Thank you Michael

No time for blogging yesterday as Michael Crouch came to visit Instanta and take me and Marion out for lunch. I must express my sincere thanks to Michael for taking the time and for travelling so far out of his way to see us. Michael is the Australian owner and founder of the Zip Group which he created over fifty years ago and which he has developed into the runaway success that it is today.

And speaking of runaway success leads me seamlessly to last night's Orange Wednesday offering at the local Vue. With the cinema foyer heaving with Harry Potter fans, we went in the other direction and watched the new Wesley Snipes film "Unstoppable". It's a classic old fashioned disaster movie starting with the introduction of the characters and then quickly throwing them all into the disaster mix. But there's nothing wrong with old fashioned and the film had this viewer on the edge of his seat throughout. It's filmed with great pace and everything about it looks very real which is a refreshing change after the glut of CGI in all the recent blockbusters. If you wanted to be critical you could pick plenty of holes in the film but, if you just want to enjoy yourself,  simply sit back and enjoy 98 minutes of great entertainment. Instead of watching in our staid British silence, we would have loved to see this in an American cinema as I am sure that the showing would have been enlivened even more by the unrestrained,  whooping and cheering that you get in the USA .

Although we don't retire officially until Tuesday, the staff at Instanta are giving me and Marion a send off at a popular local  Chinese restaurant tomorrow evening. We're looking forward to it. It will be very strange attending our last ever Instanta do. Please don't expect any speeches. I'm not sure that we could find the words too easily.

Although Factory Leader Tony Mercer did tell me a story yesterday that would go down well in an after dinner speech. He has saved this for now when we are retiring. Tony is our longest serving employee but tells me that he got the job entirely by accident. It seems that he was playing truant from school when his dad spotted him in Southport. "What are you doing out of school?" asked his dad. Always a quick thinker, Tony spotted the nearby Employment Office and, in a flash, said that he had been given time off to visit the labour exchange and look for a job. Doubting the veracity of Tony's claim, his dad insisted on accompanying him into the office where they saw the Instanta job advertised. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I'll leave you today with an ode to Gillian McKeith.

Our Back Garden Allotment

Our daughter Sarah bought us a patio vegetable garden for Christmas and it arrived last week. We got a huge box full of young plants and Marion has been busy planting as many as possible. It will come in handy for our diet and instead of buying loads of salad ingredients and vegetables, we should soon, hopefully, be able to pop into the garden and help ourselves.



I didn't have enough time to blog yesterday and Wednesday. We are heading for our year end a couple of months early in order to fall in line with the group accounts and this involves a good deal of planning and preparation. Sales of our excellent boilers ,including the super 1500lcd (pictured), continue to grow. We need to bring our processes in line with the rest of the group and as part of this process we will be reviewing our prices earlier than usual this year and will be implementing some price changes on 1st August.Customers will be advised of the impending changes in a week or two.



I'm off down south on Monday. My recruitment process is coming to fulfillment now and Nick and I are planning to interview the top candidates for our new Southern Area Sales Manager position at our parent company Zip's offices in Chiswick. I can't invite candidates until I have the results of some tests that we sent them. I am hoping to see some good scores if I have done my initial vetting properly and am looking forward to meeting four or five of them.

I'm also looking forward to seeing England get back into winning form tonight. In case you have been out of circulation since last week, here are the highlights of their first performance...........in Lego.

Another Job Well Done By Silverwood Exhibtions

As you can see, our stand at the Hotelympia exhibition here at Excel is pretty eye catching once again. So another thank you to Barry and Mike of Silverwood Exhibitions who designed and erected it for us (and will be taking it away on Thursday). They are a very hard working team and I'm sure that, with their non-stop wisecracking, if the exhibition business every dries up, there would be a new career for them on stage.




This is our first exhibition as part of the Zip group so we are going to have a Zip colleague with us every day of the show as we have a Zip under counter boiler and chiller on show and we need to listen to the experts so that we can learn about it. Jason Lee drew the short straw and did the Sunday stint with us yesterday. Keen Milwall fan Jason lives in Sidcup and covers the SE London area for Zip. It was good to meet him and get to learn a little bit more about our parent company's methods and operations.



Also with us on the stand for a few days is Anton Scoones the young head chef of the General Tarleton near Knaresborough. Anton is helping us to demonstrate the benefits of sous vide cooking and using our SV38 digital water bath to do so. I can now report that this product has won an award in the Caterer And Hotelkeeper new product awards and we are going to be presented with our prize tomorrow.



Here is Aton's sous vide signature chicken dish that he cooked up yesterday. We can't serve the food as we didn't want to go through all the hoops necessary to do so but it certainly looks mouth wateringly good and the aroma attracted a few hungry visitors to the stand yesterday. We weren't overly busy but we had some good leads and a very nice visit from the lads from Calomax who tell me that they read the blog. Thanks Tony and Michael that made my day.I always wondered who the reader was. But Tony, your web site says "You cannot do better than a boiler by Calomax". Now come on. Poetic license?


Isn't it amazing that when there is a horrendous earthquake in Chile the newspapers and news bulletins lead with two grown men one of whom wouldn't shake hands with the other. You couldn't make it up.