claytoncast

So it's Sunday, it's very cold and I'm waiting for the shuttle bus in the car park at Gatwick North. I'm heading over to Amsterdam to work as speaker coach on a conference for two days. It shouldn't be too arduous. It's reasonably well paid and Amsterdam is a great city..... And yet I seem to have gone into that winter hibernation mode this week where all I want to do is be curled up in the flat with the heating on and watching tv. The best reason I had for braving the cold this week was to venture up to Yorkshire to surprise my mum on her 89th birthday. Having already bought her a new chair( see previous entry) and arranged for a card with flowers to be delivered she wasn't expecting a visit. So a call to her at 2 pm to ask her to check the doorstep for a parcel worked a treat. No matter what I had bought her it wouldn't have received quite the same reaction as the sight of me standing on the garden path did. She was overjoyed. That and the combination

We're both very big Harry Potter fans in our house. My lovely friend Jane Millman introduced me to the books around 2000 and I quickly devoured them. They took me back to books I used to read in my childhood. The boarding school adventures of Jennings and Derbyshire, the Five Finder - outers etc. The first three books came out without much of a furore, and it was the fourth book “Harry Potter and the goblet of Fire" which really seem to catch people's attention. This was when Rich started reading the books. While I lay in bed at night trying to make my way through the 500 or so pages of the latest Harry Potter, Rich was beside me making his way through the first three books which were of course much slimmer volumes at the same time. This meant that by the time volume 5 “Harry Potter and the order of the Phoenix" came out our household had to order two copies. There was no debate as to who was going to read it first. So we have two copies of the last three books. As

Like banks, accountants are difficult to change. I've been with my bank now nearly 20 years. First Direct. The appeal when I first went to it was of course that it's a faceless bank. All business is conducted over the telephone or now on the Internet. Which is great in that you don't have to deal with people when you don't feel like it. Of course the downside is that when you'd like to actually talk to somebody with whom you have a relationship, it's potluck on who answers the phone. Whenever I've found them obstructive in any way I have thought about changing, and then 10 seconds later when I think of all the hassle of changing direct debits, bank details on invoices, and thinking of all the various things that could go wrong, I take a deep breath and carry on with them. I suppose it's what banks rely on. We all stay where we are because it's too much hassle to change. It's the same with my accountant. I'm sure he's not the cheapest, an

Well it’s been one of those weeks. Monday morning I went into town to meet the director of the BBC 4 project that I had been asked to audition for. A woman who quite clearly should have stood closer to her razor! I thought I read reasonably well, but as I said in last week’s blog I find it difficult to judge. They liked me a great deal I was told, so as you can guess, I didn’t get the job. The trip up to Yorkshire this week took me and Mum out to purchase a new fireside chair for her. Some of the things in mum’s house have been around longer than some people I know have been on this earth. The Parker Knoll chair that she sits in on a daily basis by the fire moved house with her in 1984 and had already been in situ at the old house behind the shop for four years at that time. It’s given good service, but as now she spends a large part of the day sitting in it, I was intent on getting her one that was orthopaedically correct, didn’t have a sagging bottom (the chair, not my mother!),