Up with the lark

A meeting in Bourne End today, so an early start is the order of the day. The wood is a very different place at six o'clock in the morning. It's much quieter, with the distant rumble of the M1 conspicuous by its absence and a different chorus of bird song filtering between the trees.

I stood and watched a chaffinch on a low branch a meter or two away from the path for a minute or two, before it took fright and flew away. Coming back down from the top of the woods, a couple of squirrels were sat in the middle of the path, confident that Barney was safely on his lead.

The final early morning denizen was encountered just as we were leaving the woods. A middle aged man, with a spaniel trotting along behind him, was walking along shaving with an electric razor.

Strange ...

So, a three and half hour drive to Bourne End. The M40 is a very different motorway to the M1. I was cruising comfortably, somewhere around 70 miles an hour, and I was passed by a constant stream of Beemers and Mercs all doing well over a ton with no police in sight. Similar behaviour anywhere else would result in the swift appearance of a flashing blue light in the rear view mirror.

The meeting is to look again at a contracts management system that one of our group companies is flogging, so it is now the preferred option for our inhouse systems. I'm not sure quite how well the client server architecture will scale to our WAN - there was talk of getting every body to enter timesheets and expense claims through a browser tool, but the demo that we saw crashed several times and was missing a lot of detail that we need.

I've got a bad feeling about this one ...

I got taken out for lunch at a rather nice pub called the Bounty down by the Thames. It can only be reached on foot, via the bridge that runs alongside the railway bridge and along the tow path or by boat. We were sat out in the sunshine watching geese and ducks skimming along the river, and cruisers and narrow boats pootling up and down.

Another three and half hour journey home, so I reckon a bottle of wine from Tesco's is called for, and true to form just as I pick up my glass of Chardonnay I notice a black fly ... ironic, don't you think?