I’ve not been posting for a while, as my broadband has been down. It went off suddenly and completely, in the middle of a huge thunderstorm about ten days ago. Strangely, my phone line still worked, albeit rather noisily, but no internet. I phoned my ISP from my mobile, they ran some tests, and said […]
My mother died last month. We had been expecting it since around Christmas, and fortunately we were able to hold the funeral well before everything was shut down with the Coronavirus pandemic. Now it’s a case of sorting out the paperwork. My sister and I were both named as executors of her Will, but in […]
I’ve been doing quite a lot of work with Birmingham University over the last few years, and yesterday I was invited to a conference & workshop held at a hotel that’s part of the university, to launch the next phase of the big project they’re working on. The meeting was very interesting, with several excellent […]
I went away for a few days last week to a cottage in the Cotswolds. It’s somewhere I pass through often, usually on my way to a customer meeting, but it’s been several years since I have spent time pottering around. There are a lot of Roman ruins around Cirencester, and I particularly wanted to […]
Because my team and I were working at various locations in New York, we needed to use the Subway to get around. I was, perhaps naively, expecting it to be very similar to the London Underground – but I was wrong. It was much more complicated and we all found it challenging. There were some […]
I booked a holiday recently for later in the year, just another holiday cottage, but through a company I’d not used before. I did it all online, and provided my mobile number. A few days later I got a call to discuss my booking. All very well, until the caller asked me to confirm the […]
Now is the time of year when every time the postman calls he seems to be bringing loads of holiday brochures. And my email inbox is just as bad – the majority of my emails seem to be from companies trying to tempt me to go away somewhere based on what they (or their algorithms) […]
I’ve had a load of off site meetings this week – Woking on Monday, Chelmsford on Tuesday, then Oxford on Wednesday. Chelmsford in particular is much further than I’m prepared to drive, so trains it was. What could possibly go wrong? A colleague gave me a lift to the meeting at Woking on Monday. But […]
My first impressions of Montréal were of a modern, high-rise, somewhat identikit Northern American city. And of roadworks. Lots of roadworks. The city authorities seemed intent on replacing the sewers all over the downtown, there was a lot of redevelopment going on with new skyscrapers and new bridges being built, several major road junctions were […]
I got a new pair of glasses two years ago, the first for many years, and to be honest I’ve never really got on with them. The prescription was too much of a compromise, so neither my distance vision nor my near vision was as sharp as I thought it should be. In fact, when […]
