Nelson's Coloum

My fellow Scot - the chancellor Mr Brown, seems remarkably patriotic and generous at the same time recently. His leadership in securing the purchase of Wrath Rovers in Kilcaldy, and becoming a director of a football club to boot surprised many; his fruitful outpourings seem to know no bounds with the news of his wife's second pregnancy the day after.

Come on Gordon! Give high performance glazing a tax break and help us save the planet and provide sunny afternoons for football and a better prospect for the future of your offspring!

Despite the downturn in the glazing industry - the consensus is a 20% down compared to the previous year - some are building for the future. My friends at Clear Tough have made a massive investment in a new processing plant in Bedford leaving, I trust, plenty of space in the car park for a new Bentley; nice one Sav, congratulations.

Orders are also thankfully coming in from overseas, with my pal Gary from cutting table makers MTL taking orders for two systems for a customer in Cyprus. What's the betting the personal after sales service is exemplary?

We are delighted to have received our share of orders from Anglo-Indian processors but the frequent celebratory curries are causing my ageing constitution great problems.

At last our colleague at Bohle, John Davies, who incidentally helped Noah glaze the Ark - has slowed down to working a three-day week. ‘I thought he had only every worked-part time for years', said one customer.

Nice to hear that Keith Wilkinson of Pilkington is on the mend after a recent heart attack; no doubt he'll soon be back to bash the hell out of my margins.

During the festive season Andy Westhead of Glass Age bought me a pint of my favourite tipple; I wonder how much that's going to cost me in the long run?

As a company and indeed, now as an industry, we are very much European and my trip to Vitrum confirmed that when the nice people at Alitalia lost my luggage.

Hastily providing myself with a replacement wardrobe for my stay in Milan I turned up at the Bohle stand dressed in a German shirt, Italian slacks, Austrian socks, French underwear and a Spanish tie. That's a true European Mr Blair. (But who sits there reading their clothing labels? Ed.)

Bohle's Nelson Graham will be reporting regularly and welcomes news and snippets of all sorts from industry people everywhere.