Plane Decadance

I've been travelling. Mostly for work. York and back in a day was an endurance test: 500 miles for an hour with a customer! My other meetings were all in the South and felt like trips to the corner shop for a packet of peanuts after that one.

I spent a lovely weekend in Brighton catching up with The Paranoid Mod, Basquiat Scrawls and their "entourage". I discovered how to make coffee when your host has no coffee-making apparatus and I completely forgot to take any photographs.

I got up at 0400 on Friday to get to Heathrow Airport by 0730. I met four colleagues there and twenty more at Schipol. We were bussed to a canal boat where a tour guide tried to tell us what we already knew about the city of Amsterdam while we tried to have conversations in second languages with people we hadn't seen in twelve months.

That evening we were taken to a converted army barracks somewhere off the road to Haarlem. There were glittering decorations and, inexplicably, there was a unicorn suspended from the ceiling. There was a D.J. and an organ grinder playing I Shot The Sherriff. There was a free bar. There was no sales meeting. (I enjoyed not carrying my computer.) The entire trip was a "jolly" because we've had a good year. And when management is happy, we drones in Sector 7G are happy!

By Saturday afternoon I was home again, like nothing had happened.

I wouldn't say the Dutch always know how to have more fun but here's what we did on the last U.K. office outing.