I’ve been out at an important client today doing a training session for their team. It has been a frantic struggle to find enough stuff to occupy their minds for three hours and we’ve burned midnight oil and (I did anyway) worked yesterday, as well as set off at the crack of sparrows this morning, to make sure we delivered on their brief.

We left the office in bags of time to get there, so spent twenty minutes in their car park before finally getting ‘on parade’ at 1pm. The meeting was big and well attended, the clients were challenging by asking loads of questions but fortunately the team done good, knew our stuff and acquitted ourselves well. It went on for three hours so a long session by anyone’s standards.

Pleasantries were exchanged and we were on our way home. I popped to pay a call of nature and came out through their reception to find my two colleagues waiting on the top step of the great glass palace that is their office building. The three of us loitered for a while, chatting about how it had gone, then sauntered back along the front of two of their buildings to our cars, parked at the furthest place in the visitors car park.

It was just before climbing into my car that I noticed something was strange. I was wearing a skirt (pretty unusual for me but client visits are the times when they get wheeled out) BUT, I could feel the breeze around my bum much too obviously. My heart sank as I put my hand behind me, to find my skirt was tucked into my best ‘Bridget Jones’ pants……..oh no! Open up and swallow me – please!!!!

I had walked through a crowded reception, stood outside their building for ages (and as I said earlier – all glass) and done that long walk without realising. Groan. Talk about a good impression going bad! Will I ever be able to face them again? I’m not sure. What’s disturbing is that no-one told me – have people no sense of sympathy for someone making a complete arse of themselves….literally?!

Our company’s founder, Liz Nelson, is reputed to have suffered a similar fate many years ago and she insisted that from then on, the Ladies toilets in our offices would all have full length mirrors in them. She is long-gone from the business and we’ve moved offices since she left so this practice no longer remains but I am determined to make sure I show a bit more human generosity than the employees of my client (not my audience, thankfully they were long gone!) showed me. It only takes a moment to say something and it would have saved so much embarrassment for me.

This ‘Lazy Fish’ was something that happily arrived here when DM did. He is a slightly strange man in as much as he can name all of the different types of corkscrew, despite, to the best of my knowledge, never having been a waiter. It was photographed by David last year in a very different way and I’ve been waiting for an opportunity for this shot for some months. He says it looks really ‘long’ and in fact it’s about a foot long.

Two years ago, like David, I became obsessed by monochrome and last year, we were laughing at a pub sign!