Despite having a good time last night with my fantasy league chums, I’ve had a dire two days. I’ve been in a dark, freezing cold room with the rest of our board of directors and the team managers thinking about the short and long-term future of our business.

It should be a pleasure. Even after all this time, I still get the most tremendous buzz out of knowing I’m part of a successful team. This meeting was designed to think about our 2004 targets, how we intend to achieve them and what we envisage the shape of our business will be in four years time.

Sometimes though, despite the love I have for my job and the excitement I feel for the start of the new business year, I just feel dread at these meetings. I really hate them. Really, really hate them.

They always take place in an hotel, on this occasion an ancient converted priory near Redhill in Surrey. Very beautiful if you are getting married but not so hot if you are expected to spend two days shut in a room with no aircon and sixteen other people. Each time I went out of the room and came back in, the sour stench of human bodies hit me in the face. Nice!

Because of my prior engagement at the Fantasy League dinner last night, I was ‘let off’ the overnight stay and dinner – I regard that as something of a lucky escape. I just had to get back there by 8.30am this morning for day two, meaning leaving home at 7am after getting in at 1am.

For good or bad I’ve always hated work dos. They just strike me as so forced and un-natural. By and large I keep my work and home lives pretty separate (aside from commissioning David to do design and photography work for us) and that’s just how I like it.

Anyway, we were talking about our website at one point – it comes under my responsibility as it’s classed as ‘marketing’. We were discussing the disappointingly low hit rate on some of the content pages and how we might redress it. Someone said ‘I don’t think any websites get many hits’. I was able to very smugly reel off a few of my PBASE stats to demonstrate that if it’s something that people want to look at then the hits will come. How good a feeling was that?

I had a few minutes at lunchtime for a bit of fresh air and saw this gateway looking so inviting - I might just be able to go through the gate, into a secret garden and stay there until my colleagues had all gone home. That was so tempting!!!