So that’s over at least. Truly team building away days are a bunch of arse. As these things go it wasn’t too bad. Stayed an a pretty decent place and some people had some very nice things to say about Pan, despite me being horribly late (both for the workshop) and pretty much on a daily basis, and also not being much of a team player. Not that I shaft my colleagues – quite the reverse – but I simply find it hard to be all touchy feely and consultative – the thought of taking a vote to decide some critical point is alien to me.

But anyway my colleagues seem to see me as some sort of maverick wunderkind / troublemaker / joker / visionary of the group. Which is nice. After all you wouldn’t want to be the practical ‘can-do’ enabler would you?

So now I’m knackered. Too much food, too many hours sitting in stuffy conference rooms battling with concepts such as ‘when did I last achieve one of my dreams’ or ‘on a scale of 1-100 where would you put your commitment, and where would you like your commitment to be’. Had to get up too early to get the train back to London and too much brekker as welll. Ack.

As I said – it wasn’t t actually that bad overall. Which is lucky as we’re booking a follow up session as well. Plus you get a free feed and get to sleep in a ridiculously squishy bed as well as all those other traditional hotel hobbies – looking at the wee shampoo bottles, wondering if you want to keep the slippers, gazing at the air conditioning units outside the window, flicking through 137 tv channels, none of which is porn, or at least not free porn, browsing the world’s most boring directories of local attractions and trying to work out if the fact you got a twin room and some of your colleagues got a double room was purely random or some sort of implied insult : chances of you getting pissed and repairing with an equally drunken co-worker for a sport of soon to be bitterly regretted How’s Your Father : Zero.

When I stayed here:

I used to amuse myself by disabling the window catch so that it would swing completely open and then seeing if I could flick lumps of wet toilet paper into the roofs the cars outside. I never even got close but it helped to pass the time.