The week gone by......

Highlights

- Rushing for a train in London. My bag split open, forcing five cans of Stella Artois beer to fall onto the platform. I missed my train by two minutes as a result. I also looked like a mental, sweating and alcoholic. Nothing different there then.

- Forgetting that it can be hot in England. Sporting a large slap like red mark on my head where I had failed to apply the sun cream properly. In fact I look like Gorbachev.

- Trying to turn on my electric toothbrush and failing. Being woken up at 4am by my electric toothbrush vibrating on the floor.


For the first time, in a long time, I’ve not even had five minutes to find the ‘on’ switch on my computer, let alone write anything. For someone who would wash my clothes on the internet if I could, that’s a pretty big ordeal.

And all it goes back to Tuesday.

Well Monday.

Just as it seemed my working life could not get even busier, it did. Well, unintentionally. I’ve been given two new members of staff, finally they have realised that maybe I can’t do everything from a hotel room in Canada next month. With a name reflecting a star sign, I finally had the empty chair next to me. So as well as doing my job and a few others, I was now official new starter person. Fine in normal circumstances. A little bit harder with ‘I’m going to question everything you do’ new person. It went like this.

Me: “Well, the toilets are first left out the door, down the corridor, first right”
Her : “What (With the look as if I had just murdered her dog), no, no, go down the corridor first, then take the first left. Why you do that? (with a strong Asian tang)

Which is fine, it’s just when it runs into your personal life…………

Me: “Yes, I’m getting the train up to London tomorrow”
Her: “No, no, Why you do that? You get it cheaper”. With a look of complete bemusement and slight anger, she preceded to tell me that if I had organised my life that little bit better, I could have bought an advanced bus ticket for precisely £6.25 cheaper.

Not only had we employed someone to help with my workload, we had also got a timetable calculator, mother and personal life planner as well. It was only Monday, but felt like Friday.

After refraining from physical violence, I made it up to London on my stupidly arranged expensive rail ticket with the ringing of “No, No. No in my ears”. I sat there and imagined her with me “No, no, no, that part of the train has been scientifically proven to be most fatal in a crash. Why you do that?”. Thankfully the memory faded, well it had to, London at rush hour concentrates the mind. The more pressing issue of trying to walk without colliding with anyone whilst reading my half crumpled. Fully torn, been in back pocket tube map prevailed.

The reason for the two day absence from the office was not the ‘No, no, no’ lady, but more pleasant factors. I was seeing for the first time in a year two girls that I had met in New Zealand the previous year. The no worries time of my life. I know I had changed. But had they? Well of course. They weren’t wearing bikinis and I wasn’t wearing shorts. It was in London after all, slightly different from the sand dunes of the North Island.

Then came the challenge. Two days, two jet lagged girls, and another Canadian girl who had come down from the North of England. Show them London. Which in theory should have been easy. I had grown up near there, I spent a lot of time in London. But then I soon realised. The tourist bits and my bits are slightly different.

Wading through London on your own or with someone is easy. You go with the flow. If you get lost, you get lost. When there are four, well, it’s a little bit more difficult. My instinctive directional skills were lost, probably due to the fact that I was more worried about losing the other two than where I was going.

As it turned out, the other Canadian girl called Lia who had been to London earlier that year became the guide. I became the tourist. Being shown your own city by a foreigner was refreshing but slightly bewildering. Anyone would think I had the jet lag, not the girls.

Two days in a hotel room with three girls was surprisingly good, I did manage to get into the bathroom, I didn’t have to talk about makeup and they didn’t go bitching about blokes. But then again, that’s probably why I liked them in the first place, after all, I had kept in contact with these people for a reason.

Two days out of the office and back into the cauldron of work. More issues, more work, more complications, less time to my imminent three week trip to Canada. Whilst going into work at the weekend, it also happened to be the hottest one of the year so far. Getting up for work at 6am on a Saturday when nobody is making you just so you can work in silence is worrying. Nearly as worrying as the huge, sunburned head that I am sporting, the joys of living in the sun starved country otherwise known as England.