18th February, 2011

So my back held up quite well to the week away with my wife in Wengen, but I might add the horse is now up for sale. As reported a week or so ago it has bucked me off once too often. Wow....how about that for a couple of sentences that could be misconstrued. Anyway, I have to get a large monkey off my back too. I have long been rude and scathing about Swiss wine (“life’s too short to drink this cr*p”) but it is my new passion. Enjoyed some absolutely delicious bottles last week and am now an expert. It is however virtually impossible to get hold of it outside of Switzerland. Consequently, despite exorbitant expense courtesy of sterling’s disastrous performance relative to the Swiss Franc, I am going back later in the year to participate in the Jungfrau marathon. The graph below may look like one of my stock recommendations, but it is in fact the race route profile. This is real mid-life crisis stuff albeit that my birthday earlier this week – you forgot eh?.....thanks anyway – was still the right side of the significant figure. I think you might be hearing of my preparations for the marathon in due course.





Whilst on the subject of the Alps I wonder if you remember my email about our classy Christmas Party which was held at the Turf Club? It is fair to say, and excuse the pun, that things have gone downhill since then. We had an offsite on Wednesday afternoon at which we racked our brains as to how we could possibly serve you all better. Having failed, unsurprisingly, to come up with anything substantive, we followed it up with a team spirit building dinner at an Austrian restaurant called the Tiroler Hut, located down a cellar, appropriately enough, off Westbourne Grove. Website worth a quick look tiroler hut ..omg.....it was good fun, but classy??? Not really. Featuring large was a funny old buffer playing pieces from The Sound of Music on a combination of cow bells, a saxophone and a clarinet. As I said, I had a jolly evening sitting next to my fine colleague Sven Krueger from our Frankfurt office who, interestingly, had never heard of The Sound of Music never mind seen the film. Very strange indeed.