Not so bad after all...

It's occurred to me lately that this blog's turned into less of a worrying insight into the byzantine workings of my 7-year-old mind, more a sort of 'this is what we did on the weekend isn't it nice' thing, which isn't what I'd planned at all. I'll do better in future I promise.

Despite that, this weekend has been fairly pleasant; tapas and cocktails on Friday night and a bit of a drinkathon with Keef on Saturday, strangely woke up feeling bright as a button this morning which sort of made up for Friday morning, when I woke up feeling disastrously hungover having (purposefully) not drunk a drop the previous night.

So we made use of the day, wandering out around Kensington in the sun, downing a massive, largely fried brunch at Café Continenté after which I'm fairly sure I went into shock for 30 minutes or so, heading to Oddbins for some of their amazing own-label rosé, and slowly winding back home via Tesco for lots of exciting spicy things to cook over the coming week.

So just before I wrote this, I was in the kitchen watching the Kiwi bake some banana oat muffins. She's wearing a gorgeous royal blue maxi-dress with a halter neck, the afternoon light's coming softly through into the kitchen and she's a perfectly beautiful image of femininity to me, and just at that moment, I hear the living room stereo, with Adele singing 'all the wonders of my world...', and it occurs to me, not for the first time today, that stuff can get pretty good really, can't it?

Oh the glamour

Proof that the consultancy life isn't all flash hotels and Michelin-starred dinners, I have here evidence of my rather unusual breakfast at the inimitable Leeson Bridge House, Dublin. On the plus side, they do cook your toast to order, and offer both "white" and "brown" varieties.

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.

Prague 1

So we're here! Arrived late last night following a minor drama when a
lass fainted on the plane, cue dramatic calls for a doctor etc. How
very TV movie.

Prague seems lovely, from what I can gather from a wander round at
midnight last night. If we manage to avoid the roaming packs of stag
parties we should be ok...

Now, what do they do for breakfast in the Czech Republic?