Friday 18th July 2014

It is Thursday evening, I’m sitting in my room in my pants having just come up from dinner. I was wearing my trousers when I went for dinner, I’ll have you know. I am in the fine city of Arhus, I would have gone into the city centre, but there’s a jazz festival on and the parking is even worse than normal, so I thought I would write a few lines of the blog. I am off home tomorrow, which is good. And if I’m lucky I might spend up to and maybe even more than two weeks at home, with no travel other than orchid hunting to get in the way.

To make matters worse, I am full of cold, or full of the beginning of a cold, which is not nice. But does make a change from an allergic reaction, and so variety is the spice of life. Or mine.

Monday.

IN a change, I have an evening flight, which means I get to spend the day, or most of it at home, before heading to LCY. I catch up on my mails, pamper the cats, and generally while away the day until it is time to load up the car, head to the factory to collect Jools so she can drive said car home when I get on the train. Whick is what happened, and nothing much exciting happened, other than the usual mix of crap and careless drivers. Heck, someone had managed to crash into one of the few telegraph poles on the road to Westcliffe. Good shot as they are many yards apart.

It says much about my frequent travels that a flight to Denmark does not quicken the pace. Thinking I forgot something, like my passport does of course. Although I haven’t, so I get off at Stratford, head onto the DLR, past the Olympic Stadium which is still being worked on, being converted to a football stadium for the ‘Happy’ Hammers.

At the airport there is another one of them power failures, so cases are stacked everywhere, in the hope the baggage system will work again soon. I leave my bags hoping it will make it to Billund on my flight, otherwise it would get smelly. I get through security, and head to the Italian place for dinner, which turned out to be overpriced lamb and cous cous. Which was nice as the company would be paying. I also had an overpriced beer too, it seemed only right.

We boarded the flight, and it was packed, as for the duration of the Danish holiday season it was the only flight of the day, hence me travelling at night. We leapt into the air, banked high over the east end with fine views of The City in the warm evening light, before heading into the clouds leaving dear old blighty far below.

Sadly, Denmark was hidden under huge banks of clouds and the rain was falling steadily. In fact, Denmark was hidden just before we landed, with the muted tones of the Danish countryside a few tens of metres below. Once down, I collect the keys for the car, from a different country just to keep me on my toes. I have a Toyota for the week, which will be interesting, but more of that later.

It was a 40 minute drive to the hotel in Varde, I follow the sat nav, and so we pass down deserted roads and through deserted villages until I arrived in Varde and the doors of the hotel.

‘For night service, please ring the following number’. Read the sign. So I called, I was given the combination to the key safe, got my room keys and told where the room was. The hotel was empty and in darkness. In the room, there was no kettle, so no drinks. So I powered up the laptop, wrote a mail and went to bed.

Tuesday.

I wake up, go to meet Anni for breakfast, and then we head to the factory for another hard day at the audit face, getting our fingers dirty as we audit away, or watch while someone else does. It is a slow and laborious process which seems to take forever. I call a end to the day at half four, and so we head back to the hotel, but I am going to spend the evening back round Shelly’s, as she has invited me for dinner, a lack of sleep and feeling like crap meant I stuck to Coke, or Pepsi for the evening, and drove home at a sensible time and was in bed by half nine.