Churchill lunch; 14 Sep 12

Friday was a good day. Sunny start but breezy. Not too hot and definitely with the smell of autumn. And I had a day in Cambridge with lots to do.

It started with the need to attend a County Council briefing on the ‘new’ standards regime. There’s not much new to it and most of it is common sense but it’s always worth paying attention because you never know when a voter might take issue with your behaviour.  Then it was physio, I still have not fully recovered from my calf injury of May (click here for that story), before heading off for lunch.

But in between I did a little light technology posing. I acquired an iPAD recently and have been slowly warming to it. I use it to take notes in meetings, I use it to share more ‘intimate’ presentations’ and I use it for email (its instant access is a dream). I’ve never had an Apple product before and have always been reluctant to go there because Apple is described as a ‘walled garden’. However I use Dropbox and Evernote which work across both the Apple and Microsoft platforms and that means that my iPAD is a part of my team.

In addition to a few useful apps I also use Skype and on Friday morning I did just that to talk to my colleagues in Spain first whilst I was sipping coffee in Costa and later whilst I sat outside the Galleria waiting for lunch. And for the benefit of those colleagues who had not been to Cambridge I was able to use the ‘back camera’ to show them shots of Magdalene Bridge and punting on the Cam whilst we chatted.

Lunch was a lunch for old Churchillians. Meredith (formerly Les) Lloyd-Evans and I meet every so often for lunch and earlier this year we though maybe we should hunt out others who live close to Cambridge and of a similar vintage. So after a few months of well-practiced procrastination we got the college to send a flier to people with addresses in local post codes looking for interest. We got 15 including ourselves, although we did seem to stretch the definition of similar vintage, and then arbitrarily chose a date which seemed to fit for 9 of us and went for it!

I guess you could split us into 3 groups. One included those who’d already retired and claimed to be enjoying it and saw no need to remember their mobile phone numbers. One included those who could have retired but continued to work because they need the money. They also claimed to be enjoying it; that group includes me and Meredith. And the third group included those too young to retire who just enjoyed being younger than everybody else.

But fair does it was an event short on posturing. Nobody was there talking about their great successes and there was little pressure to do so. The food was enjoyed. We drank a little wine, those who opted for red managed to drink more than those who went for white. And we displayed our worldliness by ordering cappuccinos and espressos.

It was an excellent event, or so I heard, and it will be repeated in November (Fri 16 Nov 12).

And after lunch it was back to County Council business when I indulged in the modern-day equivalent of helping old ladies to cross the road: reviewing the desire lines for people on mobility scooters as they travel to the shops in Histon and ensuring that drop kerbs and the like are consistent with them. Such people are not quite as militant as cyclists but they still don’t like to be told where they can go when it’s different from where they want to go.