However, I have been extremely busy – up until the last few weeks during which I suffered from descent into a slough of lethargy, lolling around doing nothing but reading trashy novels and watching old movies. I was rescued by a request to deliver a weeks training to a company here in London and the effort required to prepare the content seems to have put me back in circulation, as it were, as far as the lethargy attack is concerned, anyway.
So, if anyone might be interested, what have I been up to? Since I returned from Kazakhstan at Christmas time, I have been working on a book which will be published towards the end of the year – not that you’re going to see it in WH Smith’s, or on Amazon, because it is a manual for business security managers and will be marketed through specialist channels. Working on the book kept me pretty busy through the day and by the time knocking-off time came around, I was pretty much ‘computered-out.’ I did fit in a couple of short trips to Bucharest and Cairo, and I’m off to Kiev at the end of the month, all to deliver training courses of one kind or another.
I’ve also been into hospital a couple of times, once to get the arteries reamed out, again, and once to fix a bleeder in one of my eyes – the laser surgery in the eye was fascinating, but a most unpleasant experience as I found it very difficult to keep my eye open while someone was shining an incredibly bright light into it so she could see what she was doing. (As an aside, I found the perfect GP for me – the lady served 12 years in the RAMC so it was very easy to strike up a relationship…I call her Ma’am and she calls me Mr Judge, just like old times 🙂
I learned that I was entitled to a wrinklies pass – though the official name is a ‘Freedom’ pass, which is a very useful thing to have as it gives me free travel throughout the town and well out into the suburbs – getting to Twickenham for rugby matches, for example, is covered. It is a substantial benefit, but I have to say that I do think it is one of the benefits – like Child Allowance, that should be means tested and properly targetted. I shall not complain too loudly, however.
My son is recovering well from the depression from which he was suffering, with a new job and a new ‘significant other,’ who has just moved down here from Sheffield. She is a chef, and was delighted to receive a ‘phone call from the Ivy restaurant a couple of days after she arrived. She is now working there and loving it.
So, the Bravo crew is well settled in East Acton, which is not a particularly salubrious part of town, but is also not particularly insalubrious, either. Lots of non-Wasp neighbours, but, fortunately, no overwhelming concentration of any particular ethnicity, so fairly civilised, except for the BNP hangout just across the road which receives regular attention from HM constabulary, though I did watch the Boks – England match there on Saturday. Whenever I go out to the shops, I speak to people in Russian, Romanian or Chinese, depending on which shop I’m going to, and there is an interesting fmaily who run the local hardware store, South-Asian extraction but apart form the patriarch, who has a quite difficult accent, all of them speaking super-strength Jockinese.
On the downside, I lost my owner. She went one to one with a fox and came a very poor second. I’m a bit surprised at how much I miss the little bugger.
So, I’m back, with a bit of catching up to do, I see 🙂
The second season of Game of Thrones finished recently (for the record, I thought the first one was better) on Sky Atlantic. The TV series centres around a set of medieval fantasy books written by George R. R. Martin. There’s a bit of everything in the stories for the male audience: sword fights, sorcery, astounding landscapes varying from fire to ice, violence with heaps of blood, political intrigues with sharp dialogue and a smattering of soft porn. For the females, there’s Sean Bean and stuff like that.
Boadicea's Chariot 
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