One of the perks of my job, is we get to travel a fair bit to other offices. Once we're there,
we've got a lot of work to do, but there's always a wee bit of time in the day to see the sites,
eat at decent restaurants and have a couple of drinks with the staff in that location. The rule of
thumb with travel is that once you get back you have to bring in an item of "tat" for everyone on
the desk (currently 5 of us). The item in question has to be of low material value (typically £3
and under), and in as poor taste as possible.

My colleague is just back from a three week trip to Singapore, and Australia. I am now the proud
owner of a Koala bear oven glove, from Australia (no oven in the office - nice work), and a small
tub of Achy Rub, from Singapore - which actually smells very like the linement we used to use
before games of football. As nice as these things are, I would have preferred to spend the cash
and gone myself, but that's another story.

As you can expect, over the last three years, I've accumulated a monumental amount of absolute
rubbish. Water from Niagra Falls complete in a small touristy plastic bottle. 2 cups, both
collapsable one from Jersey, the other from the Severn Valley Railway, a Moose bumper sticker from
Sweden, a fossilised sharks tooth (which I actually thought pretty cool - that left my other
colleague perplexed), and a couple of really horrible ties from Singapore. I could go on but I
expect you're getting the picture. Now if you leave me some really nice comments today, I'll take
a shot of where all this resides - an area christened "the shrine of sh*te" by one of the girls in
our legal department.

This is going to be my last update until Saturday, as I'm in Edinburgh, and Glasgow with work. I
then head off to Luxembourg on Monday. So there's some pretty exciting prospects ahead of me.
I'll add my archived posts when I get back home!

As an aside, please excuse my lack of comments recently, I've been very busy at work and at home
getting prepared as I'm now out of the office until 20th December. As you can imagine that's a lot
of planning! I promise I'll catch up with everyone as soon as I can.