I’ve spent most of the week up in Edinburgh, at the main international conference in my particular technical field. It was held in a huge conference centre near Haymarket station, and even the thousand or so delegates didn’t completely fill it. What was nice is that it’s clearly the “right” conference for me – not […]
I recently spent a weekend in the depths of rural Dorset at the wedding of a friend and ex-colleague. I well remember that I was writing a bid with L, the bridegroom, whilst Christopher was extremely ill. So I was going into work each the morning, working on the bid, and then dashing off to […]
I rather enjoyed watching the Olympic gymnastics on the telly last month, so when I saw that the Chinese State Circus was in town, at the Malvern Theatres, I thought I’d treat myself to a standby ticket to today’s matinee. Normally, when I go to a Saturday matinee at the theatre, it’s full of coach […]
My work seems to go in cycles, depending on what projects I’m working on. A few years ago, I was involved in an equipment trial down at our Hampshire office, and spent a lot of time staying at a hotel that could easily have passed for Fawlty Towers. But the last few years, I’ve been running […]
I’ve not been to the Malvern Theatres for a while, as there’s been a bit of a dull patch in their programme, with little that I’m interested in. This week though they did have a play showing that I particularly wanted to watch, so I used my theatre membership card to buy myself a standby […]
My ongoing tour of British universities continues – this week it was a visit to the physics and engineering departments at Glasgow University. I’ve never been to Glasgow before, so I would have been quite keen to stay overnight and have a quick look around – there’s been a huge amount of investment in the […]
I had a meeting in Oxford on Tuesday, at a joint industry/academia forum that I’m a member of. As a city, it’s actively hostile to cars, and the university has very limited parking to offer visitors, so the most sensible option was to go by rail. The train was spot on time on the way […]
My trip to Brighton necessitated an overnight stay, which turned out to be more of an issue than I had expected. I have to book hotels via work’s online travel agent, and usually that’s no problem. However, it was Conference Season in Brighton, and all the main hotels had either no online availability, or were […]
My job seems to involve visiting a lot of universities at the moment – this week it was the University of Sussex at Brighton. The journey to Brighton from Malvern is an absolute pig – I’m not happy to drive that far at the moment, and there is no easy route by rail. The quickest […]
I spent most of last week in Durham, working on an equipment trial at the Unversity with one of the professors in the Engineering Department. We had a lot to achieve, and not much time to do it in, so we were all working pretty long and tiring days. Last year, when I was working […]
