Old friends

Last night I met with Helzo and Simon, my two partners in crime when we used to be in the corporate communications and event production business. We eventually set up Fingerprint Productions in 1997, operating from a series of offices 'borrowed' from a range of clients who all went out of business, ending up in a fantastic office with a rooftop terrace in Great Titchfield Street. That one was ours.

It was a quieter night than the last time we met, at The Sanderson Hotel with Justin and Kelvin from Illusion Factor. That one was a bit of an epic and probably best forgotten (the bits I can remember that is). My zavvi chums will remember me turning up at around 11.30 the next day with the mother of all hangovers. By the way; thanks, Steve, for pressing ahead with our weekly catch-up meeting at the end of the day... Incidentally, when I did manage to get out of bed on the Friday morning and turned on my phone, I received a message timed at 09.00 from Simon saying "Nearly home now".

Anyway as we enjoyed some very tasty if grumpily served Wagamama-style food at Satsuma, talk inevitably turned to shared memories, and of course the best ones (in retrospect) are where things were going wrong. There were a few of those times - not that our clients would know about most of them. Think of the swan analogy.

My favourite was the Virgin Our Price show where we had Darth Vader arriving onto the stage with sound effects and a cloud of dry ice to deliver the new Star Wars DVD boxset to Doug Morton.

During rehearsals, Simon came up to me and said "We could have a problem with Darth. I don't think he's going to be able to see well enough to do the handover. "How do you know, Simon", I asked, to which he calmly replied "I thought I should do a test, so I put a chair down, asked him to come over; and he tripped over it."

It might seem that Simon is bearing the brunt of those exchanges and maybe Helzo was just a consumate professional throughout. Professional, yes, but Helzo had more japes than an Enid Blyton character. It would take a separate blog to cover these.

I'm off to Aosta tomorrow for a long weekend skiiing, with Chiswick Casuals mates Andy, Graham, Pete, Mark and Alan - who lives there. Should be fun and I promise I won't go on about it when I get back. In any case, there will only be time to get home and switch on the TV for Rangers v Celtic in the CIS Cup Final on Sunday.

Finally, the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that this is the 100th post since I started writing melvtopia all those months ago - a milestone indeed.

Friends

So EUK is in administration, which means that we can't get any music, DVD or games products from them. While it's bad for the stores, it's even worse for us since we rely on EUK to ship orders to our customers. We've temporarily stopped taking orders and now we're writing to thousands of customers to tell them that we're going to cancel the orders that they placed with us.

What we're trying to do is give ourselves a fighting chance of getting these customers back when we get back to some degree of normality. By being honest and open with our customers, we hope that they'll see that we're doing everything we can to protect their interests and hopefully they'll give us a second chance.

Anyway, these are difficult times for all of us, but I've been in similar situations before and I've noticed that two things happen. First, people start to work together better - the politics and self-interest become less important and you find that everyone pulls together for the common good.

Second, you rediscover the value of having great friends. As soon as the news about EUK broke, the wonderful Helzo texted me to see if everything was OK. We've been through some some stuff, Helzo and me, but it meant a lot to know she was thinking of me.