Honestly, how did I ever find the time for practising this sort of bloggery on a regular basis? People often used to ask me this, during Troubled Diva’s most prolific periods, and now I find that I’m asking myself the same question.

I am once again resorting to the email-to-Blogger facility (hence the lack of post title), as I shall be jumping on a train to a Secret Location straight after work, in order to spend an evening with three blogpals. To this end, and because I no longer even have the time to keep up with Essential Capsule Collection blog reading (I’m currently following just six blogs regularly, dipping into the rest on all too infrequent occasions), I have taken hard copies of the front pages of their respective blogs, in order to do some essential preparatory reading over lunch and on the train. Because, you know, I’d hate to be caught out or anything…

Meanwhile, in the offline world, PDMG#1 (aka The Cottage Garden, for newer readers) is being entered for next year’s Association of Professional Landscapers Awards. And, hey, you know how much I love being entered for awards. (Not our doing! We’ve been approached! We’ve got to send a photo CD off and everything!) Photos of PDMG#1 have also, or so we’ve been told, appeared in a Japanese gardening magazine. Perhaps one of my Tokyo readers could investigate? (Ah, for the old days of Global Reach…)

It was a pleasant surprise to find Ambling Sheep from the Hangzhou office hanging out at reception this morning. What with JP having returned from Hangzhou at the end of last week, we’re quite the expat community all of a sudden. A lunch date is in the offing.

In other work-related news, I have been passionately arguing against the “disco” option for the office Christmas party. Look, it’s quite simple. I sit in near silence next to these people for months on end; so how can I possibly expected to dance in front of them? It’s too much of a leap. And I’ll be drunk by then, and hence prone to overly literal interpretive hand motions (as this guy witnessed at Club Revenge in Brighton a couple of months back, to the strains of Girls Aloud’s I Think We’re Alone Now… "running just as fast as we can, holding onto one another's hands… oh, for SHAME).

And another thing. Security access photo passes, what sort of cruel punishment are they? For in a reversal of The Picture of Dorian Gray, I am obliged to shackle myself, five days a week, to a photo of myself on my first day of employment here, back in July 2001. Oh, the fresh-faced optimism! I could weep! How long will it be until the security guards stop me at the door? ("I'm sorry sir, but the borrowing of photo passes is strictly forbidden.")

And finally: Never, ever stay at the Brighton Charter Hotel. You want more proof? Here's more proof…