here to give us the inside track is john timpson, the company‘s chairman. welcome to business life. business live. looking around the world, they wanted a model to copy, they found us, and thatis model to copy, they found us, and that is what is happening. do you think it is the start of more? not much pointjust having one. yes, a silly question. but you have a lot of shoes over there. we have one, there will be more fairly soon. 0bviously there will be more fairly soon. obviously we have to learn how to do it, we have one or two of our people over there. a long way to go. i‘m not getting excited yet, but it is a very interesting new direction for us. very interesting new direction for us. can i ask you this? i know you we re us. can i ask you this? i know you were watching the interview with john as well from argos. their model was very similar... asking if this is the future, you know, click & collect, picking up in supermarkets, and you‘re opening up a lot of the timpsons in supermarkets around the uk. is that the future because it is with the footfall is? we are in pretty much e

that was what happened to timpsons, the shoe repair and key cutting business.n timpson, returned and bought the company back. this happened in the ‘80s. since then, he's turned it into a business with almost 1,900 stores in the uk and ireland and one shop in beijing. earlier, he gave the bbc his unusual approach to annual meetings. there's a little trick i do every three years as a way of simulating out or... we don't really have sort of forward planning meetings or anything like that. but what i do, i write a chairman's report for 15 years' time. what it does, it takes you away from today. so instead of writing a forward plan, most people's forward plan, it's just an extrapolation of where they are today. they produce it, say it's going to be fine, because the sales go up faster than the costs so they make more money, so we can put that to bed and that's what it's going to be. my forward plan, my annual report for 2032, which is what i've just written, is a way away from... it's trying to guess what's going to happen. and actually, you know what the most inter

john simpson of timpson ‘s. —— john timpson. no trading on friday.ss news. 200 years ago in paris a wooden cart with wheels was fixed to a track and sent down a steep slope. the rollercoaster was born. since then, they have made countless stomachs churn and millions of heads spin. tim muffet reports. the roller—coaster story began in paris in 1817. the french put like a wooden cart onto a track that they built specifically to ride on. roller—coasters generally, and this is a great feature of roller—coasters, haven't changed all that much, really. in the 1920s and ‘30s, roller—coasters boomed in popularity. but in america, it became clear their appeal could go down as well as up. many theme parks closed during the great depression. after the war, roller—coasters recaptured people's imaginations, becoming quicker and bigger. if we're thinking about subjecting the body to different physical sensations, the extremes, if you like, the 3gs or ags that you get on roller—coasters, there is nowhere else in life that you can do that other than riding giant mac