Hello. This week’s news is good. Just good. No badness. Next week we will talk about amateur dentistry gone wrong and trapping your fingers in the door hard, but this week, we’re just going to focus on the good.

Merry Christmas

Please allow us to be the first people this year to wish you positive felicitations for the forthcoming seasonal uplift. In other words, Merry Christmas. And although it might seem a little early to start getting excited about that fat guy getting stuck in your chimney, we’re getting our who-to-send-stuff-to list sorted early, like good little soldiers. Sadly, sending out personally monogrammed cashmere socks is beyond us (we don’t have the sewing skills). But we’d still like to send you a special Christmas greeting, so if you’re OK with that, please click here (*this link was only available to all existing family members on 31st Oct 2007, if you would like to join our family and get a chance to win nice innocent stuff, be the first to be invited to our summer events like the innocent village fete and receive a Christmas present next year just click here) and fill in the boxes. If you don’t want us to send you anything, that’s fine. And if you want to send us anything, we’re after a Wii and some paisley oven gloves.

The fishmonger’s pants are pink

Fruit Towers got a little pink last week, all for a good cause. Winning the prize for Best Dressed Person in Pink for the second year running was our Jacob, sporting a natty Pink Panther outfit. We even convinced our favourite Mancunian fishmonger (Ken) to wear pink briefs for the day, replacing his usual navy blue selection. More on this story, and more pink stuff, right here.

Who won the CDs?

Over 500 of you entered last week’s competition to win some CDs and a big box of drinks. All you had to do was complete the following sentence "Tuesday is clearly better than Wednesday because...". Lots of people said it was because Wednesday was difficult to spell, which is true, but we gave the prize to the following entry:

...because Arnold told me. And Arnold's never wrong. Except when he confuses the dog with an oven glove...ooohhh. Kevin

And here are some of our other favourites:

...it gave us 'Ruby Tuesday' by the Stones AND 'Tuesday's gone' by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Tuesday just plain rocks. Wednesday tends to folk. Andrew
...Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe is on TV on Tuesdays, and Wednesday has no good television. Shiraz
...It is better to be slightly towards the edge of the baguette than slapped in middle of the whole Scooby Snack. Richard
... last Wednesday the squirrel in my garden injured his paw flinging himself from my fence into the branches of a nearby tree. Joe
... Tuesday is better than Wednesday because my feet itch on Wednesdays. Joey
...'Choose day' is clearly better than 'When's day' because of the thumbs and moustaches. Dan H

Hat’ll be all

We’re still counting hats for the Big Knit. Should have some interesting numbers for you next week with any luck. In the mean time, check out our spooky Halloween Hat Of The Week and watch a short film of some hats doing an eightsome reel (a Scottish country dance), made by Margaret and her husband Dennis and their friends Martin and Alan whilst they were all on holiday last week. Thank you Margaret, Dennis, Martin and Alan.

And spookily...

Hello. This week we are colder. We are more woollen. We are thinking about leaf blowers and wondering if it’s time to start eating porridge again. Basically, we are getting to know autumn. Hello again autumn. How was your summer? Marbella? That must have been nice.

Back to school

It’s a little known fact that we now sell our smoothies in schools. It’s a bit of a no-brainer really – young people need more fruit in their diets, and we make smoothies using whole crushed fruit. Our little wedges-with-straws have been selling at a handsome rate in educational establishments across the land for over a year now (you’ll currently find them in over 1000 schools). However, we see no reason why we shouldn’t be available in a few more places. So if you’re a parent, teacher, dinner lady or troublesome student, drop an email to schools@innocentdrinks.co.uk with the name of your school, its telephone number and postcode and we’ll do our best to get them stocking.

Joe’s dad

This isn’t really a story about smoothies. But we’d like to tell it anyway. Joe started working here a couple of weeks ago, and revealed pretty quickly that his dad recently won the 55th National Town Crying Championship, held in Hastings on 13th October (it’s the 5th time he’s won it). He is also the reigning British Town Crying Champion (believe it or not there are two major championships for town crying in the UK) and is the only person to have ever held both titles at the same time, thus making him a legend. In recent years, he has begun to establish his own brand of ‘extreme town crying’, including one performed whilst abseiling down Portland Bill lighthouse and another in the buff on Studland nudist beach. He puts his success down to the inspirational writings of Thomas Hardy  and the throat-soothing qualities of good real ales (Doombar is his pint of choice). Witness the magic of Alistair Chisholm here.

The final (woollen) curtain

The deadline for sending us your Big Knit [link] hats has passed. But we’re nothing if not flexible, so if you have any hats left, please get them in to us as soon as possible. We'll try our best to count and tag the ones that come in a few days late. And they might even get here in time for the Grand Hat Judgement, when we will have a look at all of the best hats and vote for the cream of the crop. Keep checking out (and uploading photos to) the Big Knit flickr group and have a look at the Hat of the Week too. It’s a good ‘un.

Winning things

A couple of people emailed to ask us who won the Great Taste Race at our big village fete. Well, the answer is that Shelley B won a year’s supply of smoothies and Sam T won the runners up goody bag. Well done. And if you fancy winning a pile of CDs and a box of drinks, you should go here.

And finally, bananas...

Hello. This week's news has a European flavour. For those who need to know, Europe tastes of coffee and sausages, with a hint of garlic. It's a good flavour, but maybe not first thing in the morning. Anyway, on with the news...

Put up your dukes

We've never had proper royalty at Fruit Towers, so imagine what it was like on Monday when Prince Andrew aka HRH the Duke of York came to visit. Pretty darned royal. The office got a tidy, the police came and checked out the surrounding area for villains and three people brushed their hair. HRH as we like to call him wanted to see what we get up to and he stayed for quite a while, donning a special white coat (mandatory for all who enter the smoothie inventing kitchen), chatting to Margaret and Marie (the stars of our Big Knit film) and generally having a bit of a laugh. And then he went home in his shiny black car. There's more to see here, including photos of his encounter with a tree and a phone box.

The hills are alive

We're going to launch in Austria, where the air is clean, the sun is bright and the best perfume in town is called Eau de Mozart. Those of you who like a bit of classical will have surmised that we'll be based in Salzburg, home of Wolfgang Amadeus. And we're off to a flying start, as you can see in this blog post, which includes behind the scenes shots from our new HQ (one of Salzburg's top B&Bs). We're looking for people to come and help us, so if you live in the neighbourhood and have always dreamed of working in the smoothie business, have a look at some Austrian jobs (don't worry, we'll have a proper office very soon). And if you want to know where to find our drinks in Austria, drop our Jess an email.

Scandi is one

While we celebrate the launch of Austria, we would also like to doff our caps to our people in Scandinavia. We've been selling drinks there for a whole year now, and in that time have learned to love all things Scandinavian, apart from those disgusting salty liquorice things. To celebrate, our Scandinavian brothers and sisters have made a short film about the sordid side effects of helium huffing – it's right here.

Looming deadline

We are drawing a line in the sand – the Big Knit deadline is the 22nd October (next Monday). We know the postal strike has made things a bit slow and because of this we can be a bit flexible with the deadline. If your hats arrive a few days late we promise to try and be super-speedy to get them out on bottles in time - but it would make us very happy if you could send your knitted creations in to us as soon as possible. If you want to see how we're doing at reaching our mighty target, have a look here.

Oh and here's this week's Hat Of The Week.

And finally...

Hello. The news is like this – some stuff has happened, some of it is interesting, we’d like to tell you about it. That’s how we do it, this news thing. We hope you agree that this is the correct procedure. And we may mention smoothies at some point too.

Buy one, get one tree

If the truth is known, we came up with that tree-based pun a few years ago. Then we had to figure out what to do with it. Keep it in a cupboard? Lock it in a box? Or maybe think of something to do with our smoothies and trees. We chose the last option, and boy are we glad. From now until the end of November our big cartons are going to go a bit green. On the back of these special cartons is a  unique code  that you can register at innocentdrinks.co.uk/tree. For every  code registered, we then donate money on your behalf and an actual tree will be planted in either India or Africa which will help support local communities by providing income and training on sustainable agriculture. And your tree will also appear in our virtual forest.

So just to recap – you enter your special code on the website and we plant a tree on your behalf for someone who will really appreciate it. Buy one, get one tree. A fine pun for a fine cause.

Hat’s entertainment

Please excuse yet another popular old pun. We like to give it an annual airing. As you know, lots of people are knitting lots of little hats for the Big Knit at the moment. So we’ve made a short film about the whole shebang, which you can watch right here. We found a couple of nice ladies who were willing to show our Andrew how to knit. He didn’t learn that quickly, but he did have a laugh and some biscuits. Also, we’d like to show you the Hat Of The Week. It was knitted by Pat and is inspired by the concept of the artist at work. Nice hat Pat..

The winners from way back when

Do you remember way back, at the end of September, when we were launching our autumn smoothie? Great times. And we had that competition asking you to tell us what American people call autumn? Well, the answer was fall, and not Albuquerque. These people guessed right and won cases of the new autumn recipe – Peg, Chloe, Heather, Kirk, Andy, Harriet, Linzi, Killian, Erika and Rachel. Smoothies coming your way very soon.

And finally...

Hello and welcome to the only weekly smoothie newsletter in the world that promises you damsons, knitting and Ian Brown cooking Wiener Schnitzel.

Autumn – where the leaves crunch better

We’ll make no bones about the fact that we are excited about autumn, like a squirrel on a hot tin roof. So we make no apologies for banging on about it some more, and would like to introduce you properly to our damsons and our blackberries. Both of these juicy little fellows are from the UK, and if you click on the links above, you’ll be transported to some web pages that contain smart little films about said fruits. Watch the damsons clip and marvel at the man that is Stanley Yapp. He’s been growing damsons all his life, and also has an excellent hat.

Knit like the wind

Please meet Mike. In the words of our Charlotte, he’s an ‘Australian hunk’ and is here to help us sort out the precarious pile of hats in Fruit Towers. Here he is showing off a duck hat – his favourite so far. And rightly so. But Mike needs more hats. He isn’t particular about whether they represent any particular breed of waterfowl – he’ll take anything, as long as we can stick it on a bottle and raise some money via the Big Knit. Time is ticking and we need those hats, so pick up your needles and get cracking, or else Mike will come round and steal your duck or something.

Some other morsels of infotainmentism

Live in Manchester? Eat food? Drink drink? Then get yourself involved in the 10th Manchester Food and Drink festival between 5-15 October. Gary Neville and Ian Brown will be cooking Wiener Schnitzel for a live studio audience* and we’ll be supporting a few events across the city. There’s even a fringe event in Chorlton so please feel free to get involved.

And just a quick mention for our Claire. Claire does our PR in a serene and beautiful way, and gave birth to Jessica in a similar fashion last week. Congratulations.

And finally...

* TBC