren - if we had any (Paul and Sarah please note keen prospective grandparents offering grandparenting services - reasonable rates).



Failing that. We could always indulge ourselves this weekend in that other favourite British Pastime - getting absolutely plastered.



Have a wonderful Bank Holiday.

Magicians Do Exist

Although "Magicians Don't Exist" is the underlying message of "The Illusionist",this beautiful little film proves otherwise as Sylvain Chomet has created eighty minutes of pure magic that cannot fail to enchant all who go to see it. Beautifully drawn in pastel shades that capture Edinburgh in the late fifties, this old fashioned animation offers a poignant study of love,loneliness, solitude and loss without being unnecessarily maudlin and still managing to raise more than just a couple of smiles. The story (a screenplay written by Jacques Tati) centres around a once successful French conjurer (Tatichef) who, finding himself threatened by the progress of TV and Rock n' Roll, seeks pastures new in the UK.But even a remote Scottish Island is celebrating the arrival of electricity with a new Juke Box. On the island he meets a young girl who becomes a substitute daughter and accompanies him to his final season in a decaying Edinburgh music hall alongside a motley bunch-a clown, a ventriloquist and some acrobats. The characters are instilled with the innocence and naivety of a lost age and, whilst the recent fabulous Pixar offerings Up and Toy Story 3D left the audience sobbing uncontrollably, Chomet tugs on the heartstrings with more subtlety as we watch their tragedies unfold.I thought that we were going to see a film with subtitles but the film is,in fact, to all extent and purpose silent although it does have a haunting and melodic score. We had to travel to find a cinema showing this but it is certainly a film worth going out of your way to see.



Marion and I are on the final countdown to retirement and are into double figures now with just 97 days to go. We had better start thinking about what we are going to do with ourselves. I think a holiday is long overdue as we have not been away for more than a couple of days since the photo at the top of this blog was taken in July 2008. Marion fancies a cruise although it would have to be one for anti-social people as the thought of sharing my first weeks of retirement with thousands of others is not exactly compelling. I am used to solitude now and am so isolated here in the board room that I have an idea of what it might be like for the Chilean miners - write a blog lads it will keep you sane. I wonder what their bosses are thinking about their pay - "Now are they on normal time,overtime, sick pay or should we sack them for not turning up for work. Is there room to send a couple of picks down that tube to get them doing something worthwhile until Christmas?"



Craig emails me every day with the updated sales league table. It's a very complex spreadsheet (he's a clever lad) and the boxes turn green when we have hit our month's targets for different ranges. First to go green this month was our fabulous new wall mounted value range. These fabulous stainless steel boilers which come in 2,5 and 10 litre capacities are proving a big hit with the customers and offer an economic, stylish and reliable hot drinks solution for those on a budget. Heading towards green are the upmarket wall mounted boilers which have Eco friendly features such as built in seven day timers, thick insulation and half capacity Eco mode for quiet periods.



Olly Murs is performing his new single on the final episode of Magic Numbers which airs on ITV1 and ITV1HD on Saturday evening at 8.45pm. There's an enormous prize fund of £400k up for grabs and it would be a perfect finale if someone out there managed to win it. Sitting here in the board room I can hear the radio in the factory and it seems that the producers of Magic Numbers have an uncanny knack of picking star acts for the show as I keep hearing Alexandra Burke, JLS and Scouting for Girls' (all of whom had guest slots) songs over and over again. As for that Alexandra, I can't get that catchy tune out of my head since "oh here I go drip droppin way down low dah dah da da"

Final question of the day. Why does this never happen to Chris Kamara?

Oh What A Tangled Web

With my weight at a record low I have ventured out to the gym a few times lately. Forty minutes on an exercise bike is manageable but boy is it boring. Granted there are a number of TVs dotted around the place but without sound I have resorted to watching "Eggheads",looking at the answers and surmising what the question might be and which is the correct answer. The other night "Bubble, Saffron and Edina" were on the screen in the entertainment round and I guessed the question might have been "which character in Ab Fab is played by Jane Horrocks?" but I was wrong as the answer was Saffron. Fed up with this game after a few weeks I decided to look for a pair or earphones. I knew we had some somewhere in what Michael McIntyre might refer to as the "Man Drawer " (in our case a camera bag) and there they were. Only problem was that, on arriving at the gym, whilst the TVs were tuned to BBC2. Sky News and BBC1 plus a couple of those music channels that look like soft porn, the plug in sounds were only tuned in to the music. So what's the question if the choice of answers is "Liverpool, Real Madrid or Barcelona?"




Am I alone in wondering what all the fuss is about the woman who put a cat in a wheelie bin? OK so it was a bit cruel to the poor little moggie but the way that the world has reacted it is as if the lady (who turns out to be a bank official - at least she was before the video got onto YouTube) was responsible for mass genocide. Let's have a bit of perspective. The cat was featured in today's Sun surrounded by gifts sent by well wishers. It's a bloody cat! Send your gifts to some of the people flooded out in Pakistan and get a hold on reality.





A matter of priorities.



Nothing on at the local Vue again this week so we are off to Picturehouse at Fact in Liverpool to watch "The Illusionist". It's a French cartoon with subtitles based on a screenplay by Jacques Tati but somehow Vue don't seem to think that the people of Southport will be interested even though they have found time to show "Grown Ups" and "Scott Pilgrim" which both look a bit rubbish. I'm not saying to give films like "The Illusionist" a whole week in Southport but there must be others here who would like to see the film (the list of films that we would like to see but don't reach Southport is endless)and maybe a night a week and one of the smaller screens could cater for us. Oh well it's £14 out of Vue's coffers.



We've sold out of our fabulous under counter models this week which is a bit frustrating as, with the factory on shutdown, we can't rush a few out to help a customer who wants three for the weekend. It's very rare for us to run out. We built to meet Nick's sales forecast but he was not very accurate on this range. Never mind, it's better to sell more than the target than less and apologies to those who missed out. A salutary lesson. Why not keep a couple in stock?

I'll close with a trailer for tonight's film

Feelin Like A Ghost Town

It's all quiet on the factory front this week as the annual shutdown enters its second day.We're using the time to prepare the groundwork for the installation of a brand new CNC folding machine which is scheduled to arrive next week. Our existing folder is pretty ancient now and the new one will provide plenty of benefits including neater folds, speeding up the metal fabrication and removing a bottleneck in the production line. I am looking forward to seeing this machine as it's a big investment.



Last year I blogged about the new mobile phone that I had just received and moaned on like a grumpy old man about the features when I only wanted a telephone. The phone gradually grew on me, especially as the camera was so good. But I didn't like the way that I kept finding it had connected to the Internet without me pressing anything (whilst still in my pocket), especially when Marion told me that I was getting Internet use charged on the bill.Anyway my brief honeymoon with the phone ended yesterday when the touch screen packed in. Someone here at Instanta said it wouldn't be a problem as I could download all the numbers onto a computer and copy them onto a new phone. I duly connected the phone to the computer but it wouldn't transfer until I had deactivated the blue tooth. And how do you deactivate the blue tooth? By using the touch screen. Aaaaagggghh. With the honeymoon well and truly over I tried everything to try and get the screen moving again (including dropping it from a height a number of times). After a fair bit of rough handling, disassembly and reassembly I finally got it to work for about thirty seconds which was enough to deactivate the blue tooth and salvage all the numbers. Phew.



Only two games into the season and Liverpool look to be facing climbing another mountain. I watched last night whilst glancing at a few football forums on the laptop. Those writing were questioning Hodgson's failure to use substitutes but if you looked at the subsitutes available you could see that he did not have many options. The manager provided the quote of the season so far in today's Guardian. When asked about the unsettled Mascherano "The danger of those questions is that I could give you an answer and if my answer is not 100% correct then all of a sudden I'm creating headlines. I have no wish to create headlines over the Mascherano situation." The headline above the piece "Roy Hodgson vents anger at Javier Mascherano for skipping defeat."


Whilst watching the match on Sky I also had a read of the newspaper (you can't really blame me, Liverpool were dire). In it the excellent Charlie Brooker wrote a brilliant piece about the "Ground Zero" mosque. In his usual, very funny and very sarcastic manner he destroyed the anti brigade with what is probably the most sensible piece written on the whole thing on either side of the Atlantic. To sum it up in a couple of words, "It's not a mosque and it's not at Ground Zero". Well done Charlie. If you want to read the article in full click here.

Getting a bit thirsty now. Think I'll try some of that new Drench.

A Magic (Numbers) Weekend

Just back from London where we had a great weekend centered around a visit to the ITV studios on the South Bank to watch the live transmission of Magic Numbers. People must have heard we were coming as the ratings rose to over 3 million which is hundreds of thousands up on last week (nothing to do with some of the 11 million who watched X Factor staying around to watch the show). It was a fun and very entertaining evening as the studio audience arrived an hour before transmission and enjoyed a very funny warm up man and watching the pre recording of a couple of shots to fit in the opening credits. As soon as we got home Marion played the show back and spotted us at least half a dozen times - another five minutes of fame.

One advantage of having Marion as a partner is that there is never any "where should we go?" when you're on a holiday or a weekend away. And this weekend was no exception as she once again planned our timetable meticulously starting with a meal at the excellent Turkish restaurant Kazan, near Victoria station, staying at the City Inn Westminster (ranked 11 out of over 1,000 London hotels on Trip Advisor and well worth the rating), a trip to see Grace Kelly's dresses at the V&A and ending with a glass of champagne at the world's longest champagne bar in St Pancras station (now that's what you call a station!). Thanks for that M. There's never a wasted moment.

The next telly outing will be to the recording of the new series of A League Of Their Own which is being recorded in Teddington studios in September. We are looking forward to it as we went to two episodes of the last series and it was hilarious. I am pretty sure that Sky will have some more top guests for the new season.



The last series made a lot of jokes about John Terry and his alleged dalliance with Vanessa Perroncel. However, the Observer ran a lengthy interview with Ms Perroncel yesterday for which she received no fee. She maintains that she is innocent of being involved in any affair and is so determined and insistent on this point that, instead of cashing in on a very valuable potential kiss and tell, she is suing for libel those who ran the stories about her. You can read the excellent article by Polly Vernon here.

Having got over the disappointment at the Guardian's failure to run the weekly Pick The Score league, I today heard about and joined a new football site. Fantasy f***wit.com is a fantasy league in which one aims to pick a team full of footballing f***wits. Points are scored by players on losing teams and keepers who let in plenty of goals but there is the added bonus of more points for getting into the tabloids with a lurid story such as Crouchy's recent night out in Spain. I've picked Ashley Cole as one of my eleven. He has to be a high scorer in the f***wit stakes. Any ideas for more? I am allowed two transfers a week.

I'll close today with Alexandra Burke's fabulous Magic Numbers performance. Look carefully and you will see Marion bopping away and me er shuffling around.

They're All Goin On A Summer Holiday

Doop doo-doo do do do-do-doo. Yes at 4.45pm today school's out for summer as the factory closes it's door for a week and has a breather as the lads take a well earned break. Some of us - the one's in the office and stores - won't be joining them, as somebody has to answer the phones and send out the hundreds of boilers that will inevitably be ordered next week as this month has already seen a day in which we broke our record for the number of machines ordered in a single day. How many were ordered on that day? That would be telling and we don't want to give away our trade secrets to the competition. So, to all you hard workers in the factory, I hope you have a great break and that the sun shines brightly on you and your families.



Marion and I cant wait to go to the broadcast of Magic Numbers tomorrow night at 9 pm on ITV1 and ITV1HD. Pamela Anderson will be amongst the guests and we may get the chance to meet her in the green room afterwards although I doubt that she will be blogging or tweeting about meeting us! The show is great entertainment and, although it had not been a ratings smash hit the comments on the web have been getting better and better as the show has continued its run. I just spotted these after last week's show on tvguide.co.uk ." XXXcellent This show grows on you. totally love it Kat. " "Superb entertainment great to see new and refreshing talent with a "too tense to watch" end game. Well done ITV dibber". Other guests include Alexandra Burke and Flawless so it should be another great show.



The hall looked like Aunty Wainwright's shop (In "Last Of The Summer Wine" if you aren't a fan) this morning as Marion and I had a big clear out and de-clutter of some antiques that we have not had on display for a while. A very nice bloke from a new auctioneers came to collect it all and it will be going for sale at the Southport Theatre And Convention Centre on 2nd October. They plan to have 400 top quality lots and have already sourced two thirds of those. I hope it is a big success as we have placed very low reserves on the items. Go and have a look if you are in Southport in October. Viewing starts Friday 1 October.



Although we are not going on holiday Marion and I are having the afternoon off to travel down to London. Tomorrow we plan to go to Portobello Antiques market. So we can clutter everywhere back up again.

I loved another of Chegger's tweets yesterday. "First sign of madness? Suggs walking up your drive" pure gold.

I'll close today with a little film for everyone in the factory.

Wham Bam Thank You Mam

Went to see Salt last night. Just getting my breath back.If you are prepared to suspend belief ,strap yourself in and hang on for a 99 minute white knuckle ride with never a dull moment and watch as Angelina single handedly takes on the CIA,KGB,FBI and NYPD with a performance that makes Rambo look a bit of a wuss.If you are looking for any depth, forget it. If (like me) you used to enjoy running around the school playground machine gunning all your mates with an imaginary Tommy gun, you'll love it.



I spent an hour on the Treasury's Spending Challenge website last night. You can check it out here. It is full of ideas submitted by the Great British Public on how the government can save money quickly. You can log in and vote on the ideas that you like. Your first thoughts will be "I've got an idea. Scrap schools completely. That will save a fortune as it's obvious that they are doing nothing as hardly anybody can spell". Yes, the standard of grammar, punctuation and spelling in these ideas is woeful. Once you've got beyond the spelling you will find that the majority of the five star ideas (as voted by the public)are based around immigrants and how to stop giving them money. Other fantastic ideas include one to fit prisons out with huge exercise yards and get the prisoners pedalling on adapted bikes that are connected to the national grid so that we can get free electricity. I am surprised that the person who submitted this idea did not go on to suggest that if the prisoners showed signs of flagging we could send the power back the other way and fry the buggers. I do recommend the site. There are hundreds of ideas there. We should have put one in suggesting that every public sector office that still has kettles swaps them for boilers.



We've been invited to join some friends for a drink and a bite to eat at the wonderful Eagle and Child at Bispham Green tonight. I suppose we'll have to stick to slimline tonics and salads if we are going to stay on track with the diet. We are on week 14 but it's starting to feel like week 41.Today's lunch looks good "Prawn Mayo And Salad With Rice Cakes" but when I look at the ingredients there's no mayo. That's a bit of a cheat.Oh well. I have lost over two stone so far and there's just half a stone to go. But it is starting to feel like it's becoming the never ending diet.



I'm following David Milliband on Twitter. It's nice to follow politicians as they actually take an interest in who is following them. But just one point David, text messages sent after eleven pm (or at least received after 11pm) are not exactly going to make me happy to support your leadership bid. It's hard enough getting to sleep as it is without the beeping phone beeping in the middle of the night.

If Angelina Jolie had been wearing a camera on her head throughout the shooting of some of the chases in Salt ,it might look a bit like this.Pretty amazing.

Craigy Bacon's Big Day

Craig Buckley is celebrating his 27th birthday today (or he will be this evening when he is going out for a family meal). Nicknamed Craigy Bacon from his childhood enjoyment of bacon butties, his love of that great British institution continues with his organisation of the Friday weekly butty order for the factory - the delivery of which I have to watch with hunger pangs as I anticipate my yogurt and banana lunch. Craig joined us as a seventeen year old office junior and has worked in most of the office jobs before moving to his current role assisting the sales team with all the information they need to get the sales growing. Keen (and very capable)footballer Craig met his wife Jenny here at Instanta (our first Instanta wedding). He supports Liverpool and also enjoys walking his dog and having the odd flutter playing online poker. Have a great day Craig and, once again, as this will be the last time I blog your birthday, thanks for your support over the last ten years.



The factory is closed for summer holidays next week although with the weather at the moment you could be forgiven for thinking it was a winter break . We planned this last year to coincide with our annual stock take but after the takeover we changed our stock taking date to 30th June so the holiday date has no real significance although it does help to have everyone off for one week as it means fewer weeks with too many on holiday. Before they go, the lads have gone flat out to meet a big order for 275 units and the pallets have been piling up in the factory. I am pleased to say that the deadlines have been met and they will all go out tonight.



I've been reading the stories about Graham Swann and his drink driving charge. He's been getting a lot of stick about his claim that he was going to buy screwdrivers to rescue a pet kitten stuck beneath the floorboards - certainly a novel and original excuse and one that could spawn hundreds of jokes. But, bizarre as it might sound, Swann had tweeted about his missing cat several times in the previous couple of days so he had certainly lost the animal and far from being staggeringly drunk, his blood alcohol reading was 83mg against a limit of 80 (just 3.75% over the limit and about two pints of beer's worth). I am not condoning drunk driving but surely the police must have some margin for error in their findings and what was their excuse for stopping him? Driving erratically? Jumping a red light? Speeding? No. "He was driving a high performance car in a neighbourhood that had seen a number of burglaries" or maybe to paraphrase "he's got a nicer car than us, let's pull him over".


At last an Orange Wednesday chance to go to the pictures tonight with the release of Salt. Vue are showing it a couple of days before the official release so we can go without the preconceptions we get from reading the reviews. The trailers made it look good (don't they all) and I'm off to get tickets at lunchtime. Thanks to son Paul who bought us a pile of vouchers for Xmas, we can sit in the posh seats and could even enjoy a tub of popcorn if it wasn't for the diet.

Marion and I are getting excited about our trip to London at the weekend to see the broadcast of Magic Numbers the great family entertainment show on ITV1 at 9pm on Saturday. It's live TV which makes it a risky business as BBC weatherman Tomasz Schafernaker discovered to his own cost yesterday.

Fork Lift Training In Full Swing

How's that for a catchy headline? If I get much better I'll be writing for the Sun soon. Well I suppose that it covers today's main story. Here are Sean Johnson (right) and Lee Moore (left), from our factory, with John Hall from VOSS. John is training Lee and Sean on driving and using fork lifts. This will leave us with better cover for holidays and other absences and make sure that there will always be someone available to load the carrier's wagon when he collects our daily sales.

And the training is pretty timely as the factory is getting clogged up with pallets full of boilers for a big order that we are due to complete this week. Perfect for Lee and Sean to put their new skills into practice.



I wrote about Angels of Ribchester yesterday. Here's a photo taken by Mark who took us there. I told you it was a bit different.



There's a debate about legalising drugs going on at the moment. I'm glad that it's being raised again as I've been pushing for it for years. Just think how much crime is caused by drug addicts trying to raise the cash for a fix, how much money is wasted on prison for possession, how many lowlife make a fortune from others' misery. Prohibition of booze caused Chicago to turn into a paradise for Al Capone and mobs like his and areas of many inner cities in England are controlled by drug barons here. Make drugs legal and it comes into the open. Buying from a chemist means that risks of adulterated powders are eliminated. The drug barons will no longer cause misery for their customers and the savings in drugs squad and the like will be phenomenal.On the downside, making drugs more accessible may encourage more users but we have a demand that is being fulfilled by criminals and that demand is not going to go away.

What do you do when you have money to burn? Go out and buy 15,000 fireworks. A bit of a damp squib in my opinion.

I'm Loving Angels

We visited Mark and Nita of Workhouse Marketing on Saturday and they kindly took us to dinner at local restaurant Angels. It's quite odd - we live in a busy seaside town but have a very limited choice of decent places to eat out whilst Mark and Nita live in the middle of nowhere and are within a couple of minutes drive of no end of fine dining establishments.This one, Angels of Ribchester is an amazing find. Perched on a hillside within what was once an old pub, the owners have spared no expense in converting it into a top class restaurant. The decor is totally over the top with the Angels' theme running throughout and a plethora of halos, wings,twinkling light effects and heavenly thrones in the reception area give it the air of a gay night club. But once inside the main dining area, the tables are tastefully set with starched white tablecloths and top quality cutlery and the decor is far more low key and refined. The menu was delicious and the portions sensibly sized so Marion and I were not faced with driving a coach and horses through our diet. The prices reflected the standard of the food and we had an extremely enjoyable evening.Highly recommended.



It was an interesting weekend on the football front. I went to see both Everton and Liverpool play Blackburn and Arsenal respectively. Both games were notable for howling errors by two normally reliable goalkeepers. Howard of Everton managed to spill a harmless ball right into the Blackburn striker's path whilst Liverpool's Pepe Reina marred a near perfect display of goalkeeping by fumbling the ball into his own goal in the very last minute of normal time. Of the four teams that I saw, none impressed greatly. Blackburn were far too dependent on high balls into the box, Everton put too many passes astray in midfield and lost the ball on the halfway line countless times, Arsenal impressed with their possession but created little whilst, for Liverpool, Ngog really needs to learn to control the ball and understand the offside rule as every attack in the first half seemed to break down when the ball was directed towards him. He redeemed himself with a great goal in the second half but by then Liverpool were down to ten men and it was backs to the wall for the rest of the match.The atmosphere at Anfield was better than it was last season and the crowd were behind the team. It will be interesting to see how Liverpool perform with a full eleven at Man City next week.



Marion said that there was a new detective series on BBC2 last night so we thought that we would give it a try. "Vexed" was completely off the wall and within a few minutes I was laughing. "Are you sure that this is not meant to be a comedy" I asked. Marion was not sure but it soon became obvious that it was and, in the spirit of the very first series of "Moonlighting" when the young Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd flirted and charmed their way to future stardom, Toby Stephens and Lucy Punch played it for laughs and raised plenty. I enjoyed so many little scenes within the show such as when Kate (Lucy Punch) is waiting for Jack (Toby Stephens) to turn up to a crime scene and busies herself reading the murder victim's copy of Hello whilst the poor woman lies in a bloody pool beside her and when a misunderstanding leads to her smashing a kettle into an innocent suitor's face and another has her breaking her husband's knee-caps with a rolling pin. It may not sound funny here but I can assure you it was.



I was hoping to implement a new computer system here at Instanta before we retire in November but things are dragging on that front and I have had to start a crash course for our staff on the current system. Today I have been showing Operations Director David Wilson the accounts system. He doesn't need to know it in detail but a background in it will help him and then he can tell everyone else all about it when we have gone.

Looks like Kate from Vexed had another misunderstanding when she went to McDonald's drive thru and they told he they had no Chicken McNuggets left.

A Great Weekend In Prospect

Now just let Liverpool go and spoil it. Tomorrow we are off to Ribchester to visit Mark and Nita from Workhouse Marketing. Mark and I are off to watch Blackburn Rovers play Everton whilst Marion and Nita hit the Ribchester high street. And then we have a meal in a decent restaurant booked and it's off to Anfield on Sunday when it will probably all go downhill. Looking forward to it.



You can't knock the productivity of the group of council workers in Hartlepool. Given the task of painting double yellows on a local street there was no time to get out of the vehicle and move this hedgehog so they simply painted over it. That's the spirit lads.



At last, this week's film reviews cover three new film releases with more than two star ratings so we can finally get back into our cinema going. It seems an eternity since we were going every week. The local Vue is showing "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" starring Nick Cage. His films are a bit hit and miss but they usually have a degree of entertainment. In addition there is "Salt" which has not been reviewed in the Guardian yet but I like thrillers and it may be worth a try although not so sure about Angelina Jolie. The Guardian's two four star tips are , of course, nowhere to be seen in the Vue listings. We can live in hope.



I said the other day that I was looking forward to Instanta entering The Guardian's Pick The Score again this season. But a quick look at their website and they don't seem to be running it this year. What a pity. Maybe the bloke who runs it is on holiday and they are a week late or maybe like all good things, it has come to an end.



Don't miss Stephen Mulhern's Magic Numbers tomorrow evening. A bit earlier this week it's on at 7.50pm on ITV1 and ITV1HD. Great show lined up. We are off to the broadcast next Saturday. Really looking forward to it.


The weather forecast looks pretty good for next weekend so perhaps we could dust off the tent and have a little camping trip. They're so easy to put up nowadays.