No.399 Of Tidying Up for the Weekend

It's been a long week but a great one at work. We opened up in GB with a great conference in London and followed up with a superb event yesterday in Dublin on Data Protection. I think we're all crawling to the finish line at 5p.m. today.

Next week we have Birmingham to cross off our tour itinerary followed by Manchester the week after that and then finally Leeds.

I've just taken delivery of a skip at home which means yippee dee I can empty my garage of loads of junk and get my MG back in its proper bed. At this rate I might have a normal household and life by Christmas!

No.398 Of London Calling

We opened with our first event in London yesterday after a rather agreeable dinner the night before in a Moroccan restaurant Covent Garden. We took no prisoners yesterday and it was good. Very good. The venue was great beaming T.V pictures of the conference everywhere. The speakers were all exceptionally good. The notes as usual, first class. The food delightful. Not a bad way to open up in a new jurisdiction though I say so myself.

No.397 Of Bad Dogs and an Englishman

I was a beautiful morning when I headed out to the pool today. 6.30a.m. is a great time to be up at a great time of the year. The mornings are fresh but not cold. The trees are glistening an Autumnal gold.

I did my statutory 20 lengths before racing back to the house to dash up the round and walk the neighbours golden lab. All was going well until on our return from the river walk she refused to release a large stick in her mouth which meant I couldn't get the lead back over her head. "Drop. Leave. Dead. Bad Dog" nothing seemed to work and she looked at me, passers by looked at me and those shooting by in cars no doubt wondered what the stand off was all about. Eventually I snapped the stick off either side of her mouth leaving enough room to get the lead on her and hurtled back to the house with her still firmly biting what was left of the stick. And I thought humans were meant to be stubborn.

I'm off with a couple of aforementioned humans to London this afternoon. Tomorrow marks the first day of Legal-Island in Britain and what a place to open at Oxford Circus, London. Bring it on. Let's do it.

No.396 Of Sticks and Stones

I'm babysitting the neighbour's dog, Isla, this weekend. I couldn't remember if I had to feed her or not this morning so I gave her the last of some apple pie I found in the neighbour's fridge. She looked delighted. (Isla that is. The neighbour is on holiday).

Isla is a mix between a labrador and a retriever. However, she's clearly got a complex about not being a full blooded retriever for when you walk her she shows no interest in any other dogs but spends all her time bringing things back to you. You get lost golf and tennis balls. You get old trainers and boots. You get large stones. You get an awful lot of fallen branches and sticks. And I mean an awful lot. This morning I soon got bored of throwing things for her and ignored all the stuff she deposited at my feet in the hope she'd do something else. Alas she simply took all of the flotsam and jetsam she found in the river to anyone else she could find in hope they'd do the casting for her. Fickle or what? Should have had the apple pie myself.

No.395 Of Buddies Past

I tried a new restaurant last night Hooligans in Talbot St Belfast. I met an old mucker there Maura whom I first met at University and then worked alongside at the Law Centre.

The food was exceptionally different no chips here and no "alf n alf" either. It was also very tasty too. The bread and butter pudding was to die for and yes probably as good as my Mum does possibly even better (sorry Mum!).

There was one thing that spoiled it however : the loud music. Straining to hear Maura over lots of Buddy Holly tracks made me feel a little deaf and in need of an ear trumpet or two to stick close to my head and point in her direction. Not a great feeling for someone of my age. Perhaps the solution is to wear a couple of those rinky dinky new motorbike helmets that come with headsets and two way radio. Marginally less embarrassingly than ear trumpets I suppose and far more fun.

No.394 Of Rule Britannia and the Royals

I spent a good part of last weekend in Edinburgh. I had forgotten what a great city it is and bathed as it was in glorious sunshine it made for a great two days of relaxation.

On Saturday afternoon I visited the Britannia which was decommissioned as the Royal yacht in 1996..

It's an astonishing vessel and a fine museum to how Royalty did Royalty from the early 1950s up until very recently.

Each visitor is given a handheld guide which tells you all the secrets belonging to each room as you go around. What's worth listening to is the lines in between the lines. For example, it tells you that a double bed didn't make it onto the ship before the honeymoon of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in the 80s. Then you see the single bedrooms of her Majesty and Prince Philip laid end to end at the back of the ship. It had a shared door where presumably the Prince could steal in at the dead of night and lament on the end of Her Majesty's bed just how ghastly the evening's pudding was.

The main dining room is breathtaking. It took 3 hours to prepare the 120 places with each item of cutlery set down with a ruler to make sure it was placed exactly 3 centimetres from the each of the edge of the table.

Until 1970 the Marines who travelled with the Royals to provide the band music when they arrived at port slept in hammocks but by the early 1990s they were sending as many as 6 shirts a day to the laundry room as they changed from one formal duty to another.

Different world then I thought as I jetted back to Belfast for £50 on my Easyjet flight.

No.393 Of Raised Expectations

I went swimming this morning for the first time in almost two weeks to see the Early Birds for I have missed their "craic" recently. For some reason they weren't there. May be like me getting up at the crack of dawn to make the 7.15a.m. cut is proving increasingly unappealing and difficult.

This evening I'm off to Edinburgh to see a musical written by an old friend of mine Julian Wagstaff called "John Paul Jones". Julian is a buddy from my university days in Glasgow. He was (and most likely still is) one of those very annoying people who could turn his hand to anything and do it well first time and most times do it quite brilliantly. We first met in a beginner's German language class. As I struggled to get my head round the grammar of the language and my tongue round the accent to him the former appeared obvious and the latter was well like he was just remembering the language rather than learning it for the first time. Sehr ärgerlich.

Probably about two years later I went to see him in a play he was in whilst studying in Berlin. It was the first time he had ever acted but you'd never had known it. Later that year he came to a party I had organsied whilst working at the European Parliament in Luxembourg. I asked him to bring his guitar which I had seen him carry about at Uni a few times to play a few songs if the moment seemed right. It didn't but that didn't deter him. He just got up in front of a large crowd of people he didn't really know sang and played a load of rock songs accoustically and raised the roof.

Here's wondering if he manages to raise the roof tonight. I expect so....