Busy doing nothing, working the whole day through…
I have not been wilfully neglecting my blog recently, I have just been exceptionally busy. I know that sounds a bit lame, but I really have been 
It all started the Friday before last when I had the first of far too many recent five thirty starts to my day, in order to attend a course about Solicitors’ Accounts Rules at the London headquarters of my firm. A pleasant day, spent gazing out of a massive plate glass window in an eighth floor meeting room with a wondrous view across the city. Around lunch time the clouds cleared and I realised I could see the Gherkin, which was pretty cool 
We had a rather posh buffet with cute little burgers on sticks and the whole experience was marred only by the extreme lack of aptitude of the main presenter for public speaking and the fact that my friend Mark dropped part of his banana down a radiator vent 
Have I blogged about my fear of bananas? It will have to be some other time because I’m exceptionally tired now. Suffice it to say that that was a highly disturbing experience for which Mark is not yet forgiven. The course itself was useful as I am in charge of the audit of one of our larger solicitor clients in July, although the only problem I have ever had on a Solictors’ Accounts Rules job is accidentally getting locked in after hours and setting off the burglar alarm 
In an unfortunate twist of fate I also had to get up at five thirty the following Saturday, in order to get to Peterborough for ten thirty. I may have already mentioned that this was the fault of Network Rail, and I am not going to go into it again in case I burst an important blood vessel. Actually, if you catch a rail replacement bus to Leicester at 7.15 on a Saturday morning there is very little traffic and the journey is both swift and silent, by virtue of the fact that few other people are cracked enough to doing something similiar at that time.
I did make it to Peterborough and from there had a blissfully stress free lift to the wedding we were attending outside Ipswich, courtesy of some very kind friends. It would perhaps be bad manners to blog in detail about someone else’s wedding, but the bride looked beautiful, the groom was not bad looking at all, and I don’t know why more people don’t get married in April because the abundance of daffodils was really quite lovely I did get a little cold wearing my summer dress, but my boyfriend was kind enough to lend me his jacket during a particularly chilly interval, and at some point I am sure a very embarrassing photo of me wearing it is going to emerge My boyfriend didn’t even laugh at my dress and has gone so far as to say he doesn’t think there is anything strange about my legs so all in all it was rather enjoyable except for the bit where the mother of the bride saw me accidentally touch my boyfriend’s arse and because she herself was checking him out at the time, misconstrued this as me groping him :ninja: Plus there was a slightly traumatic episode where my boyfriend nearly refused to eat my carrot soup and I thought for a dreadful few minutes I might have to eat it myself Plus on a more serious note, it was poignant to have to sit through the church service and know that the choices I’ve made in life mean I will never be married, not by my definition of married, although perhaps if I’m good one day I’ll be allowed some sort of civil ceremony which will marry me in the eyes of the law, even if not the eyes of myself or any of my family, and perhaps allow me to change my name… Luckily the reception, when we finally made it there, was blessed by enough free wine to banish such sad thoughts from my mind, and having seen my boyfriend on the dancefloor later I don’t think I could bear to marry him anyway, so it’s all good
Another interesting rail replacement bus journey awaited me on Sunday, all the way from Peterborough back to Birmingham. This one was marked by several interesting interludes; the part when the bus became trapped on a small village high street and spent nearly half an hour trying to complete a painfully difficult three point turn, the point at which someone had to get off to be sick, and the point at which an incredibly irritating girl pronounced loudly that she’d been told she had an good phone voice, to which I accidentally said out loud, “I find that difficult to believe!”
More significantly, however, I have found the place where I want to live It’s called Stamford and I have absolutely no idea where it is except a very long way from Birmingham on a bus, and it is absolutely beautiful. It is also, I am sure, absolutely outside my financial capabilities ever to live in it’s remote vicinity, but if I let myself believe that I was going to spend the rest of my life in Leicester, I don’t think I would find the motivation to get out of bed in morning
Monday I got up at five thirty again for the start of a two week stint in London. Two weeks, two audits and my career depends on their smooth running. Not an exaggeration unfortunately; I messed up a while back and know that I am being watched like a hawk at the moment to see how I perform on these. The companies are part of a huge AIM listed group which constitutes one of my office’s biggest clients. Interestingly, I am the most junior person to be involved in the assignment and in charge of a job, which adds a bit of pressure, and because the client operates in the media sector there are all sorts of weird accounting standards I know nothing about to comply with.
Last week didn’t ultimately go too badly, although my inexperience meant I had to work ridiculously long hours. I was waking up at six to do a couple of hours before breakfast, staying at the client until about seven, which is as long as I could last without an evening meal, and then heading back to my room to work until I fell asleep. Unfortunately in the process I offended a couple of people with whom I had a long standing arrangement to go out on Thursday night, and also haven’t yet had time to go down to the Houses of Parliament and feel terribly excited about the fact that I’m in London.
It was fairly exciting just going to work though, by virtue of the fact that the client was just off Baker Street I did go out one evening to a steakhouse, which was also quite exciting because we don’t have steakhouses in Birmingham, although the evening was marred somewhat by one of my colleagues finding a spider in his food The rest of the week I mainly ate Italian which was pretty cool and I had one of the nicest meals I have ever had in my life; pollo carbonara at the Prezzo by London Euston.
And now it’s Monday again, I’ve been up since five thirty and I’m off to start my second audit. I’m more worried about this one, since it seems to have gone disastrously wrong last year and the FD appear to be new. That said, she can’t be any more slippery than the character I had to deal with last week and with whom I had a very difficult meeting on Friday afternoon which necessitated me calling for manager backup.
Tonight is, in any case, going to be an interesting night because I am going to watch the wrestling. Don’t ask. I’ll tell you about it if I survive it