DROYT NATURAL GLYCERINE SOAP

Last working days before Christmas and this year we are still busy. Sometimes we’re happy to close the factory for a week over Christmas and New Year and sometimes we’re busy and it is inconvenient. Everybody likes a holiday though and I don’t think it would go down very well if we cancelled Christmas!

The Droyt Christmas lunch is on Friday, so look out, Chorley, here we come. I say lunch, but it usually extends into the evening and the directors get a bit worse for wear. All good fun. One year we went bowling and it all went pear shaped after a pretty uninspiring meal and a member of staff who started buying drinks for all and sundry with the Droyt bar tab card. I can’t remember exactly but I think someone actually did not come back to work for us after New Year. One year Chris and I were still hanging in there after the last train to Manchester had departed and were given a lift by the boyfriend of one of the our employees (who had not been out with us and was therefore fit to drive!).

Anyway if anything exciting happens this year I’ll be sure to give you edited highlights.

Merry Christmas and a Happy new Year from all at Droyt’s and I’ll be back in 2007 with more occasional snippets from the world of soap. Maybe one of my resolutions will be to try to be more interesting.

Alistair

Sometimes when I’m on the train and we pass a nice shiny new industrial estate with nice shiny new metal sheds, I mean, commercial premises, I think ‘wouldn’t it be nice?………’. Droyt’s lives in a converted yarn mill, built in eighteen ninety something and the climate is more continental than maritime, hot in summer and cold in winter. The walls are solid brick and take a long time to heat up, so first thing Monday morning in winter is pretty chilly in the office. The floors are half stone flags and half concrete in the downstairs bit and wooden floorboards upstairs in the packing department. None of the windows is double glazed and the roof is not insulated. So all very inefficient in terms of energy use and in terms of production there isn’t a smooth product flow from one process to the next (in between production and packing, the soap has to be lifted up one floor!)

And I’m particularly thinking this at the moment because over the w/e we had LOADS of rain and now we’ve got a leak in the boiler house. I happen to be quite handy and after having a quick look at the problem I can see that the lead flashing does not exist for a 2 metre section. How did that happen? It looks like it’s been mortared in, so I’m guessing that this was a quick repair done more than 15 years ago, which has lasted until now. Anyway, it only leaks when it’s really heavy rain, so I’ll put it down on the list and maybe I’ll get around to it one day soon. Which reminds me, I’ll also have to get up on a ladder to look at the gutter over the street. Oh, it’s all fun and games.

So back to my dreams of working in a dry, warm, efficient, soulless, uninteresting shed. I suppose it might happen one day, if we could ever afford it, but there’s no doubt that the company would lose something along the way.