It's Make Or Break For Rafa Tonight

No Orange Wednesday for me this week as we went to the pictures on Blue Monday because Liverpool are entertaining Tottenham Hotspur at Anfield this evening. Normally this would be a fixture to look forward to but the long haul up the hill and up the steps to the seat is becoming less and less inviting as the season progresses. There was a time when there would be a bound in the steps on the way to the games but it is now more of a trudge. Although he has huge support I have to blame Rafa. If you are in charge of any business whether it is making boilers or running a football team the buck has to stop with the boss. And if you can induce a feeling of indifference in a supporter who has been going for forty five years you've got to be doing something wrong.Let's see how things turn out tonight.



Perhaps the Reds will take a leaf out of the New York Jets' book. After a completely indifferent season in the NFL, the Jets (my son's favourite team)scraped into the play offs with a run of results from other teams that went in their favour. And now they are just one game away from reaching the Super Bowl the USA's biggest sports event of the year , an event that they haven't won since 1968. It will be a fantastic achievement if they make it to the Super Bowl. So perhaps all is not lost for Liverpool. Spirit of Istanbul and all that.



The new brochure is looking good. I'm getting quite close to the deadline so I need to get it to the printers soon. There's bound to be some errors in it. I am hopeless at spotting typos (as you will know if you are a regular reader of this blog) but fortunately Jenny and Marion between them seem to have the knack of picking up most of my mistakes.



I just got the figures from CESA for the last quarter. We send our sales figures to the trade association every quarter and they collate all the members' info anonymously and get the overall picture back to us. I was very pleased to see that for 2009 we beat the average change by 15%. Well done everyone at Instanta.

I'll finish with a Death Metal Rooster. Why? Why not?

A Filip For Rafa

I mentioned the other day that I had heard about a new Instanta baby boy and here he is Filip Kolasinski. Filip was born on 21st July and weighed in at a healthy 3 kilos. Congratulations to proud dad assembly worker Rafa Kolasinski and mum Beate. He's a beautiful baby.




Orange Wednesday tonight so we have finally decided to go and see Bruno. I think we'll either love it or hate it with little chance of anything in between.



We've got the new bank area manager coming to see us this afternoon. We'll have to see what he has to say about the wonderful interest rate collar that's currently costing us about £3,000 per month. I doubt that there's any way out of it though.



I did the company figures yesterday and they look OK. I also got the industry figures for the first two quarters of 2009 yesterday and we are certainly ahead of the field in terms of sales growth. Our growth is shown at -1.0% whilst the industry average is a much higher negative.

Here's a taster of what we are letting ourselves in for tonight.