Eight days a week

It’s been a rather strange fortnight, one of swiftly moving events and rapidly changing plans. The weather has also been extremely strange and after a morning walking round Tonbridge in my shirt-sleeves and the afternoon in the garden with just a rugby shirt to keep my top half warm, it’s hard to believe that a year ago, the country was being blasted by freezing cold air from Siberia – the so-called “Beast from the east”.

It was some of the coldest weather I can remember experiencing, and one morning driving into work, my dashboard display was indicating an outside temperatures of  minus 11ºC. I didn’t check the mercury today, but temperatures must have been in the high teens. Visitors from overseas sometimes wonder why the weather is so often the topic of conversation in the UK; with contrasts such as this, it’s hardly surprising.

Back to the main topic, which wasn’t actually climate-related, but instead was about beer, and an event I was supposed to be attending. Just over a fortnight ago, I received an email asking me if I would be attending the Craft Beer Rising Festival in London. The request came from a young (presumably) lady representing a PR company who were promoting a particular brewer’s beer.

Now I can’t be bothered to trawl back through an in-box which is stuffed full of unread or unopened emails, but the request caught my attention and, as I’ve never been to CBR, I turned the whole thing on its head. My reply was along the lines of what I’ve just written, and because I’ve never been to said event, I somewhat cheekily said that if the young lady could forward me a ticket, I would go along, sample her client’s beer (amongst several others), and then post a write-up of my impressions of the beer and CBR, on the blog.

No problem said the nice (young?) lady, she would sort out admission for me on the Friday (22^nd).  Well, until that Friday, that was the last I heard from the PR lady; more about that shortly. In the meantime I discovered that our directors were coming over from Japan, for board meeting, postponed by the delay in appointing a replacement General Manager to run our company.

In accordance with usual practice, they were inviting management out for a meal, ostensibly on the Friday evening. There was also a personal request for me to pick them up from their hotel in Tonbridge, on both Thursday and Friday mornings, and then drop them back after work. I am quite used to these chauffeuring duties, because I am the only member of management who lives in Tonbridge, and whilst I could have declined, the opportunity of a meal, plus a few drinks, was not one to be missed.

I put off booking a day’s leave for the end of the week until later; especially as hadn’t heard from the PR lady. It was then that events moved quickly. I’d taken the previous Friday off, to accompany Retired Martin on his drive down to Rye and Crowhurst, but when I returned to work on the Monday, I discovered the meal had been brought forward a day. This was because we were due to be audited by our potential new, Notified Body (NB).

Now I won’t go into too much detail here, as I don’t want to bore you, but because of an event which may, or perhaps may not take place on 29^th March, my company needs to be registered with a European based NB in order to ensure the continuation of our CE certificate. We also have to find an “EC Representative”, who is  based in the European Union.

We obviously have to continue demonstrating the same sort of compliance with the international standard for the type of products we manufacture and sell, so in our case this is ISO 13485 – Medical Devices. Now I don’t know yet know the end result of the audit, as it was still going on when I left at 6pm on Friday, but irrespective of whether we pass first time, or require a further visit from the auditor, we will need to amend all our packaging to indicate our revised CE Number, and to show the name and address of our “EC Representative”.

This will affect all packaging items, such as labels, cartons and Instructions For Use (IFU’s). So lots of changes to work through by our artwork people, and lots of business going the way of our printers. There will be lots of stock write-offs too, as whilst in the event of a managed exit from the EU, we have a period of grace to see these changes through, thereby using up as much old stock as possible, in the event of the UK crashing out with a “no-deal” Brexit, no such period exists.

Perhaps you can understand now why I am so angry at the behaviour of people like Tim Martin and members of the Conservative European Research Group, who are advocating such a damaging scenario. These reckless individuals cannot see beyond the end of their own noses, because they are so obsessed by achieving the end result and being carried along by their own arrogance, they are totally oblivious of the very real consequences that “no-deal” would mean for many businesses. "Dim Tim's", role in this is perhaps little more than that of a useful idiot,as it is the ERG, who are driving this and dictating government policy, but his magazine articles and beer mats, haven't exactly been helpful either.

Rant over, but since returning to work in January, my colleagues and I have been involved in little else apart from attempting to manage these changes and mitigate their effects on our business. Basically we are doing all this work, just to stand still. The next time a politician decides to call a plebiscite on such an important constitutional issue, perhaps they will do their homework first, because trying to unravel over 40 years of trading agreements, when you haven't the first clue what you are doing, was never going to end well.

Back to Friday morning, which was already starting out busy, when I received an email from the (young) PR lady. She had passed my details to the people on the door at CBR, so I would be admitted foc. She would be at the stand of whichever brewery she was representing, so come over and say hello.

That's one rant over, but there is something about PR people in general which means they operate on a totally different timescale, and in a completely different world to the rest of us. Getting back in touch on the morning of the event, after no communication, is demonstration of this.

Did she imagine I would be just waiting around for her invitation? Did she not think I might have other commitments or other plans? I sent her a quick reply, and to be fair she did offer me admission for Saturday, but again this was too late, as whilst Mrs PBT’s is quite understanding and pretty flexible, we’d already made other plans. This is not the first time I’ve come across this sort of last minute invite either.

The long and the short of it is that I still haven’t been to Craft Beer Rising or any of the other similar beer-related events in the capital.  Fortunately, last Friday’s trip with Martin, to East Sussex, broke the fortnight up nicely and helped restore my sanity

I’ve promised Mrs PBT’s a trip to the coast on Sunday, so earlier today we headed off in the same direction as last week's jolly. We even drove passed one of the places where Martin and I stopped, but you'll have to wait until my next post to discover which one.