Travel Dreams

Today at work was divided into two halves; the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of a relatively minor event that I had been dreading for several days. It was a personnel-type conversation I needed to have with one of my team and I hate that kind of thing – I fear it is my weakest aspect as a manager – but in the end it went fairly agreeably and I came away with an immense feeling of relief.

I had lunch with my sister, yet again patronising the local bistro-over-pub. I found I was rather hungry and ordered all three courses. After my earlier dread-to-relief transition, I even indulged in a glass of wine. It seems that Rosie’s Christmas and New Year all went well; Andy got on well with my folks. She also has a professional conference lined up in Australia later this year! I am very envious, although Sid (my boss) and I have recently been considering organising an ‘IT progress’ around our further-flung branch offices. It’s unlikely I’d make it to our Adelaide Office, as there are only four or five people out there, but if I’m lucky I should be able to arrange a trip to Santiago and possibly Bogotá.

The afternoon was mostly spent despairing at the variety of parameters required to get video conferencing to work through a couple of network firewalls…

This evening was a new-members evening for the Chorus and Brett and I had a bit of a nightmare journey to it; after an earlier signalling problem on the Northern Line there were major delays between trains, resulting in trains being packed-solid, resulting in our train not being allowed to open its doors at Camden Town, where we needed to change. When we got to the next station on the line we heard that the next service back down the line wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes, so we headed up to street level and shared a taxi with several other frustrated commuters who were heading in our general direction.

The intake went fairly smoothly though; I am responsible for photographing all the new members and transcribing their registration forms for the membership database and we didn’t have very many attending tonight, so it all went fairly quickly. The rehearsal was of a couple of pieces of our core repertoire; Our Time and Seasons Of Love, both of which I already know, so it was an enjoyable sing.

We joined a group of old and new members in the pub afterwards. I only stayed for one, but Brett was in his element chatting to the new guys and the music team (for whom he is responsible as their line manager) so I eventually left him to it as I was fairly weary.

Finished Long Way Round on the Tube back to Waterloo. The DVD of the trip is already on my wishlist!