New year, new person starting work at Fruit Towers. And this person's name is Dan, who's here to help Assia do the accounts and buy all of the stuff we need to make innocent a nice place to work. He's our second Dan, but that doesn't make him good at karate. Instead, here are some other things that new Dan does:

• bad dancing
• juggling to concentrate the mind
• falling off window sills and breaking his back when drunk

We extend a warm welcome to Dan, and may he never fall off a window sill again.

Did you watch telly at Christmas? It was good wasn't it? Our Jon was glued to Eastenders, whilst Daisy and Lucy started to behave like their Mums and watched old musicals instead. Assia watched some old French movies such as “Le Corniaud” and “La Vache et Le Prisonier”, starring Fernandel, Bourvill, and Louis de Funes (famous dead French actors). But Richard and Jemima didn't think there was anything good on, so they read some books. More fool them, because it means that they missed our fleeting glimpse of fame on the Absolutely Fabulous Christmas special. Jennifer Saunders stuck her head in the fridge to eat some food, and there they were, our drinks, nestling amongst the cucumbers and canapes. Naturally, we haven't let this thespian fame and fortune go to our heads, apart from Mat A, who now wears a smoking jacket to work and has demanded that we surround the mirrors in the boys' toilet with lightbulbs.

"As one door opens another one closes" (Larry Grayson, 1979). This quote came to mind when trying to describe our current emotional state - on the one hand we've got our nice new Dan, but then we're having to deal with the imminent departure of Matt Henchie from our everyday lives. OK, so he's not leaving us because he's fallen in love with someone else - he's off to help Peter in Ireland, and to open our first proper Irish office. But we'll miss his wise words, his bum-dancing and his star turns at our Monday morning meetings. The girls at Fruit Towers will be shedding tears as his red Vauxhall Nova drives off into the distance later this week, but all we can say is Godspeed, good luck and remember - we're only a phone call away.

The fates have been kind to us over the New Year period. Not only have they blessed us with good health and sturdy teeth, but they have also managed to get our drinks a mention in lots of nice newpapers and magazines. Of course, it's at this time of year that everyone gets freaky about detox diets and miracle thigh massages*, so our drinks get mentioned as a good way to do yourself some good without having to make too much effort. The following publications have sung the praises of our drinks, and especially our winter smoothie recipe - Sunday Times Style, Tatler, Take a Break, Red, The Mirror, Sunday Telegraph - click here to look at the list.

* phone us on 020 8600 3939 for more information. Your call will be charged at the national rate and will appear on your phone bill as 'Red Hot Thigh Massage'.

When we heard the patter of tiny feet here at fruit towers last week we thought that either Kym had to come to visit us with baby Oliver or that Barney had got his Riverdance shoes on again. But it was a false alarm on both counts as it turns out that we had a fox on the roof. Yes, really. Quite how our little red friend had managed to get up there we do not know, although we suspect it involved a lot of cunningness. However, we hope he or she comes back, as there are certain advantages to having our friend in high places - as the old country saying goes, 'Fox on the roof; lot less pigeon poo on the skylights'.

Our little office has been a much more feminine affair over the past few days, as the majority of the men from fruit towers went off on an extended ski weekend to let off steam and do what men do. It turns out that, in this case, what men do is dance together in busy nightclubs, pick up drunken French men in their car when driving to the resort and go swimming together in tight rented Speedos. Meanwhile Jon, who was left behind at innocent, had a much more lady-like experience looking after the women at fruit towers. As well as wooing the ladies with his manly feats of loading vans and mending the air conditioning, he would spend most afternoons, hand-on-thigh, foot-on-desk and pipe in mouth, recounting stories of past endeavours and adventures to a circle of doting ladies.

So go the words of the Aussie pop princess' most successful song to date. And with a high degree of predictability, it was also the words we used to greet our latest and greatest addition to team innocent, as she is indeed called Kylie, and is, indeed, from Australia. However, here are some things you may not know about our better-than-Minogue Kylie:

• She falls over a lot
• She was a life guard in Australia
• She's not bored of Kylie jokes, no, really, she finds them all dead funny, and hasn't heard them before, honest.

They say you can't have it all. And even though we sometimes try to fit mash and chips and beans and peas onto the same plate, we have to agree with them, whoever they might be. To illustrate this fact, we launched some adverts in Dublin last week. They're nice and bright and talk about our drinks, and we've stuck them on the sides of buses and on the DART train route* in the hope that people will see them and maybe try one of our drinks one day. Unfortunately, on day one of the biggest nice drinks ad campaign ever seen in Dublin in the month of January apart from that one that Vimto did in 1987, there was a bus strike. So our ads were cooped up in the bus station with angry bus drivers, braziers, Arthur Scargill and all of the other stuff you usually see when people are on strike. The good news is that they are now back out on the streets - if you spot them, let us know at hello@innocentdrinks.co.uk

...unless you are talking about that big spot on the end of your nose. Anyway, our big story concerns our best-selling thickie (yoghurt, vanilla bean and honey), not spots. Due to popular demand from some people who we like (i.e. you), we've started putting this lovely recipe into our big 750ml bottles. It will be available in lots of Sainsbury's stores by the end of this week, and if you get bored of drinking that much yoghurt, you can always share the rest with someone you quite like.

We like to think of Fruit Towers as a very broad church, but without the pews and pulpit. Of course, in our big fruit church, we always need new people to come and help us out, and at the moment we are crying out for four new people to come and worship daily. The vacancies are for a Product Developer, a Marketing Manager, an HR Manager/People Person and a Product Developer Assistant. If you fancy having a look at any of them in any more depth, just click here.

A lot of us do some of our shopping in supermarkets. They're quite cheap, conveniently located and have very attractive strip lighting. We're stocked in lots of these places across the UK and Ireland, and would today like to announce that we are now in branches of Tesco Metro all over the place too. To alleviate the selly-ness of that last piece of information, we'd also like to alert you to the presence of the great innocent label writing competition. It's quite easy really - write 90-100 words on a topic of your choice, email it to us at mylabelidea@innocentdrinks.co.uk and the best ones go on the side of our labels. Naturally, some relevance to nice fruit drinks might be good, but then again, being irrelevant is very underrated as a marketing tool.

* the DART is the main commuter train route that serves Dublin and its environs. A bit like the Tube in London, except it doesn't have rats.

Do you watch telly? We do. We watch it quite a bit when we're not making nice drinks, especially when there are any programmes on that have footage of those flying squirrels that have bits of skin between their arms and legs to help them glide. If there are no squirrel programmes on, we might watch a bit of The Muppets (Kylie), Knot's Landing (Lucy), Footballer's Wives (Paul), Morph (Jessica) or When Pets Wear Clothes (Mike). But last week our teevee world was thrown into confusion when one of us actually starred in a programme. Yes, our Assia went to The Salon to get her hair cut, and every riveting second was broadcast live on E4. So we saw Assia get her hair washed, smile a bit and ask for a cup of tea. But then they didn't show the actual haircut because the old lady who sits at the front in Graham Norton's programme was getting her nails done, which was a bit more important.

Trees are good. They can get quite big, even though they only come from a small seed or acorn or something, and they provide a platform from which squirrels can glide at their leisure. And then there's all of that stuff about them making the air that we breathe to keep us alive. So to reiterate, they really are quite good. To celebrate their goodness, we went down to Bexley Business Academy to help plant some oak and ash trees as part of the Trees for Thamesmead regeneration project. The aim of the project is to get local residents, businesses and schools working together to enhance their local environment. So we've chipped in a bit of the money that you spend on our drinks to help Rupert and his tree-planting friends from Green Gateway reforest the area. Lots of students from the Business Academy (which is a posh name for a very forward-looking secondary school) came out to help us dig lots of holes, so we'd just like to say hello to everyone we met last week. Here are some pictures of tree planting in action.

We'll be doing another six plantings across the UK this year, so watch out for one near you by keeping an eye on our news.

It's a while since we've been to the library. It's not that we're trying to avoid paying the fines on those overdue books that are under the bed; we just seem to forget to go. Thankfully, it seems like a few people are still improving their minds by visiting our civic facilities. And we know this because we got a letter from the Public Lending Rights people, to inform us that our recipe book was borrowed from libraries 102 times last year. We've accounted for 87 of these instances (thanks Mum), but if you know anything about the other 15, please let us know.

Mat A has got some new white shoes. If you see him, please christen them by jumping on his feet a bit.