Conkers

The last time I was preparing a blog posting on the plane, Sandie was preparing for a ceasarian. Whilst I will drive to the hospital again tonight after arriving at the airport at Pau, hopefully this time it will be only to help feed Capucine and Gaston around midnight. Although Sandie’s not rolling out the bunting just yet, they are doing well, are out of their incubators, are clothed, are drinking (milk) from bottles and we’re beginning to talk about bringing them home soon. Apart from that, I’m also looking forward to seeing the Little Giant at home tomorrow morning.

This week has been a long week with its good and bad bits. This week I’ve done 7 flights and 4 countries (France, Sweden, Finland and England). Whilst I was delighted to see so many old friends, I’m ready for a bit of time at home. When I was out running in London this week I was also struck by the fact that the autumn is clearly upon us – the streets are decked in orangey brown leaves. I even saw a street cleaner brushing up the leaves and chatting to an elderly gentleman who was passing by. It reminded me of my favourite street cleaner in Morpeth when I was about 7 or 8 years old who used to stop, chat to us and give us huge big conkers on our way to St. Robert’s First School. The only difference this time was that when I stopped to ask the street cleaner for directions to Paddington station (I was lost on my morning run), he looked blankly at the elderly man, they had a conversation in Polish, and then he shook his head and gestured to me with his hands essentially saying I was miles away from where I needed to be. How life has changed over the last 25 years (I never got lost when I was 8 years old).

The last two days of the week were spent in London at a marketing event where I was representing Wipro with another recent recruit, Rajesh, who does a similar job to me but for the UK market. It was the first occasion for us to spend an extended amount of time together. He’s a splendid chap and he really made me laugh when he discovered after 10 minutes on the first day that he had a huge hole in the inside leg of his trousers. We debated for about two minutes whether or not this was the right image we should be portraying, before he scuttled off to buy a new suit. He made me laugh again when he came back, clearly looking very proud of himself but unfortunately wearing what was a shiny black evening dinner suit. It was only 10 o’clock in the morning. Apparently his wife was even more scathing about his emergency purchase and she ordered him to take it back for a refund.