Lighting

The alarm woke me at 5am. I’m not sure how much sleep I got because it was one of those mornings where I knew I had to be awake and, therefore, was worrying about missing the alarm. 

I got ready and made coffee. Then I joked the pre-meeting chat where there was discussion to reinstate a slide we took out last week. Then we took it out again. A colleague felt that it hadn’t been in the rehearsal so it shouldn’t be in the presentation.  By this point I’d stopped caring. We had a solid story but presenting is a mess. I don’t think we were telling the same story and I didn’t understand some of what she was trying to say. But we got through it. 

The issue was it was the wrong meeting. This was a pitch for a forecasting tool which including all the background about what we were taking into account to generate a forecast. It’s as solid as we could have presented without any code being written. But it was not what they were looking for at this point. They wanted a sales dashboard. But, because they kept talking about ‘forecast’, our people believed forecasting was the missing link.

The rest of the day was bit of a a downer and only partially productive. There was a long meeting this afternoon about priorities for next year. By the end of that call it was 3:30pm and that marked almost ten hours since I started the day so I called it a day. I meant to grab a couple of hours sleep but I didn’t - I mainly watched YouTuber videos about London taxi drivers and put the bins out.

At 6pm I headed out for a train into central London. Another delayed service and I didn’t get to meet PY at Waterloo until almost 7pm which meant we were late meeting friends  at Comptons on Old Compton Street.  I haven’t been the celebrated gay pub for many years. Today, the upstairs bar was warm and welcoming and we eventually made it, attired in Christmas jumpers.

After a couple of drinks we went to Din Tai Fung, a branch of a Taiwanese restaurant chain, in Covent Garden.  We all selected a starter and a basket of steamed dumplings and shared the resulting mixture. My Honey & Vinegar Short Ribs, served cold, were deliciously sweet.  PY’s Crispy Golden Prawn Pancake was, probably, the highlight of all the small dishes. W ordered one of the signature dishes,  Xiao Long Bao, where each dumpling is hand folded 18 times before steaming, and the result was delicious. P ordered the Mushroom & Truffle Xiao Long Bao which I was eyeing up (they were a tasty mix of Shiitake, Shimeji, Enoki and Eryngii mushrooms, enriched with truffle oil) so I ended up with Truffle & Pork Xiao Long Bao which turned out to be the most expensive dish.   Nonetheless, absolutely delicious.  

We wandered back through the lights of the Covent Garden piazza and had a few photos taken with the Christmas lights before walking to Waterloo to discover that the last train had left about 9pm because of on-going problems. We ended up on a combination of Northern Line and 131 bus that got us home about half past midnight. It was faster than we expected.

Like two old dears in a sitcom, we sat down to have a cup of tea before bed and fell asleep.