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.

Well, finally some progress on a number of fronts. After what seems like a lifetime of dealing with government departments, we have finally managed to gather together all of the documents we need to submit our wedding dossier in France. I’ve got certificates of just about everything, translated, stamped, and sealed by government agencies I didn’t know existed. I’ve even got a Certificate of Celibacy (which is basically a certificate that says “this certificate doesn’t exist in the UK” – come on, with the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe you don’t think we issue many of these, right?)

So arrived back from a couple of glorious days in Paris – beautiful sunshine and warm, clear skies (all of which I only gazed through the office windows) to be greeted by three days of rain for our three-day weekend in the UK. We had a lovely meal on Thursday night at L’Etoile, a horrendously-overpriced restaurant with a great view of the Arc de Triumphe. I caught the Friday night Eurostar back to Ashford and reminded myself again how civilised rail travel can be.

Three rainy days later and it was off to Amsterdam, this time via London City airport and the comfort of a VLM Fokker 50 turbo-prop. The weather was windy and the ride was bumpy – I fly a lot, and this was the sort of “I think I might throw up a little bit” kind of bumpy. I managed to land in Amsterdam vomit-free, but not before I’d managed to spill my half my Coke down my shirt. I like to do big first impressions when I arrive in a new town.

The Hotel Pulitzer was lovely – loads of old townhouses all knocked into one. Just as well, too, as I didn’t see the outside of the hotel much in the four days I was in Amsterdam. The course went really well (must have been down to the quality tutoring!) and, with the exception of a few Germans who wanted to be spoon-fed the methodologies, was received with rave reviews. I left on Friday night totally shattered and arrived at Schiphol to discover that my flight had been cancelled.

It was chaos at the airport – despite having a fully-flexible ticket, they couldn’t seem to load me onto another flight. My passport was being passed between the check-out counters like a hot potato. After thirty minutes of phone calls, they finally managed to get me onto a flight.

How the Dutch are the tallest people in the world is beyond me. The food was, without exception, crap. I hardly ate anything in four days. Breakfast was reasonable enough, but lunch consisted of sandwiches so stingy that even the English seem generous and thin, watery soup that would discourage even young Oliver Twist from begging for more.

Dinner was a choice of meats in gloop, surrounded by vegetables in gloop and served with potatoes in gloop. I don’t know what the Dutch name for our dishes was, but I suspect it was something like Meet en Gloop met Karrets en Gloop. Bear in mind we were staying in a 5-star hotel and eating at (supposedly) some of the best restaurants in Amsterdam. The monotony was only broken up by the unexpectedly pleasant starters – Smooked Feesh en Gloop.

Enough about Dutch cuisine. Back home on Friday night for a beautiful, sunny weekend in Canterbury. Mowed the lawn and caught up with errands on Saturday, then spent the afternoon in the park. Sunday we took the Corvette out for a spin to the Duck Inn, a lovely country pub, where we sat in the garden and had a lovely pigeon breast salad (“PoopenShijtenBuurdBoobs met kein Gloopsaus” in Dutch), then headed back to the park for a few beers and some sunbathing.

Off to my new client this morning, and a chance to do some real client work for a change. So far, so good – watch this space!

* Please note: the Dutch translations in this entry may not be entirely accurate. I don’t actually speak Dutch.

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.

The two-week gap since my last entry is a good indication of how busy things have been recently. I’ve been frantically trying to get a piece of work out the door in the face of client requirements that seem to change by the minute. At the same time, I’ve been asked to act as a subject-matter expert for another client, and to lead a piece of business development for a third client. It means that I’m trying to do eight days of work in a five-day week.

After ten beautiful, sunny days in the US, we’ve come back to several weeks of grey, rainy weather in the UK. The garden looks great – Aude spent most of the weekend before last getting all of our flower beds planted, I took care of re-seeding the grass and getting everything trimmed. But the grey weather overall is a bit of a drag.

The weekend was spiced up a little bit by a Eurovision dinner party thrown by a friend of ours, although we still maintain that the UK was robbed.

Most of this weekend was tied up with wedding preparation courses – overall not quite as dull as I’d expected, although I did learn rather more about the sex lives of our hosting couple than I really would have liked. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

It’s another busy week at work this week – tying up loose ends on one client engagement on Monday & Tuesday, off to Croydon on Wednesday to assess the presentations of all the graduates at the end of their 18-month graduate training programme, then off to Paris on Thursday / Friday for a training course of my own. I’m taking Thursday morning off to race around Paris securing the various pieces of paperwork I need for the wedding.

Still, even a trip racing around Paris is a good trip. They’re taking us out for a slap-up meal on Thursday night, which makes the trip worthwhile in itself.