Tower Of Power

Hello fellow bloggers. I've been estranged from blog.co.uk a long time, and it's good to be back. It seems that I haven't had any time for blogging at all for months. And months. It's not as though I've got much time now, either. But something has been compelling me to write recently, even though I haven't really got that much to write about. I keep thinking "oooo - I could write loads about that", but not having a pen or paper to hand, and by the time I have a moment in which I could blog, my mind is empty, and my memory blank.

Anyway, I thought I'd better damn well start somewhere, and so this week is it, a week during which nothing - nothing of note has happened to me. That's probably a good thing, as I've lived long enough to notice that one tends to live longer, the less notable things that happen to one. In the hotel lobby last week, I passed Barry from Eastenders, and only the previous day had thought for a glorious moment that I was shopping from the same section of the yogurt counter as Andrew Marr, but on closer inspection it turned out to be some ordinary bloke who just happened to look like the hero himself. No wonder I'm still alive.

I've just been out to eat at a Brasserie called Cyrano, on Holland Park Road. It was very nice actually - from outside it looked like one of those painted Parisian street cafe scenes, with the small round tables each covered by an impossibly white tablecloth over which attractive people exchange muted pleasantries. I was shown to an identical (but alas, indoor) table, from where I perused the menu whilst waiting for a glass of the house red. During this inaugural wait, my nose started to feel irritated by something, and I swiftly realised that the source of my discomfort was the Grant Mitchell look-alike who was smoking at one of the immaculate outside tables. The smoke was being blown into the restaurant, which I supposed alleviated some of the pollution elsewhere in London. Still, the thought of the rest of London being spared didn't prevent me wanting to slip a potato sack over his head and knot it around his neck. So much the better if the sack had been full. As there was no sack to hand, I steeled myself and ordered the "Pâté de Campagne and Toast", evidently a dish named by Del Trotter himself. I was informed that the pâté had run out (I wondered if he meant literally), and so I settled for a main course only - Coq Au Vin (you can make up your own pun, I'm not going to do it for you). I had noticed with some amusement the "Breakfast All Day (until 6pm)" menu section, but won't mention it here so as not to seem like a pretentious neurotic.

When it arrived, the food was excellent - the chicken was tender, and was easily separated from the bone. The carrot slices were lovely too - all four of them (although they were spread out around the plate, and thickly coated with gravy, an arrangement which did keep me fooled for a while). I shouldn't complain - it really was a very tasty, well-presented meal, and to top it all, some other unfortunate part of the city was now playing host to the smoker. (How appropriate - there's a song by Smokey Robinson on the radio as I write!) I suppose that smokers reading this may well think resentfully about me while they shiver, huddled outside some warm, waterproof-looking building, staring miserably at the floor while the rain gently makes paper mache of their small, cylindrical raison d'être. It's all for your own good you know, this smoking ban. Anyway - un moment - allow me to dismount my grand cheval.

I managed to get through my meal, which was no mean feat while reading "The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld" - a collection of excruciatingly funny bits from Terry Pratchett. I guffawed my way through the green beans, chuckled over the chicken, creased with the carrots and made merry with the mashed potato. Occasionally, I could be found doubled up with my hand over my mouth just to keep the food in. It was that kind of read. The strangest thing was that the man seated at the table next to me was doing the very same thing, only he was reading The Times.

When I had exhausted all that my dinner plate had to offer, I sat back to enjoy more of Terry's wit, and to take the most miniscule sips humanly possible from the tiny drop of wine that was left in the bottom of my glass (you know how it is in these places - the next glass will take 45 minutes to arrive). The wine arrived more quickly than I expected actually, and so did the dessert menu. I hadn't intended to have dessert at all, but browsed the menu out of politeness, and to relieve my aching sides. I did fancy the Crème Brûlée, but noted the description ("Crispy, creamy and deadly") and went for the Apple Tart instead. I didn't get where I am today by eating food which the restaurant owner describes as "deadly".

I leave you with a random quote from Terry:
"The Disc's greatest lovers were undoubtably Mellius and Gretelina, whose pure, passionate and soul-searing affair would have scorched the pages of History if they had not, because of some unexplained quirk of fate, been born two hundred years apart on different continents."

Bonnet de douche,
~jonny

Hello fellow bloggers. I don't know if you've been wondering where I've been, but I hadn't forgotten you. Hope you all had a good Christmas and managed to get some nice quality time off work.

I don't know if you remember, but I started a new job in December, and it's been going really well. I've been really busy doing technical things again, which I really missed in the latter months of my last job. This new job is great, but I haven't had a lot of time for blogging, unfortunately. I used to use the train journey for blogging, but don't go on the train much nowadays - it's aeroplanes now, and they tend to frown on laptops - especially those with wireless. So now I read much more, and write much less; not that I was exactly a prolific writer before, but now it's really limited.

Anyway, I just wanted to say, I am alive, kicking and smiling, and a bit embarrassed about the "I Hate IT People When I'm Tired" entry. What a thing to write about.

Will write a bit more properly soon.

Keep smiling :-)
HT

I eased the door open a fraction, and reached into the blackness, my groping hand feeling for the cord. One slightly frustrated moment later, it connected with my palm, and I thankfully closed my hand around it and pulled firmly. The room became lit with the dim yellow glow of an energy-saving bulb which has yet to warm up, and the extractor fan began its familiar steady roar. In the summer months, the noise of the fan is a very welcome sound, reassuringly speaking of freshness and reminiscent of the continuous hum that a ship's engines make as it skates across the ocean to some fantasy destination. Not so in the winter, when it simply reminds me that it sucks cold air into the house as quickly as it blows the warm air out. I stepped into the brightening gloom and closed the door behind me. Pulling back the shower curtain, I stared at the white, steel cubicle. Unlike modern plastic cubicles, this one was made in the seventies when domestic showers were still a relatively new commodity, and British engineering companies were concerned with building things to last. Just looking at it, I could feel the remaining warmth from my body's core being drawn out through my dressing gown into that steel plate.

I reached in, and pushed the showerhead against the back wall of the cubicle. I wasn't getting in before the water had run warm, so I twisted the shower control, bringing the dormant beast to life. Chilled water crashed into the bottom of the tray, and I quickly withdrew my hand and pulled the curtain across while the water warmed. It should have been a relief, shutting out the cold of the cubicle, but it still stood in the room with me like a giant white refrigerator, into which I knew that I would soon cautiously, unavoidably have to step. I undid the furry nylon cord that was around my waist and pulled the dressing gown from my shoulders, hanging it from a hook on the back of the shower-room door. Then, I took the bath mat from the radiator and laid it out on the floor in readiness for the ordeal that stepping out of my slippers would be. The radiator was as frigid as the shower cubicle - it was early in the morning and far too early to start the heating system; the rest of the house was fast asleep. Once I'd removed my underwear, any pretence of comfort had gone and the cold began to have its way with me. I pushed my hand into the cubicle. The water was hot, much too hot, and I quickly turned the temperature control a few degrees clockwise.

That temperature control, like any fine musical instrument, takes years to master and I am only on grade 4. There is a 'dead zone', within which, after adjusting the temperature one way and finding that one has overshot the desired setting, adjustment in the opposite direction has no effect. It's quite a large dead zone - around sixty degrees of rotation, and outside it, the change in temperature for a minute adjustment of the control becomes almost extreme. Compensating for overshoot before hypothermia sets in is a tricky maneuver, involving turning the control through the dead zone, but not more than five degrees beyond, or the temperature drops from scalding to icily cold within seconds. Another probe with my hand told me that my adjustment had had no effect, and so I applied a few more degrees and waited, this time keeping my hand under the running water. There was still no change, and so I turned it again, a few more degrees this time. The water ran cold instantly, and I gave an involuntary intake of breath as I grasped the knob and turned it anti-clockwise about thirteen point six degrees. The water grew pleasantly warm, and I wasted no time in stepping into the cubicle, closing the curtain behind me and re-positioning the showerhead over the center of the tray.

Despite the warmth of the water that had been flowing over it, the bottom of the cubicle was as cold as a slab of marble, and my feet recoiled in horror. I placed my heel over the waste water outlet in order to trap some more of the warmth around my feet. As I did so, a mental image flashed before me, in which some long, thin and sinewy creature from the sewer had slithered its way up the drainage system into the shower's water trap, and was now ready to jab some poisoned barb into my heel. I hastily withdrew my foot at the thought, then sanity returned, I reproached myself and replaced my foot over the hole.

The water cascaded down between my shoulder blades, leaving me with the delicious predicament of wanting to warm the front of my body, but not wanting to lose the warmth from my back. I think that this particular predicament is the best thing about taking a shower in a cold room - the feeling of warm water cascading over skin that is sensitised and distorted by goose-bumps is wonderful - amazingly sensually gratifying, almost sexual, but not quite.

I thought about washing, but decided to leave it for a few minutes and rotated slowly instead, like a pig on a vertical skewer. I let the warmth work its magic over my body, imagining at times that I was actually being warmed by flames, while the extractor fan roared away above my head. For a few moments I was lost in a world of my imagination, a barren, perma-frost world through which nature was trying to stifle human life, and within which humanity rose triumphantly by inventing warm showers.

(Of course, that warmth comes at an environmental cost which may eventually result in the downfall of humanity, and of which I may write at some other time. But for now, let's stay in the warm shower.)

The time came when I could procrastinate no longer, and felt that I must either wash or accept that I would miss my train. I started with my hair, which I had been hoping to keep dry for as long as possible to avoid the feeling of wearing an ice-cap that accompanies wet hair in a cold environment. I ran the water over my hair for a full minute, holding the showerhead still in my hands, and moving my head around, boxer-like below it, feeling the water running down over my neck, my ears and my face, each in their turn crying out with relief that the cold had been temporarily displaced. I replaced the head in its bracket, poured a little shampoo into my hand and firmly massaged it into my hair and scalp. This alone is a therapy that I find can be carried on for as long as there is hot water available and have often stood there, shampooing my hair until the water has turned decidedly tepid, bordering on cold. Rinsing the shampoo off is not pleasant in such circumstances, and fortunately there was plenty of hot water today to rinse my hair and enjoy a few minutes more wash-and-daydream time.

Once my hair was finished, I moved on to other places, beginning with my face. I closed my eyes, worked up a big soapy lather and rubbed it hard into my face, making sure it worked its way deep into the pores and leaving minimal opportunity for spots. Having suffered badly with acne as a teenager, I have no wish to be back in that situation. My hair started to feel cold thanks to the room managing to retain its icy feel, despite the heat produced by the shower, but still I rubbed that soap into the fissures in my forehead, which were brought on by years of frowning, laughing and avoiding any sort of facial skincare product. Eventually I rinsed off the soap, and could once again open my eyes. The view wasn't impressive, and I felt slightly disappointed, even though the inside of a shower cubicle containing merely toiletries and one's self is never going to be the most stimulating sight for anyone.

At this point, I could easily have stood, reflecting, for as long as the hot water would run, but instead turned to the problem of whether or not it would be better from a cold-avoidance standpoint to stand still and let the warm water run over as much of my body as possible, or to busy myself washing and work up heat in my inner core with the work of washing. I decided on the latter approach (prompted motivationally by the thought of missing my train) and moved on quickly to my arms and torso. In order to lather them up, I had to turn my back to the flow of water, which was most welcome, since it had been slowly chilling while I rinsed my hair and washed my face. I was still doing my best to avoid bodily contact with the side walls of the cubicle - I had not forgotten (as you might) that they are made of cold, hard white steel. Rinsing my armpits is a favourite of mine, being a great excuse to get that showerhead off its bracket and having some directional water-jet fun. In a cold room, the body part immediately under the jet revels in warmth, while the rest slowly succumbs to rigor mortis. Moving the head around all over my body, a couple of millimetres above the skin, is an absolutely wonderful torture.

(Author's note: When I started this little story, it seemed like a good idea, but now I am boring myself and shall finish quickly, I promise.)

Finishing my upper body, the lower part was next for the onslaught. I am tall and have long legs by any standards, so soaping those bad boys took some time. I put extra effort in for the sake of generating warmth, and had I been using an abrasive soap would quickly have removed a considerable layer of skin. As it was, I simply ended up with very clean legs and feet. I shan't discuss the washing of my nether regions, as it's too embarrassing to describe; I mention it here only to assure the reader that I did not neglect those poor, underexposed areas.

The indecisive phase of the shower is that time when one has finished washing, one knows that one must get out soon, but one would dearly love to stay beneath that torrent of liquid heaven until one is ready to depart this earth and exchange it for the great big shower in the sky. This was the phase I had reached, and had dreaded reaching since the moment I had stepped in. "Shall I get out? No, a minute more will be OK won't it? No? OK. What about now? Should I get out now? Yes? But it so waaarm! I can't!" (To provide the reader with some reassurance of my sanity, this dialog took place inside my head, and not audibly).

Turning the shower off is as tricky as getting it to the right temperature. It requires a constant torque throughout the travel of the control, with no stopping for sightseeing along the way. If you stop, the water will continue to run, but very cold. Once this happens, it takes a burst of Herculean strength to move the control any further - a change in temperature makes it as immovable as bedrock. Even if this has happened to one only once before, the instinct for survival ensures that next time, one puts in the necessary effort to keep the thing moving once the turning-off process has started. I clenched my jaws, twisted for all I was worth and continued to twist - as though I was wringing the neck of some arch-enemy - until the water had stopped.

It was cold without the water running, and I was left with the task of choosing between two evils. It wasn't much of a choice - stay in the shower cubicle and freeze slowly, or get out and freeze more quickly. My mind was made up by the train timetable and the thought of my warm dressing gown hanging on the coat hook a couple of feet away. I briskly swished the curtain aside and stepped onto the bath mat. The towel was looking almost apologetic, lying against the tiled wall on top of the radiator in a pathetic heap. It was a thin one - God knows why I hadn't brought a nice soft thick one down - but it would have to do. I picked it up and rubbed my hair vigorously. Ah - that was good - my muscles still worked, and a feeble warmth was stimulated within me. Face, arms, body, legs, feet and unmentionables followed quickly and then - then I was ready for the dressing gown and slippers. Slipping them on, and picking up my underwear from the floor, I left the brightness of the shower room and ventured into the dark, cold house.

Hi. I'm Jonny Hightower - I'm 34, tall, tired, and within earshot of two balding middle-aged men that are busily exchanging phrases such as "DVD writer", "10 gig!", "hard disk" and other terms which are particular to IT people and other connoisseurs of the ghastly.

These kind gentlemen have shown me that I hate IT people when I'm tired. I hate them and the technology they love, which surprises me, as I am an IT person myself. During the day, when I'm not tired and when things are going my way, I like IT. I even like the odd IT person, and let's face it, they're all odd. If I weren't odd, I wouldn't be up writing this at this ungodly hour. Nonetheless, here I am, and it's proof that I am as hateful, boring and mindless as the drones sitting one table away.

I would say "somebody shoot me", but frankly I think that if you have a gun and you're in my hotel, you're the kind of person who would reap greater benefits from discharging your valuable ammunition into the blokes that are going on about USB interfaces and making the plants wither in their pots. I'm not boring anyone (audibly).

I'm going to bed now, before I'm nasty to anyone else. In the morning, I will meet these men, and think they are decent and likeable human beings. But that will be after I've had a long, deep sleep, and dreamed dreams of dangling the boring boys from the hotel roof using electrified USB-powered testicle clamps. A looooong deeeeeeep sleeeeeeep.

I'm back in Belfast, where the big talk is the new IKEA store which opened on Saturday, the largest IKEA in Europe. In anticipation of the massive crowd, five hundred staff were waiting, and the police had carefully organised local traffic diversions to cause minimum disruption to the city and to facilitate effective traffic control should the crowds become too great. In simple terms, if IKEA got too crowded, they'd stop the traffic going there.

When the Birmingham IKEA store opened, thousands of people turned up, each of them with the sole intention of buying one or more of the hundred half-price sofas that had been reduced to celebrate the store's opening. People were seriously injured in the crush. To prevent a similar occurrence taking place on the emerald Isle, police had advised IKEA not to hold any special promotion for the first few days after the opening.

The day came and saw some four hundred visitors to the new store. Four hundred. That's a hundred less people than there were staff present. I don't know about you, but I find that slightly amusing, even though I'm not really sure why.

IKEA recently ran an advertising campaign with the slogan "Home is the most important place in the world". One wonders if perhaps it was too successful?

You may or may not know (what a pointless phrase that is) that I started a new job yesterday. I know it, because I feel the tiredness. I was up at 4.15 AM to get the morning flight from Cardiff to Belfast. Quarter past four - it's a hideous thing to have to get up that early in the morning, especially after two weeks off. That's only fifteen minutes after four o'clock in the morning. As I showered, I thought to myself "even if I stayed in bed for another three hours, lots of people would still consider that an early rise." Have I laboured the point enough yet? No? I thought not.

So, I drove to the airport, and parked the car in the long-stay car park. Before I parked, I noticed a few odd things. Firstly, there was a wheelchair parked alongside a Citroen Picasso. I thought that it would be waiting for its occupant to alight from the car, but the car was desolate, and had been all night judging by the condensation on the inside, and the dew on the outside. Weird. If the car's owners had left the car to go to the airport, wouldn't they have taken the wheelchair? And if they were using the wheelchair to come back to the car, where were they now? Also, next to a Land Rover Discovery lay a small red pillow. You might have thought it could have come from the wheelchair, but it really was quite a distance away. This is all very puzzling when it is before six in the morning and you are me. However, these shocking events only served to better prepare me for the further shock of parking next to a Vectra which had been left with the driver's window wide open. (It is not uncommon for the electric windows on Vectras to open randomly by themselves - it happened on at least two hired Vectras whilst they were in my possession.) Of course, the window being down meant that the car's interior motion sensors generously incorporated the space outside the driver's window into their zone of protection, and dutifully triggered the alarm as soon as I stepped out of my car. I did my best to ignore it as I dragged my bags out of the boot, but couldn't help thinking sarcastically to myself that there was no more inappropriate (or likely) time for me to be arrested than on the first day of my new job.

A little time, a latte and a muffin later, I was safely in my seat on the plane and we were taking off. Taking off and landing are my favourite parts of a flight. The take-off is when you really appreciate the immense power in those turbofan engines, as the acceleration forces you back into your seat. There’s not much else like it, apart from a motorbike. I do miss my motorbike - my lovely Honda VFR 750. I love acceleration. But on a motorbike, you have to change gear when the rev counter moves into the red area, whereas the aeroplane just keeps charging on relentlessly. It’s magnificent.

I remember the first time I flew. I’m not sure why, but I was completely amazed at how smooth it was - I must have expected it to be bouncy or something. I remember thinking that if you could somehow miss the take-off (by being drugged or similar), you could be forgiven for thinking that the plane was stationary, when in fact you were hurtling through the stratosphere faster than a couple of CDs containing sensitive information leaving the hands of a well-known freight carrier. Or maybe at the same speed - who knows?

As we left the ground, dawn was breaking and the sky was turning the most beautiful shades of blue. It faded from almost black nearer the ground to a sublime dull cyan sort of colour in the mid-regions, before fading back to a dark blue higher up. The subtlety in the colour gradients was amazing – no photograph could do it justice; it was for the naked eye only.

I looked out over Cardiff and Penarth far below, and was enjoying the view when it was interrupted by the plane banking sharply to the right. (I am sadly unfamiliar with aeronautical terms – maybe should that have been ‘to starboard’.) That maneuver was shortly followed by more banking to the left, and then to the right again. Over the course of the next few minutes, the pilot changed course about six hundred and fifty times. I exaggerate of course – the actual figure was nearer four hundred. All the banking caused me to think of a preposterous theory.

In my preposterous theory, I see flight paths as roads, and (I assume) flights from Cardiff to Belfast nearly always take the same flight paths, in much the same way that Lorries going from Cardiff to London would usually take the same route each time. I have no real idea about this, but it seemed to me that someone (I know not whom) could charge airlines for the use of the flight paths, in much the same way as vehicle owners pay road tax.

I was flying on BMI baby, and it occurred to me that maybe [insert name of budget airline here] saves money by taking the cheaper flight paths, or by avoiding allotted flight paths altogether. If a monster truck driver wanted to avoid paying road tax, he might consider driving the cross-country route to work to avoid being caught by bridge-mounted tax-dodger-spotting cameras. In the same way, the pilot on my flight seemed to be trying to dodge all established flight paths. The theory went some way to explaining the meandering route he was taking, anyway. Alternatively, perhaps he was sticking to the windy back roads instead of bothering with the motorway. Or maybe he was just bored, and was sitting in the cockpit making loud “mmmeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaawwwwww” world-war II fighter plane noises as he threw us all about.

After those minor alterations to our course, the flight became more pleasant, and the cabin was filled with the smell of hot bacon and cheese rolls. My mouth watered, but I had packed my wallet into my coat in the overhead luggage compartment, and I wasn’t getting up and blocking the aisle just so that I could have a bacon bap. I reflected instead on my preposterous theory and the composition of aeroplanes and clouds.

Aeroplane wings are incredibly complex things, did you know? They are covered in at least twenty different flaps of various shapes and sizes – flaps that open and close, extend and retract, lower and raise, spit and polish and generally save the world, at least from the point of view of the people on the plane. Their main purpose is to generate lift, but they also manage to carry thousands of gallons of fuel, and effortlessly suspend tons and tons of engine. The landing gear is also contained within the wings, and all the mechanisms that are required to raise and lower those wheels. When the aircraft is accelerating for take-off, the wings transmit all the thrust from the engines to the main body of the plane. In flight, the wings suspend the fuselage between them, and on landing, the wings bear the impact of landing and transmit the reverse thrust of the engines to the body. This happens numerous times, every day. Aeroplane wings aren’t like cars, which are smooth and polished, and painstakingly free of unnecessary features. They are full of bolts, screws, rivets and painted arrows that you just wouldn’t see on a car. Looking at the engine mounts as we flew, it seemed miraculous to me that the engines don’t just fall off pathetically every time they produce some thrust, or when the plane lands. The engineering is marvellous – it is a very fine line between making the plane too strong and heavy, and making it too light and weak.

I was looking out of the window pondering this when I became aware that the wing I was watching was flapping. Not a huge flap, but the far end had a peak-to-peak amplitude of around a few feet. We were encountering a slight turbulence, and it brought me back to my road theory. It was as if we were definitely on the cheap roads today. The ones that all the big heavy goods vehicles drive on, creating potholes and puddles – the ones that everyone else avoids. Those roads were ours today, and the Boeing 737 bounced in and out of the potholes with aplomb. The tops of the clouds below were lumpy – that must have been the reason for it. I remembered my little girl asking me recently if clouds taste of candy floss, and momentarily wondered what would happen if a two-meter diameter turbofan engine travelling at nearly five hundred miles-per-hour hit a pillow of candy floss half a kilometre across. I decided that it wouldn’t be pretty, felt glad that clouds are only water and ice droplets, and dismissed the whole candy floss idea from my mind before sheer raspberry-flavoured panic set in.

We landed safely (as you can tell, because I’m blogging, and it’s not from beyond the grave), and I got a taxi to take me the twenty miles or so to the office. I sat in the front beside the driver, who was a chatty kind of guy. I didn’t mind that at all – the more he talked, the less I had to. He said some interesting and scary things, and I’ll tell you next time about what he had to say. I won’t trouble and confuse you with further detail about the inner workings of my mind today. The next time you fly again though, check out the wings, and see how hard they work while you either relax or grip the arms of the seat with set jaw and white knuckles. You’ll be surprised.

Browsing through some Facebook groups earlier, I came upon a group called "Petition to revoke the independence of the United States of America". The group's description is basically making fun of American culture and use of language, and I would argue that it is just humorous banter, rather than a racist assault. You should read it - I thought it was very funny (and quite well written). However, the wall posts reveal that the group's subject matter obviously rubs some Americans up the wrong way. Take Mitchell for example. He argued:

While reading through your list of insults on the citizens of the United States, I was appalled at your terrible grammar and lack of extensive vocabulary. Sentences were awkwardly thrown together and lacking many necessary commas. Most noticeably absent was the Oxford comma, which is surprising, since the creator is, ironically, an Oxford student. If you're going to insult the intelligence of others, make sure you check your own, first.

In response, one of the more prolific posters of the group retorted:

Mitchell, the Oxford comma is a beautiful element of English, but its use is more ornamental, in some respects, than stricktly necessary. I do admire hitting back at people via their grammar, though. Bravo.

If you're going to correct someone's grammar, don't include a spelling mistake in your correction! Come ON!! What's the matter with people today??

In defence of the prolific poster, he'd removed the offending post and replaced it with an apology during the time it took me to write this blog entry:

Soooo Sorry just made a faux pas
*hits head against wall in shame*

You could argue, therefore, that I should pull it. I could argue that I won't - I'm a bit short of material lately, and picking on bad spelling and grammar is easy with the drivel that people write nowadays. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

Alas, this is possibly the last time I shall catch the 18:15 from Paddington for quite some time. I’ve been looking forward to leaving my current job for the last couple of months – since my Mum died I suppose, and I started to re-evaluate my work/life balance and all that sort of stuff. But now, as I’m leaving my project in London and everyone’s being so nice, and some of the things I’ve been working hard on for months are coming to fruition, I suddenly found today, as I prepared to leave the office for the last time, that I didn’t want to go. What a strange situation. As recently as yesterday evening, I was desperate to get out of there, and now I long for more Wintry evenings spent on West India Quay, and more time to wander across town after work and meet friends.

Canary Wharf on the whole is a really strange place – it’s so artificial. It has this air of expectation and ambition – it sets out to display perfection and prosperity, to make its inhabitants feel inadequate – as if they are never doing well enough, and in the words of many school reports, “could do better”. Did it make me feel like that? Sure it did, but not for long. The “could do better” feeling lasted only until I realised that the Wharf is also a great leveller. It couldn’t survive without people, mere humans, each one capable of both disaster and triumph, each one dependant in some way on the others, no-one being immune from that inter-dependency. And everyone mills around in their suits – it’s almost like a school uniform, and we all know that school uniforms were invented to make it harder to tell the poor kids from the rich kids. You could bump into anyone in Canary Wharf – a director of an investment bank one minute, a bar manager the next. The area has more than its fair share of bars – maybe this is an indication of the amount of alcohol that’s required to fuel all that ambition.

I do like the Wharf – I have many mental video frames of happy times spent there – the sights, the sounds, the smells, being barred from pubs for not wearing proper shoes, shivering whilst waiting for the DLR in the dead of night, walking past the huge illuminated snowman in West India Quay, watching late-night skaters in Canada Square park, leaving the icy chill outside when you slip through the door of a cosy Starbucks into the warmth of Nat King Cole’s Christmas songs and a latte and cinnamon muffin, watching the Cabot Square fountain steaming in the morning frost, an impromptu evening meal at Carluccio’s finished off with a dessert wine like petrol. How we laughed at the wine! I will always look on it fondly for those, and a million other reasons.

But, despite its wonderful points, and constant bustle, it can also feel like the worst, most miserable and lonely place on earth. I’ve experienced that too, though thankfully not as much as I’ve experienced its good qualities. I’ve met some amazing people there. I’m staying in touch with the nice ones. If I’m not staying in touch with you, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not nice, but it wouldn’t hurt to send me a large cheque to prove it.

So, I’m travelling back from London tonight, and up to the office tomorrow. That’s where my ‘official’ team lives – Malvern. I’ve been working for my current company for five and a half years, and the guys there are like my brothers and sisters in a funny kind of way. I have lots of happy memories set around and about Malvern too. To be honest, most of them are of the Nags Head, or all-night hacking in L-block, or sitting at the breakfast bar in Sid and Sue’s – my loyal bed-and-breakfast family. There’s the time I had to kick open the bathroom door with the broken lock, to free the Japanese guy that couldn’t speak English. It took me ages to get him to move away from the door so that I could burst it open. We spent ages eyeballing each other through the keyhole, trying to find some common shred of language. Then there were the long summery lunchtime walks up the Malvern hills. Driving around the area trying to hack a GPS tracking device so it didn’t know where we were going. Happy nights spent sitting in the Nags with a huge reel of cable and electronic gadgetry, trying to get free credits from the jukebox. Writing RTSP clients in hotels to get *any* movie to play on *any* TV in the building at will. Late nights writing Bluetooth protocol parsers and PIN crackers. Late nights figuring why my network attack tools made the printers spew out half a ton of paper. The night in the hotel bar playing a big white grand piano whilst smoking a big fat cigar, with everyone in the bar singing along. My eyes were streaming from the smoke, I could hardly breathe, and the thing kept going out because I was trying to reduce the smoke. It was still a great night. The team trip to Bletchley Park, being shown around by one of the original code breakers, being shown the working, reconstructed Colossus by one of its original operators. Working in the kneehole of my desk to avoid being beheaded by the office frisby. The memories are countless.

I will miss everyone – both in London and in Malvern – I’ll miss them [you] all very much, and we’ll keep in contact. It’s time for me to move on though. There are more memories to be made yet.

Last night, I worked late at the office – I worked until half-past eleven at night. All the hotels around the Canary Wharf and docklands area were full, or holding out for some extraordinarily rich and mad someone who would pay £335 for one of the few remaining single rooms. Consequently, I had to get a taxi from Cabot Square to somewhere near Brixton, where I was booked into a hotel.

Forty minutes and twenty five pounds later, my taxi arrived at the hotel. From outside, it looked like a very small place – neat, but not smart. When I eventually made it inside to the tiny reception (I had to squeeze past a guy who was carrying a bike out through the tiny porch area), it too was small, very Mexican, and nice in an unusual, friendly way.

I checked in, and was shown up to my room. It was simple - a sturdy door made of vertical wooden planks held together by wrought iron studded bar with a wooden floor and plain wooden furniture. It was obviously very clean too, and the bed looked, and indeed later proved to be, very nice indeed.

On the way to my room, we’d stopped at the bar. It was a lovely bar, with a very high ceiling, subtle lighting and tastefully decorated in a Mexican aristocratic style. But the loveliest feature was the fact that it was an honesty bar. There were no bar tenders to be seen – everything was on a “help yourself” basis, and a notepad and pencil were provided for you to write down what you were drinking. I wasted no time in getting the “help yourself” process up and running, with a double JD and Coke (proper stainless steel measuring thingies were provided).

As luck would have it, two gentlemen from work with me were staying in the same hotel, and were in the bar when I arrived. Only the three of us were there; we relaxed in the sumptuous leather arm chairs with our drinks, and surveyed the glorious bar that was ours for the taking – rows of bottles of spirits and liqueurs and a fridge full of beer, with no bar person between us and the precious liquids. There was no music playing – just an elegant, quiet, well appointed room, that contained a bar, and it was all ours.

It made me think about honesty - it felt nice to be trusted so much. Nowadays, it’s quite common to be treated like a criminal by suspicious strangers wherever you go. Let me give an example from today.

For lunch, I met up with a colleague from work who was visiting the area for the day. While walking towards the shopping centre, another colleague phoned to say that he and another chap were also in the area, and fancied meeting for lunch. I knew that the guys who had stayed in the hotel last night were there, so I phoned and invited them, and just for good measure, I invited someone else too.

We arrived at Pizza Express (yes, laugh if you want to) in about three separate parties, and seven of us crowded around a round table for four. We jostled, joked and generally had a good time, and eventually, after a most satisfying lunch, the thorny problem of the bill came up. As we were all claiming the cost back from separate expense accounts, we decided to split the bill four ways, and asked the waitress for four receipts. She told us it wasn’t possible, and instead, provided four copies of the bill for the full amount. In theory, we could each have claimed for the seven meals, but none of us would have done that.

However, a manageress bustled over to us as we were standing up to leave, and demanded our bills back. She spoke with an eastern European accent, and accused us vehemently of planning to commit “tax invasion”. We politely told her that we would each be claiming only the amount that we’d actually paid, but Madame didn’t believe us at all, and insisted on handwriting us a receipt each for the correct amounts. Adrian pointed out that this was what we had requested but been refused by our waitress earlier. Madame was not amused. I’m sure she was on the brink of calling the Inland Revenue.

The honesty bar and Pizza Express. I don’t normally experience either extremity in day to day life, let alone both within twelve hours of one other - it just begs a comparison.

I’m sure that people who use the honesty bar don’t try to rip it off. I’m sure, that just like the three of us last night, those people appreciate the feeling of trust and respect, and are happy to pay the same respect back to the hotel owners. Pizza Express didn’t show us any respect at all, which doesn’t inspire me to show respect when I go there either.

There is a small, but important lesson to be learned here. To get respect, you should show respect first. The Church Street Hotel knows this. Pizza Express doesn’t.

It's just thirty four days and counting until I start my new job. Yay!! I haven't resigned properly yet, but have spoken to my manager on the phone about it. I'm going to resign on Thursday (or Wednesday if I can't get a hotel in London for Tuesday night). Depending on how many holidays I have left, I could be away in as little as two weeks!!

There are some good reasons for me to go. Firstly, I hate my current engagement with a reasonable level of passion. Secondly, now that I've been on this enormous project for the bank for so long, I will always be the 'expert', and will never be able to escape queries about the damn thing. Thirdly, the new role is a great opportunity to maintain my technical focus, whilst gaining some respectable CV points by managing a team and doing some business development. Fourthly, I have one particular qualification (CHECK) that's very important in my line of work, and it has to be renewed every three years. Mine runs out at the end of February, and I'll have to take the exam again. CHECK team leaders are worth a lot more in their field than non-CHECK team leaders, and so I'm pretty sure that my current employer would find some excuse not to put me through the exam next year. This would seriously devalue me on the market, and I'd be stuck in my current position for evermore. The company I'm going to needs a CTL, and so will definitely put me through the exam again in February. So it's a no-brainer really.

I will sorely miss all of my friends in London and Malvern. But Hightower's gotta do what Hightower's gotta do. We'll still be able to meet up now and again, and I'll be nice and happy in my new fulfilling role :-)