Morrisons (Thursday July 17th)

Now the picture above may not look that spectacular to you, but to me it depicts an oasis of delights. Working in Yorkshire and living in the High Peak dictates a lot of travelling and a fair amount of time away from home and the view you see here is a reflection that I am about fifteen minutes from seeing my family. I often stop in this car park and ring home to see if I need to buy any essentials, pop in, do a shop and then get back with groceries and Brownie points for going. Petrol is cheap there too. There have been times, I admit ,when I have bought pork pies and secretly eaten them before arriving at my destination. For some reason creme eggs always catch my eye at the sweet counter too. I am a creature of habit.

For this reason Morrisons Bredbury was my first port of call when I went out looking for venues for the Bananathon and how I was rewarded.

I asked at the customer services desk if there was anyone I could talk to about a charity event I was helping to organise in the area. In no uncertain terms I was informed that nobody would come to see me on the shop floor. Crestfallen, I pulled out my "Not even if it's Bob Off Emmerdale?" card. I drew an ace and whilst I was waiting for someone to come was told how customer services had just been visited by a particularly rude customer. Imagine dealing with that all day when you are trying to do your job. Don't shoot the messenger.

Laura O'Neill came to see me and seemed enamoured with the idea, immediately suggesting a week long store collection and the possibility of the staff being sponsored to wear fancy dress for the day. Whilst we chatted two staff members passed by and gave the fancy dress idea the thumbs up, they looked well up for it. What great people.

What would we be doing in return?

Packing shopping for customers. Fantastic! Visual and useful.

This is the first venue to be named where the whole staff have offered to get involved and fundraise and I can't say how impressed we have been with this inituative.

Big Thanks to Morrisons.

Elsewhere today, thank you to Mike Keegan at the Manchester Evening News. Not only did he write a piece about the bananathon (which I am yet to see, as I am stuck in Leeds), but he took the time to contact me to tell me it was in today's edition. The MEN is by far the biggest paper in Manchester and within two hours of it hitting the streets I had a couple of messages from elsewhere in the media asking for more information.

Jane has worked out how to put the interactive map on the blog page, just to the right the clever swine and it looks great. He/she has also put a list of each venue just above today's blog....yes up there. Nice one Jane; now get back in that jungle kitchen and make me a banana split.

Tarzan.