Sunday - Monday

On Sunday we had lunch. That was about the only thing we achieved. It was a very nice lunch, in very nice surroundings and with very nice company though; It was one of Ping’s events (every so often he organises lunch for a group of friends. Nominally it is a brunch club, but in fact it’s usually late enough to be classified as lunch.) We were at the Four Seasons Hotel near Canary Wharf which is a lovely spot. The food was top quality and the service very smooth and discreet. There were nine of us around a circular table (which was actually the only thing I didn’t enjoy about the meal – shouting across the table wasn’t very intimate.) Mark G and his partner Chris McC were joining us for the first time and seemed to enjoy themselves. The buffet-style presentation was delightful, allowing you to sample a little of everything – to do it so well is quite a coup for a hotel; buffets are hard to do well.

Conversation was a mixture of holiday, gay weddings, chorus and New Orleans’ hurricane talk. The other Chris in the party, Chris McM, was enjoyable company but always leaves me feeling like I’m not quite well-versed enough in pretty much everything. I didn’t notice until midway through the meal, but Brett was very subdued; he seemed to be there in body only. Paranoia immediately set in, but he assured me on the train home that he was just feeling hungover from Paul L’s party the previous night.

Lunch ran on until nearly four o’clock, after which we came home and slumped on the sofa for the afternoon, watching occasional TV, reading and surfing. I also had various admin stuff to do relating to the new Chorus members we recruited last Wednesday.

Today at work was fairly mundane although I am getting increasingly pissed off with our main firewall which has been performing erratically in certain respects lately. Fortunately it is not a security issue, but rather a functionality breakdown for our network; less damaging but, alas, more visible to the users. Tomorrow I am going to be trying to engage the manufacturer’s support team to help me work out why it is going wrong so often when doing something which should be fairly basic!

Chorus rehearsal tonight was uneventful. We had a sectional meeting at the break and were ‘buddied’ up with the new guys. John W got matched up with the guy I had been hoping to get and I ended up with no-one. Hey ho! That’s life I suppose.

Richard B gave me a lift home and was telling me all about a chap he has been seeing. They seem to be well matched for each other but there are a few things they need to work out between them first. I do hope they can manage it. Thanks to Richard’s lift I got home before eleven, but still went pretty much straight to bed.