Must mention the splendid 2-3-2 cafe on Gloucester Road, Bristol. We spent last friday evening in this lovely relaxed cafe / restaurant. It’s one of those places where you can have cake and coffee or lovely 3 course meal, well worth a visit in you are in this part of Bristol.

During the course of the evening, we had a very interesting chat about planning for old age with our friends Pete & Maggie. After seeing the struggles which have afflicted our respective parents over recent years, we decided that we need to get together with all our friends and move into some sort of sheltered housing.

That’s right - get rid of the houses which as you get older become more of a curse than a blessing and use the money to get a nice flat. we could use the common room for punk rock disco’s, arrange outings to the cinema and have a fine old time. Not long to go!

At the other end of the spectrum, we went to a very wedding reception of Sunday evening as old BT friends Ceri and Simon celebrated their wedding in the idyllic setting of Priston Mill. It was a chance to catch up with a few old friends, some of whom I’d not seen since leaving BT in that previous life of mine.

Ceri and Simon are now taking a month long break firstly in Kong Kong before moving onto Australia. Back in 1990 we went to Australia for a month and had a brilliant time but...Coming back to work after a 4 week break was a nightmare.

I’m the sort of chap who needs to be retrained after a lunch break, so after a month I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, the trouble is that everyone else thinks that you still know what you knew before you went away. This resulted in lots of very painful conversations, featuring me desperately trying to bluff my way through situations. I could just about manage my name and shoe size, anything was like being asked to explain nuclear fusion, somehow my colleges put up with and coaxed me back into some sort human state. I guess that it was a test run for those confused days of old age which await us all.