I deliberately set up this steamy coffee shot to illustrate my day. It’s been another long and arduous one, I wonder if I’ll ever have a normal day again sometimes!

Without about 15 cups of coffee I don’t think I’d have survived.

It’s been a combination of watching pilot interviews for a survey that’s about to go into field so we could refine and enhance the questionnaire, followed by dashing 70 miles across country this afternoon to a presentation to another client then dashing back across the country to finish the questionnaire and discuss the survey’s logistics with my first client.

All-in-all, the day has gone very smoothly from the point of view that the pilots were good, the questionnaire is now (hopefully) put to bed, providing the client’s internal customers are happy with the modifications we’ve made today and the presentation this afternoon went really well.

Somehow though, even though much of what I’ve done would have looked to an outsider like the privileged life, because I’ve spent a lot of time ‘chatting’ to clients and being driven around the countryside in a taxi, it’s been both mentally exhausting and physically draining. No breaks at all in a day ten and a half hours long is very hard work.

Picture the scene, there’s me, in a taxi, struggling with car sickness, which I’ve been afflicted with since I was a little girl. I’m reading and checking the presentation (fortunately that someone else is delivering) that my only opportunity to look at is on that journey because the charts weren’t ready until this morning and they were couriered to me just before I set off for the meeting. I’d been asked to go to this meeting at relatively short notice as an ‘expert’ in the field that was being presented on despite not having been involved in the project at all so I knew nothing about the survey’s design or objectives until today.

For me to contribute effectively to the discussion in the meeting, I needed to be au fait with the presentation content and to have formed some views of the reasons for the results. Not easy with an hour’s preparation time to look at 75 charts in a taxi while stuffing down a sandwich. I spent a good deal of the journey with a mobile in one hand and a sandwich in the other, the presentation balanced on my knee talking through some of the points raised with my colleague ‘back at the ranch’ who was checking facts for me. Groan!

The rest of the day, by comparison, has been a pleasure. Ginny and Ewan have been stars and looked after our other client admirably in my absence, to the point that when I returned to the hotel where they were working on the questionnaire revisions they smugly asked me to look at it and I could find no fault at all. All I needed to do was suggest a couple of wording changes to clarify a couple of questions. Between the client and the team they’d done a grand job.

So, coffee. The best cup of the day, the one when I arrived home and was able to sup it with David and the dogs!

Now this pic is reminding me of one of my favourite songs ever…..Black Coffee In Bed by Squeeze even though it’s not intended as a tribute to the song or band. Claire, Sharon and I recorded the song onto a C90 tape over and over again so the whole tape was just full of the same song and we used to listen to it and sing along in Esther (my 1.1L Fiesta) when on our way to gigs. Why? Well because the song was not only written and recorded by a band I loved, but two of our great musical heroes sang backing vocals on it and if you listen to the song you can quite clearly tell who…..but I’m not going to tell you, if you want to know, get the album out and have a listen!