I Can See Clearly Now

The glasses arrived from Workhouse Marketing this morning as promised and, after four days of struggling, I can see again. Forgive the lousy pun but it really has been an eye opener to discover how reliant I have become on my specs and the relief to have them back is palpable. I even have a new case for them courtesy of Mark and, if they had been in one in the first place I probably would have spotted when I dropped them.

Congratulations to Craig Buckley who turns 26 today. It is eight and a half years since Craig started in our office and he has worked his way from office junior through a spell in stores to our sales department. On 1st September he will be going out on the road visiting customers for a three month trial period and we are sure that you will make him very welcome. Apart from the potential career move at Instanta, Craig's 27th year looks to be the biggest of his life with a planned wedding to our Office Manager Jenny very soon and their first child on the way in early 2010. This will be the first wedding between Instanta staff for over fifty years and we are all very excited about it. Congratulations Craig. Have a great day. We'll let you off messing up the five a side.



I was talking to John Walkinshaw from our electronics supplier KLH Electronics PLC last week about our horrendous home electricity bill. One of John's subsidiary companies LED lighting solutions has developed this fantastic replacement for normal spot lights.The product is the first true replacement for MR16 lamps, it uses LED technology to provide the same brightness as a normal lamp and yet uses only 7 watts of power compared to 50 watts for a normal lamp. Its lifespan is 100,000 hours ( it will have dropped to 80% brightness ), around 30 years at 8 hours per day and will continue to work for many more years. It contains no harmful products unlike fluorescent lamps and emits a warm natural light for domestic use. We plugged a sample in at home and the OWL electricity monitor didn't register the cost. This is a fantastic step forward and we will certainly be replacing all our home spots with these. The energy savings will be enormous and the green implications are incredible.



I've got an appointment at the hospital this afternoon for the results of my hip x-ray. I'm hoping that it shows a groin strain and not the hip problem that the physiotherapist conjectured. The "groin strain" has been with me for almost four months now.It's not quite as painful as it was but it's taking a hell of a long time to go away. I'm not limping as badly as I was so, fingers crossed it's a muscle and not a joint problem.

I'll close with a song that not only fits today's headline but also comes from a great and very funny film.

Workhouse Marketing: The Number One Lancashire Detective Agency

When Mark Jones from Workhouse marketing (above) told us on Thursday that he and Nita would have a look for the missing glasses on the fells above Whitewell at the weekend I never doubted his word but, in addition, I never thought for a second that they would have any success in a search that I thought akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. So you can imagine my surprise as the phone rang at 7pm last night for me to hear Mark telling me that he was enjoying a pint in the inn and had the glasses with him. It seems that the specs were not far into a field and in clear view (which is something that I haven't had for three days). Having gone straight to the opticians at the first possible opportunity and ordered some replacements I feel guilty at having doubted Mark and Nita's chances of success but as the replacements are a few weeks off and the cheap Tesco reading glasses are giving me real grief I am also extremely grateful for their detective skills.

Mark's detecting skills do not extend to his football score predicting as he was confident of at least seven draws in this week's Premier League fixtures. And how many were there? Er.. none.In our Instanta league, machine tester Andy Fyles stormed to the top with a very healthy twelve points.Don't get carried away Andy, it's a long slog, a game of two halves and all that. One thing that does puzzle me however is how come people who didn't put any scores down seemed to end up with 2 points.




Apart from the forgettable ninety minutes watching Liverpool I spent most of the weekend redrafting my novel. It's on its third draft now and in many ways finished (although I am sure that it is still too short and could be improved).Marion discovered a brilliant website set up by Harper Collins to allow budding authors to upload their work and allow others to read it and comment on it. The books that are most popular get at least 10,000 words read by the Harper & Collins people. Members who register are able to criticise your book so I will have to be pretty thick skinned if I join. I do like the idea though and think I'll give it a whirl.The site is called authonomy and you can check it out here

Did you read that the government has released files on UFO sightings here in Britain? It seems that they are putting the surge in reports in 1996 down to the X Files on TV causing massive interest in the phenomenon. Here's a more recent sighting captured by BBC's Look North cameras.

Those Weren't Just Glasses They Were Lindberg Glasses

Although vanity has precluded me from appearing in them in any photos on the blog, I have been wearing varifocal glasses for a few years. Wearing them is much better than having to constantly put on and take off reading glasses and, until last night, I was very happy with my ultra light, Lindberg Air, award winning, titanium pair. That is until we walked up a hill with Mark and Nita from Workhouse Marketing and they somehow disappeared from my jacket pocket which I had slung over my shoulder due to the warmer than expected weather. I am now squinting at the screen wearing a £3 pair of reading glasses from Tesco but I've got an appointment with the optician tomorrow. I suppose I could claim on the insurance as they are covered but in fairness to the insurers I was due to change them in the very near future.



Here is Marion with Nita on a hill above the idyllic Whitewell in rural Lancashire. After the brief walk we enjoyed an excellent meal at the famous Inn At Whitewell. Good food, good service, good company. Highly recommended.



We've got a week's holiday in the factory coming up in ten days time. This will give us plenty of space for our annual stock take scheduled for the end of the month and allow the lads the chance to play a bit of golf. It's essential that we have enough boilers in stock to get us through the week without production and, looking at the machine store, it looks like we will just be OK. We are out of WM15-3 and CH1000 but I can see them coming in next week keeping up our record of dispatching everything within our target of ten working days that we have kept to for every order this year bar one machine. Mind you 1500lcd stock, whilst good today, may not see us through to the end of the month as they are selling like hot cakes.



Which to be honest is a bit of a misnomer isn't it? How many times have you seen "hot cakes" for sale? And when you have, have they been flying off the shelves? I suppose that like many sayings it is something that has come from the past and has lost it's meaning. Oh let's be pedantic and look it up. SELL LIKE HOT CAKES - "Hot cakes cooked in bear grease or pork lard were popular from earliest times in America. First made of cornmeal, the griddle cakes or pancakes were of course best when served piping hot and were often sold at church benefits, fairs, and other functions. So popular were they that by the beginning of the 19th century 'to sell like hot cakes' was a familiar expression for anything that sold very quickly effortlessly, and in quantity." From "Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997)

With the soccer season starting tomorrow I'll finish with a brilliant move in another sport. This one, from a Bulls v Titans game is especially for son Paul who is a big fan of American football.It has to be one of the best sports moves I've seen in ages.

The New Premiership Season Beckons

There's growing excitement here in the (now almost all male) Instanta office as the new Barclays Premier League kicks off on Saturday. To my horror I have discovered that in Lee and Matthew we have two Manchester United fans which shows that I badly slipped up somewhere during the interview process.Mind you if we look on the bright side at least we Liverpool fans will have two extra staff members to gloat over on Monday mornings as United fade into their long overdue oblivion.



Good news as our first sous vide unit is exported to Australia. We have been trying to get into the market in Oz for a number of years with the boilers and it will be good if we get there on the back of the sous vide digital water baths. Speaking of sous vide we recently discovered a website devoted entirely to promoting the wonders of this method of cooking and you can find it by clicking here.



I enjoyed last night's Orange Wednesday film "Orphan" although a full car park at 9.pm meant us arriving later than usual and sitting on the front row with necks cricked. Marion didn't like the film but I suspect the discomfort caused by looking up probably spoiled her enjoyment. We'll have to stick to the earlier showings in future. As for the twist? Yes I managed to work it out but it's certainly not obvious.



Hey US Republicans. Hands off our NHS. As Barack Obama tries to model a health service based on our free system he has come under attack from the right wing republicans who have been making all sorts of outrageous derogatory comments about the NHS. Including "No cancer care for old people" and all sorts of lies about waiting. The NHS is not perfect but last week I had an appointment to see a phsyio at 2.30pm and was seen at 2.30pm on the dot. I then went on to have an X Ray which was booked for the same afternoon at 6pm and was done immediately upon my arrival at the hospital.In addition Marion's mum Flo has had ongoing cancer treatment despite being 84. So get your facts straight America. Which is better? A perfect system for the rich with nothing for the poor or a pretty good system for everyone?



Whilst on the subject of politics, how refreshing to see a German politican with a sense of humour. Vera Lengsfeld issued this busty poster of her and Angela Merkel for her Christian Democratic Party with the strap line "We have more to offer". Good to see someone making a joke as, despite all the fuss, I'm sure that's all that it was. Certainly got them plenty of worldwide publicity.


I'll end today with the new Everton away strip. Something else for us to laugh about.

More Hits On The Blog

I pay a subscription that lets me know who has been looking at the blog and how they got to it (Big Brother is watching you) and it's quite fascinating to see the search terms used. After writing about briefly meeting Britain's Got Talent star Greg Pritchard and getting his autograph I got hundreds of hits from his fans but it is often more obscure and quite surprising musings that result in most visits. Yesterday someone arrived via, of all things, a search for a Lakeland Microwave Egg poacher (if it was you and you are back, it's highly recommended but put the boiling water in after the egg and you get better results with two eggs than with one and have a look at their pineapple slicer too its fantastic)and another was searching for Jenny Wright but was it our Jenny Wright? "Fat baby" seems to be a very popular search term but why on earth was someone searching "Instanta Meeting Of Creditors"? Do they know something we don't know? It's quite amazing how few people arrive by way of looking for a water boiler and sadly the photo of knickers that accompanied a blog last year still gets the most hits.



The papers have been full of the Baby P case again following the naming of his mother Tracey Connolly. Nobody can possibly condone the terrible suffering caused to the poor child but the lynch mob mentality that is now being brought to fever pitch by the press and others (at least half a dozen Facebook groups with thousands of members including a group called "name and shame the horible basterds" (their spelling not mine))is worrying. The Guardian ran a full page article on Connolly yesterday.Her own background and childhood was truly horrific and the abuse escalated after her lover's brother moved in indicating his influence as a major factor.There was a parallel in the drama documentary on the Manson family the other night where the influence of one man turned half a dozen normal twenty year olds into vicious murderers.Let's stop the lynching and try and understand how someone could become so dehumanised that they could allow this tragedy to happen.



Yet another plug for Charlie Brooker's "You Have Been Watching" on 4 on Tuesday nights. As long as you aren't offended by bad language this has to be the most laugh out loud show on TV at the moment and the comments on the BBC's "Dragon's Den" last night were just brilliant.



As I took Sarah to the station yesterday I was struck by the lack of originality of the front covers of the magazines Now, Heat and one other which I can't remember. Every one had photos of celebrities in bikinis and some comment on their bodies. But the lack of originality goes further than that. Above is the current cover of Now magazine and below is the cover for August 2002. Are they simply recycling their articles year after year? Must save a fortune on staff.





We are getting lots of interest in the Sous Vide equipment and yesterday had a very positive enquiry from Australia and New Zealand. We know that this product will have universal appeal and expect sales to increase rapidly after we exhibit the equipment at next year's Hotelympia show at London's Excel.

I said that "You Have Been Watching" is the funniest thing on TV but Sales Director Nick tells me we should be watching the BBC's "Walk On The Wild Side". Here's a taste.

Jam & Jerusalem. The New Last Of The Summer Wine?

I'm sure that the writers and directors would hate me for likening the BBC's "Jam & Jerusalem" which started a new series on Sunday, to "The Last Of The Summer Wine" but it is intended as a compliment. I have been a "Summer Wine" fan for years and love its whimsical mix of gentle humour and off the wall (mostly male) characters in a rural setting although I feel that after decades it is starting to feel like it has now run its course. "Jam & Jerusalem" has an equally odd bunch of (mostly female)characters, another wonderful country setting (Devon instead of Yorkshire)some simple and gently amusing plots and a superbly appropriate theme tune "The Village Green Preservation Society" first recorded by The Kinks in 1968 and now performed by Kate Rusby. With an incredibly strong cast including Dawn French, Sue Johnson, David Mitchell and Jennifer Saunders you must give it at try.



We missed Orange Wednesday last week as daughter Sarah was home. It was great to see her but now that she's back in Scotland we can continue with our weekly routine and this Wednesday we are off to see "Orphan". The reviews were good and each reviewer mentioned a brilliant twist at the end. I wonder if we'll get it? The problem is that when you know that there is twist you spend the entire film looking for it " I see dead people". Before looking for the twist in this week's film, I have to say that that ribbon round her neck looks very significant.Not expecting many scares as it's only rated certificate 15.



Sales are continuing to run well and we are now just three weeks away from the end of the financial year. It seems quite remarkable that a year has passed so quickly and I can't believe that it is 12 months since customers started dropping like flies and leaving us with bad debts. Perhaps our two year guarantee has helped in our sales remaining buoyant throughout the recession.It doesn't cost us much to give this guarantee as our products are very reliable and the only things that seem to go wrong are tap springs which sometimes break inexplicably. We buy them from a highly reputable manufacturer and, fortunately, replacing them is simple. Before you buy a competitor's boiler, check out the guarantee.



Having hardly gone out at all for a few months we are having an overload of eating out this week having taken Sarah to the Eagle & Child at Bispham Green on Friday and The Warehouse Brasserie last night. On Thursday we are joining Mark & Nita from Workhouse marketing for a meal at the Inn at Whitewell (above). We've never been but it's recommended in loads of guides and we are looking forward to it.

I'll leave you with the Kinks and their original version of "The Village Green Preservation Society".

Another new face at Instanta

It's all change at Instanta this morning as we welcome 18 year old Matthew Brindle to the office. If you think the name sounds familiar you are right as Matthew is the nephew of our Northern Area Sales Manager Peter Brindle.Matthew has just completed a BTEC in software development at KGV college and his knowledge of computers and networks should be an asset. Matthew tells us that he has a good sense of humour which he's certainly going to need working with us.



After reporting on the blog that Nat had brought her baby Olivia (more a toddler than a baby now really) to see us last week, we were overrun with children on Friday. I managed to get snaps of a couple of them but some of them evaded my camera. Here is store man Phil Joce with his two year old grandson Lewis. Phil tells me that Lewis is a handful but he enjoys every one of the few minutes that he gets looking after him.



And here's Marion with our machine tester Andy Fyles' beautiful little one year old daughter Bethany. Message to our kids, Marion would make a great Nana.



Young Matthew's Uncle Peter will be celebrating in his holiday tent this morning as we relay the news that he won our lottery bonus ball draw. We all have one permanent number and put £1 each in the kitty. The holder of the Saturday night lottery bonus ball number wins the kitty. As we have less than 49 members there are some weeks with a rollover and amazingly this has run on again and again for over two months now leaving Peter to scoop over £260. I'm sure that everyone in Instanta will be delighted to see Peter's win.



We went out on Friday night with some good friends. One of them had offered to read my novel a few weeks ago and to my surprise she had finished it. I am pleased to say that she liked the story. She had a few constructive criticisms of the text and some of these had already been corrected in the second draft. I am now on the third draft and have managed to increase the word count of the first half of the book by around 18%. If repeated for the whole novel it will run to around 70,000 words which is an acceptable length for a published novel and the fun will then start when I attempt to find a publisher. I hear that chances of getting a first novel published are remote but it will be great fun trying.

Did you hear about the race riot in Birmingham at the weekend? It didn't get much national coverage but is this sort of thing going to be on the increase now that we have elected BNP members in the Euro Parliament?