I will never grow up. Ever.

Saw this today round the back of the Tate Modern. Made me giggle all the way back to the office.

Terrific.

Definite progress

... on two fronts. Firstly, that Powerbreath lark I mentioned a while back is really working - still doing it every morning, and this evening managed a full 1.5k in the pool, which is precisely 10 lengths further than I've ever gone. This, I reckon, is 100% down to the breathing exercises, 30 breaths each morning is all it's taken.

Secondly, the plan's sort of all popped into place, as the Irish client reckons he can take on the BA tasks, so I'm free to go as of Feb 12th, when we go on holiday for about three weeks (more on this later - I'm SO excited). They're not replacing me throughout the remainder of Feb, which will throw up whether they need to moving forwards or not. I sort of suspect they will need to, as the client only actually sees about 25% of what I do, and he's right - that much he can (and should) do, but the less interesting stuff, the stuff that's currently doing my head in, they'll have to get some other gimp to do.

This leaves me free to get on with my life when I get back in early March. Remains to be seen exactly what they'll get me onto, but ooh, that's all part of the fun, eh?

Career chess

What a perfect arse of a week. My masterplan was almost derailed, but I managed to get it put back a few weeks instead. What happened was fairly typical, in that having proposed a way of getting me off the Irish project, things dragged on a bit, I found a new project for me and a replacement for me on the old one, job done, let's hand over next week. The new project was due to start on the 28th Feb.

So far, so good. Next thing, the project manager on the Irish project drops something of a spanner into things by (and bearing in mind he's already effectively agreed to this to our superiors) deciding that not only is the replacement not up to scratch, but I shouldn't be allowed to move off the Irish project.

Still with me?

So, after months of trying to create advance awareness of the transition, to propose a simple solution and generally make everything easy for everyone, I've given up and basically said that I'm officially off the project when I go on holiday and after that everyone else has just got to deal with it, and that I'll expect to move onto something else when I get back. Not entirely how I'd hoped this would turn out but there you go. Everyone save the PM in question has been massively understanding and supportive, incidentally.

The principal thing I'm finding tricky about this is that there's a wider context to this that work don't and can't know about. What I need on my CV prior to moving to New Zealand is as broad a consultancy experience as possible, featuring as many brands as I can cram in in the short time I've got.

So it should be quite a ride over the coming weeks - I'll keep you all posted... interesting things afoot! Incidentally, the diet's going reasonably well, although on Friday night we did cave in a bit and had a kebab and OH MY GOD was it ever good.

Cleaner, greener...?

In a couple of hours, we'll be serving up some sort of salad involving quinoa, marking the final meal of our 9 days of the Holford diet. Now, 9 days ago, I'd been furtively harbouring plans for what I'd be doing come midnight tonight. I was going to ensure there was both pizza and beer in the fridge, and was going to make myself a blissful midnight supper, whether the Kiwi wanted to join me (or even approved) or not.

Now the funny thing is, I really don't feel like it.

In the past week or so, I've lost about 5cm off my waist, which when fully expanded is (or 'was') a truly terrifying sight, and the fairly decent abs that lurk beneath are only thus due to the strain of holding it in all the time. There's something approaching 'tone' going on, too, and my skin's starting to resemble that of someone in their early thirties rather than early teens. I've also put on two kilos, which brings me ever closer to a decent weight, and I'm sure this all isn't entirely down to the occasional bout of Wii Tennis.

So I'm not all that keen to put all the past week's efforts to waste. Although we're not intending to be quite as ascetic this week (and for the forseeable), we're planning a similar diet, similar exercise approach and so on, and yes, I'll be out Tuesday (meeting up with Mark for the first time in ages) and Wednesday (birthday of tall Kiwi) nights, but that's eminently allowed.

However, without the constraint of an actual regime written down on paper, it'll be interesting to see how I get on with this, as my self-control has never really something that, well, exists. Watch this space, chaps.

On this blog

In response to Kathryn's question on 9 Days of Hermitude, I keep this blog entirely anonymous where possible, and I'm careful not to mention it to anyone at work, or around work. It's not that I'm expecting to say anything out of order, just a last-ditch attempt to keep my work and personal life separate, especially now I've so many colleagues on Facebook.

I started this blog as a way of venting about work and talking about the transition from one job to another and, although it's degenerated somewhat into vague ramblings about, y'know, stuff, I'm keen to avoid bringing it to my employers' attention, just in case they have a problem with their name being linked to an employee who's sometimes getting a bit ranty.

When I accidentally posted from my work email once, forgetting the automatic footer they add, the resultant post (complete with work's email disclaimer) popped up on my work Google Alerts within a few minutes, so it seems my worries are well-founded.

Freaky, eh? Anyway, hence the cloak & dagger approach. Oh, and on the BA front, it'd drive you insane with boredom. If I were to try to tempt you to the dark side it'd be with something a little more 'consultant-y' and grandiose like 'Ecommerce Specialist' or something :)

Healthiness and Socialism

Well. I really, really, really didn't expect this. We're at the end of Day 4 of the detox, and contrary to what every fibre of my being was telling me on Saturday morning, I'm actually quite enjoying this healthy eating lark. The meals have been small, but regular (breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner), and generally quite tasty. Think steamed white fish (tilapia) with roasted sweet potato and red onion, or mixed rice (brown and wild) with kalamata olive pesto, or any number of brilliant soups.

I've also just been for a swim for the first time in months, and by god did it ever hurt. I pushed myself to do the full kilometre and am sitting here on the sofa feeling my shoulders turn slowly to stone - tomorrow might be a bit of a challenge, I reckon!

The weird thing, and possibly the most surprising thing, is that I've stopped craving things. Well, I've still got that ever-present background hankering for a kebab from our local place, but that's understandable. As long as I live I reckon there'll never be a time when I'm not secretly thinking of a kofte kebab from there. But on the whole I'm not missing anything except the odd glass of wine, and even that isn't that much of a problem.

Next week I think we'll roughly continue in a similar vein, although not quite as rigidly perhaps. Who knows, this might be a bit of a lifestyle change.

Which brings me to the book I'm reading: Orwell's England. I'd never paid much attention to Orwell, save for the obligatory reading of 1984 and Animal Farm, but I'm really warming to him. He's fairly disparaging of everyone in equal measure, but there's some fascinating insights into the English (note, not 'British') class system, written during the Second World War, when a quiet revolution was rumbling to its conclusion. His description of England is brilliant:

"England is not the jewelled isle of Shakepeare's much-quoted passage, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relatives who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase"

We as a nation have definitely moved on, but I think some of the sentiment still holds true. Anyway, enough for today.

9 days of hermitude

Yes, Facebook users, you read it right. The Kiwi and I have kicked off our annual January health binge. This morning, following a really-quite-pleasant breakfast of some sort of apple & cinnamon porridge which the Kiwi made from scratch (oats & all), we headed off to Tesco and spend just over two and a half times our weekly food budget on five days' worth of food, including a good £30+ on wacky things like glutamine powder and so on.

Seriously, our trolley looked like a Monet painting, all greens, reds and yellows, bursting with good intentions and so on, seeds, sandals and such. For a moment there I could almost hear George Orwell mocking me for looking like one of his 'fruit-juice drinking, bearded, sandal-wearing socialists', so I snuck a bottle of wine in there too to balance it all out, although I won't be able to drink it until next Saturday. We're doing something called the Holford  9-Day Liver Detox, which the Kiwi picked up in Manchester and which, unlike the one we've done for the last two Januaries, seems to consist largely of really nice meals. I'm actually looking forwards to it, in a way.

This should coincide with a renewed bout of exercise and so on, which in my case has manifested itself with me using a Powerbreathe to get my cardio fitness up to a point where I can actually walk to the gym without getting out of breath. The Kiwi is in the pool as I type - I'm not swimming with her at the moment as she's quicker than me and yes, that bothers me enough to swim alone. I'm not proud but there you go...

So we'll see how this goes. The two things that concern me most are the not drinking thing, as I'm kind of used to a glass of wine with my weekend meals, and the lunch thing, as I'm not sure how taking seeds and salads to work is really going to work. We'll see. I do need to do something like this so I'm going to do what I can to make it work.

On the work front, things are moving forwards. I've set in motion a plan to get me off the Irish project and on to higher profile stuff that works better in the context of my short-term career instead. If I'm to be leaving the country in the coming 12 months I reckon I need to consolidate my retail strategy and management consulting creds, rather than learning how to be a business analyst, which is frankly somewhat dull in my opinion.

So I'll be on the Irish thing for about another month, then we're off to the other side of the world for a couple of weeks, then I should be back to work on something else, all being well. The aim is to get into a position where rather than being stuck into one thing for six months at a time, I can get involved in lots of things more lightly. All good for the CV.

So there we are. A shiny new set of good intentions to rival Kathryn's! Right, off to find out what these flax seeds are all about. I'm somewhat suspicious.

Christmas, NYE, back to work

And we're back. Following a week and a half's mental haring around Manchester I'm back in the office to relative normality. It's a bit of a slow day here today as you can imagine - the alarums and hysterics I'm used to on the first day back are apparently unique to retail. It seems this doesn't filter down to (or percolate up to?) agency level for a couple of days yet.

Christmas was lovely. Following a cautiously enjoyable Christmas party with work on the Friday (taking it very easy on the beer, leaving in time for the last tube, don't think I offended anyone) we drove up to Manchester, taking a full 5 and a half hours to do so. We stayed in a reasonably smart apartment in Ancoats, just behind Piccadilly station, sort of, which is real inner-city Manchester, in the first throes of redevelopment and feeling a bit like Shoreditch did a few years back. It's still distinctly edgy, with some of the old rag trade offices still open for business and some of the old alleyways still ripe for lurking in, but the tell-tale bars and cafes are starting to creep in, along with the posh apartments and new businesses with shiny nameplates proudly displayed outside.

Bouncing between our apartment and friends and family all week was great, so good to see everyone again and spend time with them over the week - just as nice to be able to retreat to our own space when we needed to. The Thursday in particular was one of these times; the Kiwi went shopping whilst I settled into a pub with a bit of Orwell and some decent northern bitter. Brilliant. My wonderful Kiwi had managed to find me a Wii for Christmas too, which has shamelessly made me fall in love with her even more, whilst at the same time ensuring that I'll pay her marginally less attention in future. Funny paradox, that.

And so back to London on the Saturday, leaving at 0700 and taking about 2 hours 40 to make it back, in stark contrast to the outward journey. We spent the afternoon with the Hatter and his family out in darkest Hampshire; he's getting married in 08 and as I'm to be his best man (hooray!) we thought it about time we met the rest of the brood, and a very happy man he must be, with three ridiculously cute and (apparently) well-behaved kiddies and a rather idyllic part of the country to call home.

New Year followed, with a small group of mainly Kiwis round at ours, me drinking unusually heavily mainly in order to numb the pain of a minor mutilation which occurred whilst preparing bruschetta (middle-class credentials firmly intact there). New Year's Day was spent almost entirely on the sofa with both of us alternately freaking out about returning to work and (mostly me) worrying about January's finances which, in the context of 2008's plans, are some way off course.

There we are then. New Year's resolutions? I don't normally, but here we go: more exercise, more reading of books, more saving of money, more earning of money, more ruthless career progression (hahaha), more wearing of good shirts. Less drinking (not sure about that one), less eating of the bad food, less procrastination, less chopping of fingers. Oh, and possibly the purchase of something shiny before too long. And that's all I have to say about 'that'.