UK catch up
Sunday, 14th October 2001 by JulieHi there
It seems a while since we’ve had much going on with us but it probably is time for a catch up session with home. Tom doesn’t have much enthusiasm for writing detailed emails so it’s back to me again.
Our trip to Bath the other week was fun even with having to wake up before 6am on Friday to catch the coach.
It turns out that Bath is a scenic place (World Heritage site now) with most of the houses / buildings made out of pale yellow Bath stone in the 18th century Gregorian style. Not having much architectural knowledge up till now, we were very interested to hear all about the Palladian style, and this has made walking around London more interesting as well.
In the middle of Bath is the outlet of a hot mineral spring (the only one in the UK… it produces 1 million litres per day) and at this spot they also have most of the remains of the original Roman baths built by the Roman settlers in the first century AD. Very interesting to walk around.
We stayed in a comfortable B&B run by a South African couple about 10 minutes walk from the town centre, did all the touristy things, and had a pleasant long weekend overall.
The weekend after that we saw “AI” at Warner Village, Acton… Kind of a strange movie. I’d say rather wait for the video.
That was also the weekend that the washing line in the bathroom fell down – or, more accurately, that was when the large plastic screws holding one side of the line to the plasterboard wall wrenched themselves loose. Two wash loads later (socks and underpants drying on every free surface in the interim) and we bought one of those metal foldable washline things from Argos (a large, but very frustrating, catalogue store) for £7.99
The weather lately has really been rather good… People are saying we are having an “Indian Summer”. Yesterday we had a bit of a day-out and went to see the “World Press Photo Exhibition” which was on at the Royal Festival Hall. The exhibits are photos taken by journalists from news events all over the world in the past year and from the 1000′s of entries they’d had, the winners in each of the different categories were on show – free – in the Royal Festival Hall foyer. We bought Tom a one-day travel card and headed for town.
Since the closing date for sending Christmas presents by land-mail is fast approaching, we went via Hamley’s toy shop in Regent Street to do some present-hunting.
It was the first time we’d really looked around the whole shop and we had a lot of fun ourselves exploring the 5-floor kid’s paradise. The selections of toys and games are mind-blowing!
From there we caught another train to Waterloo Bridge, the closest stop to the Festival Hall. We both enjoyed the exhibition – there was some really captivating work on show although it did tend to highlight a lot of worldwide human suffering as well.
The entries included some from SA and among these were shots of the penguin-washing operation from last year, and the deporting of illegal immigrants. The photos were placed off to one side of the huge foyer, in the middle there is a long bar and lots of chairs and tables. Adding to the pleasant ambience yesterday was a live band and a singer entertaining the crowded tables as well as the more remote photo browsers.
On our way back we walked through Trafalgar Square where they were having a peaceful protest against the war in Afghanistan. It’s funny how so many of the South African’s I’ve spoken to seem to think that the Americans had it coming to them and should stay out of the affairs of the Middle East… In contrast, many British seem to feel solidarity with the Yanks and support the war. The splinter groups protesting yesterday were the flip side of the coin but they aren’t that common.
On the work side, I spent the whole of last week at a client’s site by myself. And tomorrow I’m going back there for one last day. Bearing in mind that Tikit only tends to deal with the top 200 law firms in the UK, these places do tend to be pretty swanky. I would hate to think of the rent that gets paid for one of those huge office blocks in central London!
Most law firms produce an enormous amount of documentation and the tendency is to automate the document creation as much as possible so that they waste minimal time over setting fonts correctly or putting in the date etc. In their versions of Word, they have additional menus which have items on them like Letter, Fax, Court document, Compliment Slip and Envelope to name but a few. Most of the time there are also sub-headings to distinguish different versions of these documents types.
So the point is that when you select, say, a Letter, before you even start typing, up comes the letter outline with your address already in place, as well as the date, the company letterhead, and whatever other frills you would like as a standard. Producing and fixing these automated documents (templates) is a big part of what I’m busy with at these different companies. For instance, the one from last week has just merged with a law firm in Paris and they want the company blurb at the bottom of the letter sheets to include the word “Paris” under the list of offices. 5 fax templates and 6 letter templates, an hour or two later, and I’m done.
Then there are the more hellish problems involving 4-tray HP printers that only want to print from the manual feed tray ever since they installed the new driver (printer work is the worst!), and favourite keyboard shortcuts that “always worked before we did
Tom will finally be getting his chance to fly again next weekend if the good weather holds out. Better hold thumbs for that one… I don’t know if I could take the disappointment if it doesn’t work out! Anyway, that’s about it for now. Take care.
Love from,
Julie and Tom
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(Pictures taken from Wikipedia‘s image collection)
