Suddenly life is very busy with travel again. Within our team, we have rolled out a training programme that covers our standard methodology and approach. It’s a great course, three days residential (although it will be five days residential in the future), one that I went on as a delegate when I first joined the firm.

We’re rolling it out globally now, with a view to putting all 500 of our finance consultants through it by the end of July. I’m off to Paris on Thursday & Friday this week for a “train the trainer” course, certifying me to lead the course. I’m off to Amsterdam next week to lead the course myself, and it looks like there are opportunities to go (quite literally) around the globe to deliver this course to my colleagues in Asia, Latin America, Europe, the US and Australia. It’s a good chance to do a little employer-sponsored tourism, if that’s what I want to do. I suspect my willingness to volunteer will be in direct proportion to the attractiveness of the training venue!

The Paris trip has come at just the right time. I plan to spend tomorrow morning battling through the French bureaucracy to get all the paperwork in order for our wedding in September. Even the town hall seems unclear about what’s actually required for my dossier, so I’m erring on the side of providing far too much information. But that means trips to all sorts of government bodies to get documents stamped, endorsed, and translated. I suspect I’m going to see a lot of Paris that I’ve never seen before.

It’s a long weekend here this weekend, the second May bank holiday. We’ve reminded Jerome that it’s a bank holiday (they never let him out of the office, so he’s only vaguely aware of the passing of time) and he’s agreed to come down and spend the weekend with us. With any luck, we’ll have good weather and be able to spend the entire weekend in the garden. It’s not all fun and games, though – we have some serious work to do. We’ve got a bachelor party to plan, after all.