Aude learned a useful lesson today – barbequing is one skill best left to men. While I nipped across the street for bread, she thought she’d save a few minutes and throw the sausages on the grill.

I wish I’d had a camera, for the resulting inferno was something to behold. The grill was far too hot. Cue a ball of fire from the dripping fat and smoke signals that could be seen on miles.

The merguez were lovely, incidentally. Despite the rather unorthodox cooking technique.

One of the problems with being out of the office as often as I am is that you become totally dependent on your technology. Well, yesterday mine let me down rather spectacularly, and I spent most of the day utterly paralysed and unable to accomplish anything.

We don’t have access to the internet at our client site, so we’ve bought a 3G router to log into our corporate network. And that works fine with everyone else’s PC, but throws mine into fits of spasm. So I spent most of yesterday in taxis, rushing across town for my IT department to fix my PC only to find that we can’t replicate the problem – it’s all down to the pesky 3G router. So IT would tell me the problem was fixed and I’d head back to the client, only for my PC to lock up again. Very frustrating. By 3pm, I’d given up the will to live. Armed with a pen, paper, and an abacus, I decided to tackle the problem the old-fashioned way.

In other news, I managed to send all of the wedding paperwork to France yesterday. Fingers crossed that our offering to the Gods of Bureaucracy is acceptable in their eyes. Watch this space.

It turns out that absence does make the heart grow fonder. After months of pursuing a client for some business (unsuccessfully – lots of good conversations but little opening of chequebooks), I’ve recently been so busy with other commitments that I’ve largely ignored their emails. The tactic seems to have worked – they’ve now asked me to book time in my diary and propose terms. Sadly I’m busy, but I’ll find someone else to do the work with them. You know what they say: treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen!

I’m making good progress with my new client as well. Like most clients, this one has some perks of their own. A household name that makes a huge variety of product, my client produces (among other things) several lines of ice cream – and it’s all you can eat throughout the office. There are huge freezers full of every ice cream product under the sun on every floor. It’s lucky that I’m not a big fan of ice cream, or my prospects for fitting into my wedding suit would be under threat!

We have inherited a project that was going badly wrong – always a tricky time to step in – but in a marvel of resource scheduling and creative networking, we seem to have absolutely the right team on the ground. I’ve brought in a manager to run the project who could quite literally herd cats and she’s quickly brought order to the chaos. I’ve got a great techie that actually understands business requirements, can self-start, and can largely be left to his own devices. I’ve got an army of junior guys who are happy to take orders and just get on with things. In short, I’ve got the perfect team to turn around a troubled project. Even the client can see it, which is great. As long as the ice-cream keeps flowing, this project should be a great success.