Australia, New Zealand, funeral

So, moving on from the events in my last post, here we are in Auckland, following a few days in Surfer's Paradise in Australia with the Kiwi's parents. The flight over was a bit of a trial, 10 hours from Heathrow to LA, several hours in transit in LA whilst they do all the immigration nonsense, fingerprinting and photographing and such, even though we don't actually want to enter their daft country, including the comedy questionnaire which I might write more about in another post.

Next, 11 or 12 hours over to Auckland, then a couple of hours wait before a 3.5 hour trip over to Brisbane, where Mr Kiwi met us to drive us down to Surfer's. Fortunately my wonderful girl had upgraded us to business class for this leg, so we spent the time stretching out in their first class seats, drinking all sorts of nice stuff and eating as well as you can on a flight, I reckon. Being in front of the engines makes the whole thing a lot less stressful: quieter and, I reckon, less vibration. We checked out the price of the full trip in business, and it would have cost about three times the price, possibly not entirely worth it even so...

Anyway, superb couple of days in Surfer's, beach, pool, restaurant, boat sort of stuff, we treated to the best the place had to offer by the folks and shook off the tiredness of the journey and the pallor of London in a few days. We arrived in Auckland yesterday afternoon and met up with a few friends, tonight we'll be seeing a whole lot more of them after spending the day researching places to live in this city. We'll be moving here within the year, so this is an essential bit of orientation for us both, as I've only ever spent a couple of days here and she's not lived here in seven years.

Paul's funeral is at 0020 tomorrow morning NZ time (1120 Thursday GMT). It's slowly been sinking in over the past few days, has thrown a lot of things into sharp relief for me. I'll be sure to take a moment whilst it's all going on - it's still hard to find any words to make sense of this.

More on our travels when I get the chance - we're rarely in one place for that long but some of our places advertise wi-fi so I'll do what I can.

Can't work this out

This morning a friend of mine called me to tell me that a guy who I've known since I was 11 died this morning. He'd developed a chest infection which had grown more and more serious, and died in hospital, apparently alone, in the early hours of the morning.

Although we weren't as close recently as we were as teenagers, we spoke every time I went back up north, and still got on as well as ever. I looked up to him when I was younger and still do - a brilliant musician with a wicked sense of humour, one of the most fun people I knew throughout school and beyond.

I'm writing this because I can't figure out how to deal with it. Work today was impossible - everything seems trivial by comparison. It still hasn't sunk in; I don't know that it ever will.

Sniffle, Cough, Flight, PIE!

Looking back on recent holidays, this is happening to me with alarming frequency: I AM ILL. Again. This time it's a particularly evil little virus that's had me incapacitated all weekend and is still, STILL poking at my sinuses with spiky poking sticks and leaving horrid things in my lungs and banging on my head incessantly. All this despite first attempting the holistic healthy approach and then, faced with a deadline of Wednesday morning to get well again, attacking it with good ol'fashioned over the counter Drugs.

The deadline of Wednesday looms because Wednesday is the day upon which we embark on an aeroplane journey which will end on Friday morning. Leaving Heathrow at around 1400 on the 12th. Arriving in LA at 2000 on the 12th. Arriving in Auckland in the early morning of the 15th. Arriving in Brisbane some time later that day. What happened to the 14th? Lord only knows. I'm trying to get my head around this but frankly it's beyond me, so I've voted to just screw my eyes tight shut from the London tarmac until when someone says 'Welcome to Brizbin'.

The journey back is simpler. Leaving Auckland at midnight, we arrive in London at around lunchtime that day, the only problem is that 24 hours will have passed in the meantime.

In the meantime we'll have had a brilliant time I'm sure, and I'm really looking forwards to catching up with the Family Kiwi and the Auckland lot (not to mention those in Hamilton and Hawkes Bay), and everything in between. I'm sure photos will follow.

So tonight we're packing (and I'm secretly looking forwards to the flight out, so long as I'm virus free at the time), and having a couple of the best pies in the world (sorry NZ, I do mean literally the best). One more day of work... then we're off. Bloody brilliant.

Oh. One more thing. When I said 'we're packing', I actually meant 'the Kiwi's packing'. I'm on the sofa being poorly.

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.