Good afternoon everyone.

A lovely, sunny bright (but cold) afternoon here at Fortunatus Housing Solutions.

We are all looking forward to Christmas and the Christmas Break. Although Fortunatus Housing Solutions is open to our tenants 24 hours, 365 days of the year, we have lovely firm called SPS who take care of our out of hours service. That means the rest of us can take a well-earned break and enjoy some quality time with our families.

Our Christmas decorations will be going up in the office on the 1st December, we are waiting until our Events Manager Sara’s birthday has been celebrated (29th November) and then the festivities can be begin.

November was a busy month, with our annual audit taking place (for the purposes of the charities commission) for a whole week. We had the lovely Tom and Stuart from Watkinson Black accountants on site and thankfully sailed through the audit.

My husband Julian (our Finance Manager) is sporting a rather jaunty moustache for November, as is our Health and Safety/Transport/Health and Safety Officer Gareth Langhorn and Ian Foster, one of our housing support officers.

I personally will be glad to see the back of Julian’s moustache, he currently looks like an extra in a World War I film.

November also saw the annual IRRV dinner dance in Chesterfield for the West Midlands Association. Julian and I attended along with some other Executive members to represent the Lancashire and Cheshire association and we stayed in probably one of the nicest hotels we’ve ever stayed in – The Casa Hotel in Chesterfield. Owned by a local business man, who also owns Global Brands, distributors of Amigos and Hooch beers. Julian was very happy to see Amigos on draught 🙂

I also appeared on stage in amateur dramatics as the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz and landed a part playing the Wicked stepmother in Cinderella in February 2015 (typecast methinks)

The launch of our App ‘Engage’ is around the corner, we awaiting registration with Apple before we can encourage people to use it and with a free download and easily accessible forms, we know our tenants will be able to engage an interact with us via another medium that may suit them better than face to face or telephone contact.

Exciting times ahead!!

Catherine