By The Time We Get To Woodstock

No we aren't off to a festival. It's just that Marion and I have decided to indulge ourselves and take two days off work. That's a bit of a luxury although we did have a week off work booked. However with the accountant in full flow it wasn't the best time to be away. Anyway, we are off to the NEC for our favourite Antiques For Everyone Fair. It's a great antique fair for anyone interested in good antiques instead of the rubbish that turns up in your average fairs which should be called "Find the Antique fairs" being filled with so much repro that was made last week. After that we are going to stay at the Kings Arms in Woodstock.And hope to visit nearby Blenheim Palace on Friday.



Then on Saturday we are going to see the opening of P J Crook's latest art exhibition in Burford. PJ is our favourite artist and we have two of her paintings in our collection. We scraped together the money to buy the first one years ago at one of her very first exhibitions in Theatre Clwyd in Wales and are so pleased that we did. The second (similar to the one below) was a surprise gift for Marion's birthday last year.





We have to be back for Saturday evening as we are off to see our favourite comedian Eddie Izzard who is performing his "Stripped" show at the Echo Arena. This will be our third visit to one of Eddie's shows. He is just superb. If you haven't seen him, do try and do so.



But before that there's yet more culture in store for us with a visit to the Everyman in Liverpool to see Jonathan Pryce in Pinter's The Caretaker tonight. I am really looking forward to this. I didn't enjoy it much when it was read to us by our English teacher at school (doing all the parts himself) but I guess that Pryce will be much better than "Sir" was.



With such a glut of culture we may not find time for our regular visit to Orange Wednesday this week. But if we do, we will definitely be off to see Fantastic Mr Fox.And speaking of fantastic animals, did you see the meerkats in Life on BBC1 last night? I couldn't find a clip from the programme but this one is as near as dammit.

The Draw's Been Made Who Will Be Our Hustler

Yes I've just done the draw for the inaugural Instanta Pool Tournament and between now and Christmas fifteen Instanta employees will be battling it out for the coveted trophy (I haven't bought it yet but I am sure that it will be much coveted when I do).The matches will be played as best of three and the draw has brought together some interesting pairings with twins Darren and Gary Rodwell matched against each other. One contentious issue will be how Factory Leader Tony Mercer managed to get a bye but, be assured, everything was above board.

The full draw follows.

Andy Fyles v Joey Jones
Craig Buckley v Peter Barlow
Tony Mercer v Bye
Craig Mercer v Lee Moore
John Brassey v Peter Brindle
Mario Kiepas v Phil Joce
Gary Rodwell v Darren Rodwell
Jason Poland v Nick Neal



I had a visit from CEDABOND director Keith (3rd right above) of Instock in Carlisle today. CEDABOND is a consortium of catering equipment dealers who club together to negotiate the best deals they can from manufacturers and suppliers. Keith had a look around the factory and I am sure that he was suitably impressed for us to continue as a preferred supplier to CEDABOND.If you are a catering equipment dealer and want to know more about this catering band of brothers, click here



This week we've none of the agonising that we had last week for our choice of film for Orange Wednesday. We finally gave it a miss last time but this time there's no competition with the new Pixar movie Up in 3D way ahead in the reviews. The reviews of the film were almost universally gushing with a number of papers giving the film the full five star treatment.I'll have to make sure that Marion brings the Kleenex as I believe that it's got a lot of weepy moments.



We're off to see Tom Jones at the Liverpool Echo Arena on Saturday night. He's being supported by Florence Rawlings. "Florence who?" I hear you say (which is exactly what we said) but we'll let you know what she's like and anyway she looks better on the blog than Tom would have done.

I'll leave you today with a clip from last night's Life on BBC. Marion's been raving about the nut cracking monkeys so, just for her, here they are. (brilliant aren't they?)