A chapter finally closed at Business Builders at the Langstone Hotel this morning. Malcolm Archibald stepped down from leading the group and will be moving to Murcia in Spain next week. Richard Peckham has stepped into some very large shoes and I wish him all the best in following Malcolm’s act – because it will be a very hard act to follow…

Business Builders has been an institution in the south Hampshire area (or is that many of the attendees OUGHT to have been in an institution – in south Hampshire or otherwise?) It’s full of characters and seems to have attracted the eccentrics from a wide local area. Not that I am in any way suggesting I’m eccentric. What me? The singing accountant as a lot of people still call me? Not at all! Our glorious leader has a very droll turn of phrase and it is the least stuffy networking group I think I’ve ever attended.

Enjoy your change of scenery and I look forward to getting my PHI renewals in Spanish henceforward.

He did the talk this morning as well. Hadn’t realised quite how many Grey Funnel Line alumni there were in the group before today. Suffice to say I really CAN’T understand how Britain ruled the waves with THAT bunch of lunatics defending our seaways…

My regular reader will be pleased to know that I think I’m FINALLY getting the better of the software I was whinging about last week (and the week before) though the rest of you might need to look at the previous week’s missive.

But it has involved a lot of juggling (sure beats accounts even though I say so myself) to give enough to not let clients down while not actually working 24 hour days (heaves huge sigh of relief and is overcome by aches and pains as a consequence of overdoing it big time). Running fast to stand still.

Not ideal but needs must and here’s to fitting the whole of October in the 2.5 weeks I’ve got left…

Actually October is normally a little quieter than some months so it IS doable. But only if I believe it is! Ended up with a backlog of over 300 emails that needed dealing with at one point yesterday – due in the main to the software issue, and that was after deleting all the ones that WOULD go away. May have mentioned before but one of my pro bono clients had generated 20% of said total. Quite an achievements in itself if you stop to think about it. Presently it’s just squeaked its way over 200 but there are a few easy ones to delete (which I’ll probably ignore pro tem) and concentrate on the thirteen generated in response to one of the draft sets of accounts (see above and last week).

Having said it’s normally a quieter month, I’m currently booking meetings into November – albeit partly to make sure I’ve left time to actually do some work. Keep forgetting that… have been know to get to about Thursday lunchtime and wonder when I’m going to get round to the doing that week. Somehow it generally fits, no idea how but it does! Maybe the pixies do it…

Question. If you have (say) five “real” appointments in a particular week, would you prefer to concentrate them into one or two days (travel time permitting, obviously) and keep the rest of the week for fulfillment or would you prefer to spread them out – one a day say? I’m interested how other people approach their working weeks.

And all written to a background of Manon Lescaut by Puccini – music to slash your wrists by. Eat your heart out Leonard Cohen. Why are so many operas so bl00dy miserable???

Competition time. The image store I use shows a selection of “related images” to the one you are looking at. WHY was one of those images a head of broccoli? Please tell me why…