May 1997 was not a great time for me personally but most mornings I would wake up feeling inexplicably happy and the reason for that was that we had a Labour government. After eighteen years - all of my teens and adult life to date - I'd been living under a Tory government. Looking back and judging it against this current bunch of psychopaths, the governments of Thatcher and Major don't seem so bad - although never good - but the relief was palpable. 

I've felt something similar this last week since Sadiq Khan was elected. I realise that geographically at least I'm no longer a Londoner but I have felt affronted to have Johnson as our major for the last, what, eight years. To keep it brief, I'll just say that he was unrepresentative of everything I love about London. 

So, OK, maybe it was just the sunshine but I felt quite joyous as I made my way to the Internet of Things summit, this morning, even stopping at a coffee house near London Bridge to sit outside and watch my fellow Londoners walk past in their summer clothes, freshly liberated from the The Buffoon's administrative yoke..

A little later, once I was at the summit, I received a Facebook message from a chap called Tom, whom I met via my friend, John, at a Wire gig a few years ago, saying he'd seen my photo on Instagram and, as that was near his office, did I fancy lunch? Now, despite only having met face to face on one occasion, Tom and I are friends on Facebook, and the prospect of an hour with him in The Shipwrights Arms seemed a lot more appealing than networking with my fellow summiteers.

And so it was that we had a couple of drinks in the cool interior of the pub, its dark walls punctuated by bright squares of harsh sunlight, chatting about this and that and, I think, getting on splendidly.

The last couple of sessions back at the Internet of Things were, to be frank, variations on the morning's presentations and discussions but Tom had asked me to think about writing an article about the event, so I took a few notes and roughed out some structure for what I might want to say. After that, it'd be simply a matter of letting my ideas ferment for a couple of days. 

After the exhibition, I hopped on a tube and made my way to The Argyll Arms on Brewer Street to meet up with the Minx, Katie, Bibi and Dean. It's an odd feature of conversations with Twitter people that sometimes you refer to other users by their Twitter names and not their actual names but when my old chum, Colin, arrived and I went to introduce him to Katie, I actually couldn't remember her real name! (Sorry, Katie.)

Anyway, hurriedly putting my faux pas behind us, we settled down for a couple of very pleasant hours before the Minx and I headed north again, with me feeling a little more sorry to leave than I have done for a long while.