Autumn days!

Hooray for Sunday nights now that I don’t always have to go to work on a Monday- what a difference that makes! This week just gone was a full on 5 day week and it felt like it by Friday. Not only did I have to work on Monday to do a client pitch (which we lost), but I also had to be in London on Friday for an all-afternoon quality meeting. Who on earth thinks that they will get everyone's attention on what is really a relatively dry subject at that point in the week? As if that wasn’t bad enough, the session was led by a Latvian partner from our global team (generally considered to be a team of very well paid but possibly not always vital partners). He started  from an assumption that we could barely spell quality let alone understand its importance, so when he was still on the title slide after nearly an hour and a half the whole room (all senior partners) he was on a losing wicket. Luckily he had enough sense to finish still before the scheduled time which was the high post of the session.

The week was also hard in that I’m still angsting over whether there is something better than this (job wise that is). Having spoken to a number of friends and seeing my clients first hand  I’m not sure there is currently. Every big organisation is facing tough times with the associated impact on staff. A few friends have recently bounced very quickly through smaller businesses and proved that’s not a panacea. The upside of the trials and tribulations we are going through is that I’ve had a number of heart to hearts this week with other partners and it’s clear that I’m not the only one who feels change is overdue. Upstart of all of this I’ve decided that no sudden moves are they safest bet. Abi and Glenn are happy with that. Izzy will keep looking at Right Move regardless!

The big question with all this time (ha ha) is what to do with it? Tomorrow we are hoping we might be able to look round a local school which we hadn’t previously considered - Cokethorpe. It’s in Oxfordshire and a bit of a journey, but no further than the other ones we’ve thought about. The pluses include the fact that it’s mixed, a day school only and a good balance between academic, sport and arts. There’s also a bus which goes from Chieveley which would make it much more feasible than the other favoured option which is a bus from Basingstoke. I’m still a bit at a loss as to how you make the right decision. At the end everyone talks about finding somewhere that feels right. Let’s see.

Today was a lovely family home day. We all went to Basingstoke this morning to cheer Glenn on in a cyclocross race (or get to go to a park and eat a burger if you’re one of the kids). It looked brutal - 40mins of non stop pedalling on grass around a field with 100 other people in Lycra. It was hard to work out whether he was doing well or not with classes all mixed together but the timing chip showed he did brilliantly completing the same number of laps as the winner. There were also 100s of kids there of every age riding in the junior classes so we’ve said next time I’ll ride and see if we can get the kids to have a go. Abi will probably be too embarrassed and Izzy it will depend on whether she thinks it’s cool or not. Ho hum, we can but try! We came home and Izzy went off to a friend while Abi, the dogs and I went to rake up leaves, a constant occupation for the next month or so. I love this - on a sunny autumn day like today it’s such a cathartic thing to do, not least at the end of it you can see what you’ve done. If only more things in life were like that!