Some Final Toasts

Here's Marion raising a glass on Saturday evening as we toasted everyone at Instanta using one of the crystal glasses that were amongst the kind retirement gifts given to us by our generous staff. Friends joined us for a meal at home and we used a very fine vintage bottle of wine given to me for my birthday by son Paul and his wife Josephine - thanks it was absolutely fabulous.

Others who we must praise in this penultimate Instanta blog are Simon Smith of Dunk Ink who travelled all the way from Tunbridge Wells to be at our retirement meal on Friday evening at Ho Lee Chows in Southport. Simon has been doing PR work for us since way back in the early 90's and has hundreds of excellent contacts in the catering trade. Thank you Simon, your presence and generosity at the meal was really appreciated by both of us. Best wishes to you and to Sue.

Silverwood Exhibitions who have designed and built all of our exhibition stands for many years must not go without thanks. Barry and Mike are two of the most genial Yorkshire men you could ever wish to meet and their stands promoted the Instanta image to brilliant effect making us look much bigger than we were at first. They are the most professional exhibition stand designers that we have ever worked with and we can strongly recommend them to everyone.


I had hoped to put a photo of the Jackson family from BJ Eurosell Ltd on here as my final tribute for today but unfortunately, as I write, the photo has not arrived. Jim Jackson together with his wife Barabara and son Paul have been supplying Instanta since 1989. They source all of Instanta's boxes and insulation material and you couldn't meet a nicer bunch of people. Paul and Jim are regular fellow sufferers at Anfield and I sometimes see them on the trek up to the home matches. Sorry that your photo was too late to appear here but at least all your packaging always arrives on time. If you need to source any packaging materials BJ Eurosell are a wonderful supplier.

Of course our friends on Saturday had to eat early so that we could watch X Factor. All my money is on Cher Lloyd but her odds have drifted so other punters disagree. Watching this I simply don't understand why she is not favourite. If any of the contestants has the "X Factor" rather than can sing well look no further than this.

Where Would We Have Been Without KLH Electronics PLC?

It was over sixteen years ago that we were introduced to a young John Walkinshaw and his company KLH Electronics by a fellow metal detecting enthusiast and I have to say that this find outweighed any treasure that we have ever dug up as John's brilliance in electronic design transformed Instanta's products from being advanced for the industry to being more than advanced for any industry. With John's help we developed features never before found on water boilers and had the rest of the catering trade scrambling to catch up. Not one to rest on his laurels, John has always been ahead of the game and when the competition caught up and brought out service warning codes and ECO modes we were ready to move ahead again and launch another more advanced generation of boilers incorporating liquid crystal displays, timers and built in filter monitors. The printed circuits designed and developed by John have not only been advanced but also extremely reliable. KLH have invested huge sums in automated production and these robotic production lines ensure that every board is identical and have made Instanta the market leader in advanced water boilers.  

Every electronics company needs a brilliant designer like John but we must also thank his fellow director Carol Morris for the efficiency with which she has run the operation ensuring that supplies are delivered on time and dealing with any queries quickly and in a very friendly and efficient manner. We will miss John, Carol and her husband Tom and everyone else at KLH and must thank them for the major contribution that they have made to Instanta's success.

Before we used John's design skills, all our boilers incorporated bulky electro-mechanical thermostats like these. They are good and reliable stats but the bulbs are in contact with the water and can suffer from limescale deposits in hard water areas and they have fairly long differentials when switching.

These tiny thermistors introduced to us by KLH transformed  temperature sensing by being extremely accurate and operating on a small differential ensuring constant temperatures and, being fitted externally, less sensitivity to limescale and much easier service.

It looks like Cher Lloyd, my X Factor tip for this year, may struggle to win. She came in the bottom two on Sunday night despite being much better than Wagner and Mary so she may not be as popular as I thought. Mind you, no X Factor winner to date has ever been in the bottom two so there has to be a first time and, in the same week in 2008, KLS were in the bottom two and finished as runners up. Much depends on how big the Wagner bandwagon has become. The anti Cowell brigade managed to knock Simon Cowell's act Joe off the number one spot last Christmas and they could do the same sort of thing again now by voting Wagner to win. But the laugh will be on Simon's face as he's the one who stands to gain the most from all those telephone votes and there's bound to be some sort of get out clause in that prize recording contract. I'm keeping faith in Cher for now and will be interested to see how she performs on Saturday night (if our friends who are coming round for a meal are fans of the show).

Here's another example of the hilarious jokers those great British telephone voters are. They've crucified poor Paige for the benefit of Wagner, kept a leaden lump in Strictly Come Dancing and now they're putting the knife into Gillian McKeith. OK so she's not the world's most popular woman but, after a week of being chosen for those gruesome insect torturing trials, isn't it time to give her a break?

We Start The New Week With A New Office

We arrived today to a sparkling new office. After the desks arrived on Thursday, the decorators came in on Saturday and spruced everywhere up with a lick of paint. All the cracks have gone now and everywhere is looking bright and fresh. The carpet is next and then we can start putting things back up on the wall and mess it all up again.

We've got a big meeting tomorrow. It is most likely going to be the last business meeting of our working careers and Marion and I will be giving official notice of our resignation as directors of the company due to our retirement on 30th November. I've just done some figures to report at the meeting and I have to say that they look pretty good and we can go out on a positive note in the knowledge that the business is going from strength to strength and growing healthily and that our new owners made a good buy when they bought our shares.

I'm off to the doctor today for a check up. Thanks to the wonders of the NHS our local surgery carry out regular checks on blokes who are over fifty. It seems that we are in the category that is most at risk from high blood pressure, heart disease and weight problems. I had all the blood tests last week and my weight is now at a healthy level. As for the blood pressure, I've been treated for this for about eight years now and it's very much under control. In fact when I took my reading on Saturday is was 95 over 65 which seems to be on the low side. Mind you I worried about the reading and a couple of minutes later it was 111 over 65. It would be nice if I could reduce the medication as with blood pressure tablets, cholesterol pills, sleeping pills and painkillers for the bad hip I go to bed rattling.

Last year I tipped Joe to win the X Factor and had a small win on Betfair. This year's competition is much harder to predict as there are a number of likely candidates. I have had a flutter on Treyc and Katie as I think that their odds are too high and there will be a chance to lay the bets in the next couple of weeks as they stay in the competition.At the moment I don't think that either will win. I feel that the best price is Cher (above) who is 13-1 on Betfair today. I don't particularly like her music but if the same people who watch YouTube are those that vote on X Factor there may be a clue there. At the time of writing, Matt's performance from Saturday has had 352,000 hits on YouTube whereas Cher has only had 281,000 with One Direction trailing in as a poor third at 173,000. But if you scroll down the YouTube chart you will find that Cher's performance has been uploaded four times and she holds four of today's top twenty most watched slots taking her total to 398,000. Just a thought. I struggle to look at her with a straight face after Grace Dent likened her to Mrs Overall on Twitter.




Now that we are only six weeks away from retirement We're going to have to think about buying ourselves some mobile phones. Dave Wilson and Nick have been dealing with phones here at Instanta and every now and then a new one will turn up on my desk and I'll spend the next couple of weeks trying to work out all the features. I haven't done a great deal of research yet but no doubt Marion will find a website on the lines of comparethebestmobile.com and try and persuade me to get the most economical option but I've always fancied one of those iPhones. If I don't get any phone calls I can always do a bit of performing. Remember to double click if it doesn't fit on your screen in the blog.