get into ‘em

My visit home to the UK was fairly uneventful. The meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday went OK and it was nice to see old colleagues even if I didn’t get a lot of time to chat with them.

Being home during the week was strange. Somehow it was a more stark reminder of how much I miss it. I don’t miss work in the UK as what I’m doing in Italy is very interesting and rewarding. But I do miss Lynsey and our little house. And I miss being able to just nip and see my mum and the cats. And my car, I miss my car!

Anyway.

I returned to work in Fabriano this morning and it turned out I missed an important meeting. Last week we had a meeting that lasted 10 hours and didn’t finish until 9.30pm which I thought was pretty remarkable. But yesterday they managed to have a 12 hour meeting. Yeah that’s ridiculous, I know. But this meeting didn’t start until… wait for it… 4pm!! It’s true! I could barely hide my disappointment at missing it. In a perverse way I am sorry I missed it. Had I been there, I don’t know how I would have reacted but it’s kind of nice to have these stories from the trenches for later life. Something to tell my grandchildren… “When I was in Italy I was once in a 12 hour meeting that lasted all night” to wide eyed grandchild, “Wow! Really grandad?”

Good news from home today as Lynsey has got a 2nd interview with my company. Lynsey’s had bad luck with her two employers since making the move “up north” but, for all it’s faults, this is a good company and from my experience (and I’m in my 14th year) most of the managers are pretty decent. Oh and it’s not a case of nepotism as I piss people off far too much to ever have any influence on matters like this! Fingers crossed.

Please note that references to grandchildren in the above blog are purely for comedic affect and do not reflect any deep down need of the author to breed.

and this little piggy

I fly home to the UK tonight. I have some meetings with HR on Tuesday and IT on Wednesday. It’s weird going back to the UK office. And it’s horrible going back to the IT department because it’s so scruffy and dead: feels like everyone has had the life sucked from them. Really depressing.

But at least I get to sleep with Honey Pie for a couple of nights and I can squeeze in a lunch with my mum too.

I finished Ian Banks’ Dead Air yesterday on the train back from Milan. An excellent read. My first by him so now I can go and start on his back catalalogue (do authors have back catalogues?).

What shall I read now?

So What a biography of Miles Davis, Jake Arnott’s Truecrime, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand or If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino (the original Italian version – in Italian).

Well sorry, Italo, but even though your book is probably the most beautiful thing I have ever read, I can’t be arsed to translate it just yet. I’d like to be able to read more than one page a night. I’ve gone for Truecrime.

Let me entertain you (but not too much – i’m tired)

We’ve seen Robbie before at Milton Keynes Bowl a couple of years ago. That night he was great but in the car going home we both agreed how needy this guys is. Almost embrassingly so. Recently he’s played some enormous gigs in the UK: at Knebworth playing to 350,000 fans a night. Lynsey had watched this on TV and we both knew people who had been there and by all accounts it was something special. If anything a relatively small(!) crowd of 20,000 in an indoor arena should be even better in turns of atmosphere.

You would think so.