70s food, Kiwi-less, plans

Oh hilarious. I'm watching, as I have been doing every Tuesday evening for a few weeks now, 'The Supersizers Go...' with Giles Coren and Sue Perkins. This week, it's the 70s, and it reminds me quite how much I really like prawn cocktail. I remember having it at my eldest sister's wedding when I must've been all of five, and thought it was about the most exotic and brilliant thing I'd ever had. It was served with buttered brown bread, out of which I made a prawn cocktail sandwich. Classy.

I still make it, if the truth be known, with my own marie rose sauce and big fat tiger prawns - and it's still ace.

Anyway, childhood food aside, I'm writing this stretched luxuriously out on the sofa, as the Kiwi's in New York this week, generally attending numerous parties and watching films, I think, damn her, and so here I am, all by my self. She's back on Friday, which at this point is seeming very far away indeed.

My weekend was spent back in Manchester, which was brilliant - catching up with the folks and the family Yoog, then back to London on the Sunday night for drinks with my old housemate which were probably more enthusiastic than they should've been; Monday morning was a bit of a challenge.

I do have a bit of news for you all. The kiwi and I have been thinking about it for a while, but we've decided for definite to move to New Zealand. In about six months' time. Scary stuff, but massively exciting too. We'll go via Manchester for a week (early Christmas), then Canada, snowboarding, then Australia for a bit of time with the folks, then NZ for New Year. And then back to reality with a crash...

More on this later, but I wanted to let you all know. Funny, I started this blog to document some work-related changes in my life, but I guess the changes will be a little more wholesale than that.

In other news, Nick Drake has been in my headphones a great deal of late, what terrifically brilliant lovely stuff it is too. All three albums, in sequence, at least once a day.

And here we go again...

Another 0430 start tomorrow, shudder. It really does leave you feeling a bit dislocated all week, that sort of thing, and dropping out of my normal routine does tend to leave me somewhat ruffled. I'm sure I'll learn to deal with it in time, the rest of the team seem to manage ok.

Given the relative silence from me this week I've decided to jot a little entry down now (whilst telling the Kiwi that I'm working, which I sort of am. Sort of.). You see, we have but one ethernet connection in the Irish office, between numerous people, and the connection in the hotel is appalling, so my opportunities to do interweb stuff are a bit limited. I'd hoped to be able to give nightly updates or something, but there you go. Oh, and if you think I'm doing this from my phone, stop right there. It took me 20 minutes to write an email the other day.

On the whole it's been a productive week. I'm fortunate enough to be working with a very experienced Project Manager who's giving me a fair bit of guidance, which is great as I've not worked as a Business Analyst before. There's a certain discipline to it, which seems to be aimed at coaching people for whom analysis doesn't come naturally through the whole thing. It's a case of putting fairly rigid processes around what for me is a pretty natural way of thinking, so once I'm through the learning curve of understanding those processes I should be ok. End of next week, I reckon. It's sort of fun, in a challenging kind of way.

One of the things I'm having to learn about at the moment is unions. See, as a child of the Thatcher era, I know nothing of unions in practice. All I know about them is that getting rid of them left a lot of working people rather exposed but meant that more senior people could make more money, or something like that. Anyway, the unions are alive and well in Ireland, and one has to tread extremely carefully when entering a business to potentially effect change. I've horrible visions of the Irish fondness for kneecappings and the like, but I'm told that doesn't happen nearly as much these days.

I did actually write a big long blog post last week, typing it into Notepad and intending to paste it in when I next got online, but I decided not to expose you all to what was a fairly downbeat entry about how bored I was and how over this whole working away from home thing I was. True, I was getting a bit sick of crap TV, no swimming and no Kiwi, and any city's pretty much the same old boring nonsense when you're there on your own (as I was for much of last week, effectively), but I decided in the cold light of day to count my blessings etc. I went for a run the next morning south through the canals of Dublin, with all the hedges sparkly with dew and the morning sun just starting to warm up the cobbles and everything sort of popped into perspective.

Flying back into London on Thursday was a real eye-opener, can't tell you how good it was to get back to this city which, despite all its failings I really am starting to love. Was truly amazing to walk out of the tube later that day into the Kiwi's arms and get back HOME, where there are unthreatening pubs and normal money and decent food and reliable internet connections. She made a brilliant paella on Friday night too, fantastic thing that she is, having batted those lovely lashes at the fishmonger in Notting Hill and come home with some of the fattest tiger prawns I've ever seen. I'm a very lucky chap.

So, lunch today at the best pub in West London, the Temperance just by Putney Bridge with some friends of ours who've just announced that one of them's in a family way, and then an early night and doing it all again next week - we have pivotal workshops Tuesday and Wednesday, including dinner out on Tuesday which apparently might stand a chance of changing my opinion of Dublin cuisine. Presumably this means it's not in one of the thousands of kebab shops which seem to be the cornerstone of Irish foodiness. Here's hoping...