Personal Review of 2005 - January to June

After a rather hectic and overworked 2004, I decided that in 2005 I would try to rectify the work-life imbalance.

In January Russell and I went on a 4-week trip round South-East Asia - visiting Thailand briefly before touring round Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. Apart from learning to appreciate the importance of the Mekong River to these countries, I also fulfilled a dream of mine - to visit Angkor Wat. It was more spectacular than I could ever have imagined. My Canon EOS camera got well-used on this trip, and a selection of photos can be seen in the photos section of my website.

As soon as we got back from Asia at the beginning of February, we jetted off to Basel with Christine, Ged and baby Alex for Elisabetta's 40th birthday. She certainly didn't expect me nor Russell to be there - Well done to Neil and Christine for confusing her and leading her to think that we were still in Asia. As usual the party was good and well-organised. No sooner I got back from Basle I jetted off to Newcastle for work, and so by mid-February I had clocked up nearly 15 flights already!

Anthea and Peter came to London to visit in March as it was their 10th wedding anniversary celebration. We went to a few exclusive restaurants - including the very awful "Fifteen" opened by Jamie Oliver! The meal was expensive and even I could cook better than the staff there. I have no problem with cookery training schools and using trainees (in fact I am all for it) - but don't charge £60 and serve dishes that are not worth that price. Then we went to the Fat Duck in Bray for dinner - now that was only slightly more expensive but definitely a lot better. Me being so critical about the food, when the manager Didier asked me what I thought of the tarte tatin, I said "it's OK" and he thought I was not happy with the food, so he whisked that away and offered me a chocolate delice instead (little did he know that I was just full rather than not happy with the food - in fact the chocolate delice was a worse choice for me, as the gooey chocolate really hurt my nose - an undesirable side-effect from my tonsillectomy / uvula-palatoplasty operation in 2004). We could have gone to River Cafe for another dinner but Anthea got ill (after we did a day-trip to Paris).... so missed that one.

In April Darcy and Bob came over for a visit - although Darcy came over for Christmas 2004, I managed to persuade her to come over again.... Using the Kylie Minogue's Showgirl Tour concert as the bait certainly did the trick. We really enjoyed the concert at Earl's Court. It was a complete shock to hear that after the UK leg of the tour, Kylie had to postpone all the Australian tour dates due to her breast cancer.

During Darcy's visit we also managed to squeeze in another nice restaurant visit - this time to Gordon Ramsay's. After this visit I changed my opinion of Mr Ramsay - on telly he came across as all arrogant and foul-mouthed, and so I was a bit skeptical about his restaurant, esp after the Jamie Oliver experience in March. But to my surprise, the food was excellent and the service was immaculate, and the price was not dissimilar to Fifteen.

It was the end of May when the air-con in my Renault Megane failed and I had to take it to the Renault garage in West London to get it fixed. Well, you would have thought this was a simple fix, but it took them 4 times to fix this. I was about to explode by the 3rd time and refused to cough up £750 - after a lot of negotiations I ended up paying £150 (on top of the £70 and the £110 I had to pay in the first 2 times).... it's only fair. Luckily Renault did not demand any payment when I took it in for the 4th time and they fixed it free of charge - otherwise I would have exploded!

In June, it's another visit to the Fat Duck - this time to celebrate Chris' 30th birthday. As usual the food was good.