A Relaxing Weekend

After several hectic weeks at work and at home we managed to get some relaxation on Sunday and had a great day with a morning spent listening to the wonderful Radio 4 (Broadcasting House, The Archers Omnibus,Desert Island Discs (Jimmy Mulville catch it on the Beeb website if you can) and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue) - a morning worthy of the license fee on its own. And to make the weekend even better we managed to see both our kids. With Sarah living in St Andrews and Paul in London this doesn't happen often but Sarah and her partner Duncan made a surprise visit en route to a holiday cottage in Cartmel on Friday and stayed over for the night. It was great to see them and I hope that they enjoy their cottage break and get a bit of good weather.

As for Paul, we only caught a glimpse of him and his lovely wife Josephine. They went to the broadcast of Stephen Mulhern's Magic Numbers on Saturday evening and Marion spent the half hour after the show finished winding the SkyPlus backwards and forwards until she found them in the audience (centre above). They both seemed to be enjoying themselves and we certainly did too. The show is very light entertainment, the acts are polished and highly watchable and there was some tension at the close when a viewer managed to win a whopping £70,000. Marion and I are going to a broadcast of the show, which Paul developed, in a couple of weeks and we are looking forward to it very much.





Can you spot the difference between our super WB2 steam and water boiler and the other product? You may think it's easy but it was beyond one of our customers (who shall remain nameless). We ran out of WB2 boilers the other day so, when a customer was desperate to source one quickly, we phoned around a load of distributors and found one who was willing to send one from their own stock with us agreeing to replace it for him when we were back in stock a couple of days later. The desperate customer was relieved and extremely grateful when we organised everything for him. But his gratitude and relief were short lived when this other boiler turned up instead. The whole exercise cost about £100 in carriers' fees and made us look a bit stupid.I suppose the old adage "if you want something doing properly- do it yourself" will always be true.



With a little spare time yesterday I had a few minutes on Marion's WiiFit. I haven't used it for some time and expected it to compliment me on my weight loss. But no. The squeaky little voice told me I was out of time for my targets and I still have to lose another two stone. Two stone!I'll look like a skeleton.Just to rub it in my "wii mii" makes me look like Billy Bunter.

I'll close today with the Peckahm Terminator a video that makes interesting viewing on a number of planes and raises a great deal for discussion. Firstly, are bus drivers told not to intervene in arguments? Secondly, do they teach English in schools today? Thirdly, would you catch a bus in Peckham? And finally if you want to exit a bus is this the best way? Oh, and if you are easily offended by extremely bad language, watch with the sound off.

Belated Birthday Celebrations

I'm always a bit nervous about surprise birthday parties as the person whose birthday it is has a lot of time to think "has everybody forgotten my birthday?" when the event passes almost without comment. So when our daughter Sarah's partner Duncan told us that he had booked a holiday house in the borders to celebrate her 30th I hoped that the small gifts that we sent and the apologies that we couldn't see her as we had to be at work for stock taking would not be too much of a letdown as, let's face it, 30 is quite a milestone in your life. Fortunately everything went well and a group of thirteen of Sarah's friends and family had a very pleasant country weekend in the ancient town of Melrose. Above is Sarah cutting her cake.



Duncan booked a private room in the local Burt's Hotel for a formal dinner on Friday (above)and on Saturday it was home made pizza, strawberries and birthday cake.



And speaking of the cake, I have to make a special mention of Jan Harbon who once worked here in the Instanta office before taking up her new role as a full time foster parent. Jan has always enjoyed making celebration cakes and she kindly made this one for Sarah to our brief. Being a summer baby Sarah has always celebrated birthdays when strawberries are in season and we spent many happy hours with her as a toddler at the local pick your own farm where strawberries would find her basket and her mouth in roughly equal quantities with her trademark saying of "that one's a booty daddy" before it disappeared. We possibly should have weighed her in with our collected fruit. Jan captured this theme with this wonderful celebration of summer and strawberries (and the beautiful fruit cake beneath the decoration tasted as good as it looked). So thank you so much Jan and please put your prices up.



As one of Sarah's birthday presents we made up a photo book of her life for her using the website BobBooks.co.uk (highly recommended - great service) on the Internet and had a lot of fun digging out and scanning ancient photos to go in it. Here's a photo of us as teenagers about forty years ago that we used to start the book. Son Paul says that he doesn't want one when he is thirty but that's not going to stop him getting one.

The visit to Scotland meant that I missed half of the World Cup final but "missed" is probably not the right word. As I said on the blog on Friday, the match was almost guaranteed to turn out as it did and my only regret is that I didn't put my money where my mouth was and put a bet on the nil nil full time scoreline. For me the highlight of the World Cup was this stunning save from Rob Green in the very first England game. Strange how time plays tricks with the memory.

Such An Important Date Tomorrow

It was thirty years ago tomorrow that Marion and I became parents for the first time. Our lovely daughter Sarah arrived in the world and we were overjoyed. It hardly seems five minutes ago. So much has happened in those thirty years and Sarah has gone from being a beautiful baby to a beautiful young woman. She was a great dancer as a child and has always been very good with numbers (don't know where that comes from) so it was no surprise that she was successful in getting two Maths based degrees at St Andrews University and is now a maths teacher in Cupar. Marion and I are both hoping that she has a wonderful 30th and are sorry that we won't be sharing the day with her.





I am sure that our head of welding Craig Peach won't mind Sarah stealing his limelight as Craig is today celebrating his 35th birthday. Keen Southport FC supporter Craig joined Instanta as a sixteen year old and nineteen years later he is still with us. Craig is planning to celebrate his birthday this evening with a family meal out in Churchtown. He's very much a family man and he and his partner Dawn have two daughters of their own. Dannika is fifteen and Georgia is eleven.Craig shares my interest in antiques and enjoys trying to find bargains at local events. Have a great celebration Craig.



After losing my World Cup gambling kitty when Germany,Spain and France lost in the first round I changed my betting away from football and concentrated on Big Brother a subject on which my son Paul (who works in the industry)is somenthing of an expert. Acting on Paul's tip I put all my money on Irish student Caoihme in the hope that her then long odds would shorten. Unfortunately it appears that she has been chosen for eviction tonight and with her odds to go at just 1.16:1 on Betfair it would seem that I am going to have to wait until X Factor or the start of the new football season before I have another flutter.

Our ace local photographer Peter Raymond often supplies me with funny titbits for the blog and he emailed me this video yesterday. And to think I always associated Old Spice with dull.

Well I Would Drive Five Hundred Miles

Unlike the Proclaimers I couldn't walk five hundred miles (bad hip you know) but we did drive five hundred miles on Saturday to go for lunch at the Seafood Restaurant in St Andrews. "Is the food that good?" I hear you ask. Well it is very good indeed and well worth a visit although a five hundred mile round trip is not recommended. No, we went to see our wonderful daughter Sarah who was involved in an horrific car crash the Friday before.We wanted to see that she was OK. I am pleased to say that she looked great although she was still suffering from the shock. She won't let me put the photo of her car on the blog but the photo below of another car will give you a good idea of what happened to her. She is extremely brave and I am pleased to say that she went back to school this morning so lets hope that the kids gave her a good day.



Nasty eh. Whilst we were on our flying visit to St Andrews we managed to get a look at Sarah and Duncan's house which is unrecognisable from when they bought it last summer. They have done a fantastic job of doing the place up and it's going to be amazing when it is finished. I know that they are both a bit fed up of living in what is virtually a building site but there are three finished rooms so the house is livable in and it won't be long before there's a fourth and fifth room finished. Sarah and Paul both gave their mum a lovely birthday present so Marion had a very happy birthday (apart from the Abba tribute of course). Can you hear the drums Fernando? Sadly yes my ears are still ringing.



Here's John Walkinshaw from our electronics suppliers KLH Electronics plc looking very thoughtful. John has been working on our new all singing all dancing circuits for our new range of boilers and they are fantastic but there are a couple of tiny, minuscule glitches which have cropped up and, being a perfectionist, John is determined to put them right. We're almost there now although his assistant Michelle has christened the circuit the bungee as it keeps bouncing back to her. Pretty sure that we have ironed the lot out now and we're all set. You won't find a more comprehensive boiler circuit anywhere.



I see that BBC2 are running a quiz style programme for antique collectors. It's called Antiques Master and is aimed at finding the top amateur antiques expert in the country. I don't by any means think that I am the top amateur antique expert in the country but I may be one of the top amateur antique experts in the country who are willing to make a fools of themselves on the telly so the application is in the post.Speaking of quizzes, we are off to the local accountants Champion's quiz night tonight at a local bar. These are usually fun events. Our biggest problem is coming up with a witty name for our team. It's traditional for pub quiz teams to have quirky names like The Know It Ales or Never Been Quizzed. We are looking for something original. Any ideas before 5pm welcome.

Here are some blokes in India who must fancy ending up like poor Sarah.

How Can A Bank Lose £4 billion?

For my sins my first career on leaving school was in banking. Having studied hard and gained all my banking qualifications after learning at the foot of my very old school manager Mr Wood I have to wonder how things have changed to the extent that a single bank lost £4 billion in just six months.I used to get upset if my till didn't balance by 5p so £4 billion! Not the US billion but the British billion that's £4,000,000,000 or £65.63 for every single person in the UK in six months. Old Mr Wood would be turning in his grave. Mind you, the writing was on the wall years ago. In 1988 as I got my first branch manager job and just before I left the bank they introduced two new products - endowment/pension mortgages and payment protection insurance. The sales people were so keen to sell these that alarm bells rang in my head and I felt that the endowment and pension forecasts seemed too good to be true and the payment insurance seemed extremely expensive with all the premiums added to the loan at the start and interest charged on them. I refused to sell any endowment or pension mortgages and sent customers to the local insurance brokers who could do the payment protection for a fraction of the cost. It didn't make me popular with the bank but at least I can somewhat smugly say today that I was right.



Got a call out of the blue yesterday from daughter Sarah to say that she is coming down from St Andrews tonight to stay with us for a few days. That's really great. We've been asking her to visit during her school holidays and we're really looking forward to seeing her.



The new pool table has arrived so the lads now have the choice of pool, darts TV or the gym during the lunch hour. The last pool table was great and has financed the new one. Here's Jason sinking the very first ball.



The quote of the week came from Charlie Brooker on "You Have Been Watching" last night. Commenting on Jeremy Clarkson's outrageous use of the c word against Gordon Brown, Charlie said it was a case of the **** calling the kettle a ****.



The show also had the wonderful Reginald D Hunter on the panel.Reginald has become something of a panel show regular this year and I've seen him on "You Have Been Watching", "Have I Got News For You" and "Eight Out Of Ten Cats". He has stolen the show on every one of them and I think he's going to be a big star. Here's a "taste"