It has been a while since I made the time to share my thoughts. Most recently they have been devoted to a bit of an inconvenience, the recovery from a fire in the factory.

I was called from my bed early on a Saturday morning to hear that there was a smoke coming from the factory. I pretended that I had blue lights and arrived on scene at about 06:00. By noon the fire was out and the six fire engines had gone and I was looking at a black hole with no lights and 20 mm of blue pigment and water over the entire floor. Every room in the office area was covered in black soot, every surface in the factory was black and most things plastic were melted, particularly electrical conduits and wiring.

By then we had a couple of volunteers from the staff turn up as well as the Insurance broker, our loss adjuster, plus a speculative one who had kept track of the fire brigade. We also had a couple of clean-up contractors to quote for the five figure clean-up project.

My focus was on getting the power on and some temporary lighting to enable us to make plans. Our usual electrical contractor provided a magnificent service in doing just that.

By the end of the day we could see the size of the problem and the one item of good news: the fire-door between factory and warehouse had prevented the smoke from spoiling stock in the warehouse. The warehouse was still clean and would serve for manufacturing when we could get it supplied with power. The power to the offices was restored with a temporary connection and we got the computers and telephones operational.

On the next day, Sunday, my wife worked to make some of the office area clean enough to use and I was in a daze as I tried to plan the way forward. In mid afternoon I was standing in the factory, so dark despite the temporary lighting that I could barely see the equipment around me when part of the roof fell in.

As I watched the glittering strands of glass-fibre from the burned-out translucent roof panel twinkling on their way to the floor I could see the sky! And I knew that we would overcome this minor inconvenience because I could see what was to be done.

We would start “Project Revival” tomorrow. No customer would miss a delivery, no supplier would be turned away, no sales opportunity would be missed.