It never rains but pours

What a wise man it was who said that. Of course, he’d never been to Manchester, where it never rains but drizzles. However, semantics aside…

And anyway, that’s not entirely true. It does, on occasion, rain with intent in Manchester. One such occasion was as I was racing from my office, with my last task not entirely finished, to catch the bus to Liverpool airport. Then it was absolutely bucketing down, hard enough to make me stop and dig frantically in my case for an umbrella before racing on again. Those 30 seconds were the difference between catching the £8 return bus and the £65 taxi. I spent that taxi ride being VERY zen, carefully putting £60 in all sorts of context…

Paris was fantastic. Ulrich and I spent the night near the airport then headed up to Chantilly for the day (apparently the lace is actually made further north). There’s an absolutely fabulous castle there which looked like needing far more than a few hours to see properly, so instead we went to the famous stables and watched a “spectacle” (ie a horse show). I’ve been to a few such exhibitions of horse and rider prowess before, and the interesting cultural difference in this case was the way they spent a fair bit of time upfront explaining the techniques. The French obviously like to be an informed audience. I’ve been pretty slack with the camera lately – so you can see extracts of the show here… http://www.museevivantducheval.fr/fr/spectacles/extraits_de_spectacles.html.
This is a really poor photo, but in reality it was the cutest thing you’ve ever seen – Shetland ponies doing the movements of the haute école.

We spent that night at a big family dinner, then the next day I caught up with 3 friends from various corners of the earth who all happened to be in Paris that weekend (well, one lives there now). It was also the fête de la musique, the longest day of the year and all of France suddenly bursts into song with bands on every corner doing every imaginable kind of music. Lots of fun.

Before going to Paris for the weekend, I’d spent a week in Leeds working out of a client’s office (in a pretty grim ex-coal town called Castleford). So it was all a bit hectic getting from there, back home for a night to quickly do some washing and pack again before Paris. But not half as hectic as on the way back, when I got a call that I would be going to Guinea in West Africa. So it was back from France after midnight, straight up to the client in Castleford, race around sending off my passport to get a visa etc. Back home for the weekend, then Castleford Monday Tuesday, home that night to pack again then off to Guinea Wednesday morning. Got back from Guinea Saturday morning, came into my regular Manchester office Monday to be learn that half the office seems to have been laid off and that I was to go back to Castleford for the rest of the week. Just when I thought I could unpack!

Guinea was fantastic. My first time on the African continent, and I loved every minute (ok, maybe not so much the stomach bug I picked up). Of course it helped that the client had chauffeured cars at my beck and call and I never had to worry about anything. I was there to help look at the disastrous state of the Conakry (capital city) electricity network, as the government was forming a plan of action and needed to do some prioritising. My French got a pretty serious workout, and I now know lots of ways to say “this equipment is completely stuffed”.

Some trivia: Guinea holds the proud status as the first African colony to successfully throw out the French. Amongst other things, this meant that they ripped down all the old colonial street names. They just never got around to replacing them, so finding places can be interesting.

The view from my hotel room. Not representative of Conakry, I have to say, but it was either this or photos of dodgy electrical equipment. By the way, unlike Manchester it most definitely pours there.

On a completely different note, I snapped this photo in Manchester one weekend. I thought it was a very novel way to make sure you didn’t lose a child in a crowd!