Our Boomerang Almost Came Back

We had a great evening on Friday when Mark and Nita from Workhouse Marketing joined us for a meal at the Malmaison in Liverpool. It was good to catch up on all their news including the imminent opening of the Whalley Wine Shop in Whalley (where else?)by their son Tom. It's going to be supplying a great range of wines and more and Tom, who once managed the same premises for Thresher, is hoping that his old clients will return and benefit once again from his expertise. With the strength of the Workhouse publicity machine behind him I'm sure that he will make it a great success.



Unfortunately things went downhill the morning after our evening at the Malmaison. Whilst we were having breakfast, a call came through from the factory. Yes I had given Andy the closely guarded secret that is my mobile phone number and told him to phone in case of emergency. We had some of the factory team working overtime to catch up on the backlog of orders that had built up when the circuits were late. So when the phone rang I knew that it was an emergency. Andy told me of a programming problem with the boilers and I couldn't suss it out. So planned day shopping in Liverpool was curtailed as we weren't in the mood for it and we returned early.The nightmare scenario was that three hundred circuits would have to be scrapped. So, after a couple of hours of thinking, I came into the factory and started playing around with the boilers on test. And, guess what? The programme glitch was dead simple, all that was required was for the boilers to be rebooted to accept the new programmes (a bit like when you put a new programme on your computer) and they were all working perfectly. What a relief! I always vowed not to work on Saturdays but now that I no longer own the business, there I was at 6pm.(Chris please note). Thanks to the lads who gave up their time.



I still have a chance to meet Sandi Toksvig. I had a phone call on Friday from a very nice researcher Laura at the BBC and she asked me to come to Manchester for an audition for the show.So tomorrow evening I'm off to the BBC in Oxford Road. I don't really think I stand much chance as, although I know quite a lot about ceramics and Japanese stuff, I don't think I'm up to much on the rest of the antique spectrum.


As part of the audition I have to take a favourite antique with me and talk enthusiastically about it. There are quite a few on a display in the lounge but I'm torn as to which to take as I really like and am enthusiastic about them all.I'll probably take the least valuable as, knowing my luck lately, I'm bound to drop it. And talking of dropped stuff, I just bought a beautiful antique teapot on eBay. The seller said it was in good condition. Now I don't know about you but I don't think that four enormous rivets and a re glued chip on the spout could be defined as "Good condition". The seller was fine and offered a full refund (even saying I could keep the pot if I wanted). I loved the style of his response "hi there ,
to my knowledge [and i m not THE XPERT]it was in good condition.the handle , didn t know , sorry .
to me it s just a teapot .it s eBay .you can t see it , sometimes you are lucky as a buyer , sometimes not .look , i ll send you a full refund if you d b happy that .i m not fussed " sic as they say.

Finally something to shout about at Anfield. I invited my brother Peter to join me but he was unenthusiastic about the prospect of another boring performance so Nick came and saw one of the best goals scored at Anfield for a few seasons.

You Couldn't Make It Up

I don't want to start sounding like Richard Littlejohn (heaven forbid) but an item on the Today programme this morning certainly made me raise an eyebrow. It appears that a woman in Norfolk asked the local Job Centre to put up an advert for a cleaner. In the advert she asked for applicants who were "reliable and hard working". When she called the Job centre the following day she was told that the advert could not be displayed because using the word "reliable" would leave the Job Centre open to prosecution for discriminating against "unreliable" workers.Hmmm. The Job Centre did put the advert on their website but did not display it in their office. Now I'm all for political correctness but who in their right mind would go to court and say "I'm not reliable and I am suing." Of course this argument doesn't have much relevance to Instanta. We have never ever had an unreliable person work for us in our 53 year history. Honest.



The new brochure is approaching completion. I have been struggling to get hold of a couple of case studies to break up the endless pages of stainless steel and chrome. We have thousands of satisfied customers but the likes of the Police, the NHS,the Prison Service and major restaurant and hotel chains have strict rules on endorsement and , whilst we may well get permission "in due course" we simply don't have time to wait for the approvals. So a big thank you to David West of Marble Hill House near Richmond who managed to get us approval to mention his boiler and to Amanda Sweeney of City Servicing for pointing us in his direction.



The wedding is approaching at breakneck speed. On the Friday evening before the wedding Marion and I are hosting a "rehearsal dinner" at L'Escargot in Soho for the 30 people who will have roles in the ceremony. It promises to be a very pleasant evening and, to date, almost everybody has accepted. The next job is to arrange a seating plan. As long as everybody gets on with each other that should be a piece of cake. It's a wedding. Everybody gets on with everybody at weddings. Don't they?



Now I don't want to set alarm bells ringing amongst Liverpool fans but I just got an email from the club offering me £20 off one of their special edition Fernando Torres shirts. Being a businessman I wonder why on earth the club would want to discount the price of their best and most popular player's shirts. Surely they can sell as many as they can can get hold of. But the transfer deadline closes on Sunday, Liverpool are skint and Torres is a valuable asset.Who would want to be left with a pile of shirts on Monday? Just a thought.

And speaking of Liverpool I'll finish today with the highlights of last night's match at Wolves....

Happy Birthday Mike

It's Mike Chubbs' 37th Birthday today but he's not in so I can't get a photo and have had to use the one that I used last year (hopefully I can update it tomorrow). We all wish him a really great day. Mike has been working at Instanta for 15 years and he is in charge of our engineering workshop where he runs 2 CNC lathes. Mike has had a rough time this year after he injured his shoulder whilst playing with his son Jamie.Sadly the hospital missed the dislocation and has had a very painful few months. As he enjoys golf this has prevented him from playing. We have to admire the stoical way that he has handled this injury.Being an Evertonian he's used to suffering. Have a great day Mike.



Love it or loathe it you have to hand it to the X Factor as it certainly provides plenty to talk about. Today the office has been awash with indignation over the survival of John and Edward and outrage over Jamie's song but, let's face it, the boys' dire performance was more entertaining than some of the Karaoke that we had to sit through.I managed to win £117 by betting that Rachel, Jamie and Lloyd would not be eliminated.Whilst it was clear to the world and his dog that the Irish twins were the worst act by a million miles you have to remember that this is being voted on by a British public who put John Sergeant through on Strictly every week and kept Barry from Eastenders on ice for weeks longer than he should have been.I hope that blog readers took my advice and backed Joe when he was at 13-1.He's 4.9-1 today.



Yes, all in all, yesterday was a pretty good day. I went to Anfield to watch Liverpool beat Manchester United 2-0 with yet another sublime performance from boy wonder Fernando Torres. I forecast a 2-0 win in our Guardian Pick The Scores competition and that catapulted me to the top of the league for the first time this season. The forecast was not wishful thinking. I forecast a defeat at Sunderland last week too but I thought that as long as Fernando played we could get something from the game. Mind you, standing up for a full ninety minutes did nothing for my arthritic hip (ouch).



Our prodigal son Craig (above right) returned to the office today from his brief adventure on the road. But as Lee (left) did so well standing in for him he is staying in the office and Marion has been showing him the ropes this morning. In no time he will be an office all rounder.Last week I said that I was treading water here in the office but Lee has now made things a lot easier for us.

I think Alan should be on X Factor.

We Bought The Lad From Sunny Spain

This is not (and never will be) a football blog but football (and Liverpool) has played a large part in my life and it sometimes finds its way on here. There has to be an exceptional reason of course and, of course, there is today. On Saturday I was lucky enough to be amongst the forty odd thousand fans who witnessed Fernando Torres score a most sublime hat trick. Football has had a lot of bad press lately but when you see a player as graceful and scintillating as Torres you realise why it is sometimes called"The Beautiful Game".In my forty two years as a regular on the Kop I have only seen a handful of Liverpool players with that special something.In the seventies it was Kevin Keegan, in the eighties Kenny Dalglish, in the nineties Robbie Fowler but only now as the noughties are reaching their end has a player emerged to be given the ultimate accolade of Liverpool Superstar. At half time on Saturday I sent a text to my son Paul "Torres is Roy of the Rovers" it read. Five minutes into the second half I sent another "No! He's better than that". Arise Fernando a legend already (and he's only 25!).



You will no doubt have read about the amazing glut of spiders that has been witnessed here in the UK. It seems that we are in the mating season. The conditions are perfect and they are breeding like rabbits. OK they are breeding like spiders really. They aren't quite as cuddly as rabbits as Marion will tell you having let out an ear piercing scream when we got back from the pictures the other night and she found a mini tarantula on the kitchen floor. We haven't escaped them here at Instanta either but, as you can see, we are humane and, instead of stamping on the Instanta giant spider, we used the old glass and cardboard trick and took it outside (and then we stamped on it - we didn't want to spoil the floor with squashed spider. Only kidding) and released it to enjoy the spider breeding season - there are some pretty hot spiders in the bushes behind the canteen.



David Bailey eat your heart out.It was Southport Air Show this weekend and the Red Arrows flew so near to our rooftop that I could see the whites of their pilots' eyes as I looked out of our loft window (or I could have if they weren't wearing goggles). Here's my photo of the lead plane as it went over about ten feet above the chimney. Flipping fast aren't they?



What's that? You clicked on the director's blog link thinking it might be relevant to your desire to purchase a super smashing water boiler? Here's our wonderful CT2000 just for you. Actually I got an email on Friday asking for entries for the green equipment awards at a CEDA or CESA do in the late autumn. I think it's all very well to give an award to a product that is green but what about the manufacturing process? Here at Instanta we have followed our green principles to the extent that a recent BSI environmental management system auditor told us that our energy usage followed a perfect curve and was the best that he had seen.Maybe we'll enter all our products and argue that because they are all made in an extremely green environment, they should all win.

I can only finish with one thing today.