Joel phoned me saturday around 4pm haveing woken from his nap – he seems to sleep as often as my cats, and requires about as much as they do to stay vertical. Met up at the Hilton in Bracknell, and found our way to a nearby Balti house for dinner (recommendation courtesy of some friends who live near Bracknell).

Dinner was pretty good, actually, due at least in part by my sudden inspiration of letting Joel order the entire meal, thereby bypassing his fastidiousness and making the selection of dishes into his problem.

Walking back to the car, out of curiousity, we stopped in at a Chinese restaurant to look at the menu. Joel started speaking Cantonese to the guy behind the counter, and his face was a sight to behold. People in the UK are simply not known for a facility with languages.

We got mildly lost in Bracknell, en-route back to the hotel, and once off the beaten track decided to stop at a pub that was evidently more used to serving the local populace, and wasn’t used to strangers.

We decamped to a picnic table on the patio, and chatted with some of the residents, including a bizzare woman who came outside specifically to ask us if we were Americans – or some other sorts of foreigners – and who had decided that if I was not American then I might have been Dutch.

I dunno – maybe I’ve been hainging out too much with Casper, Joep and Henk?

Anyway – she was mildly shocked when I dropped into Brummie, and chatted for a while longer. Finally the phone rang from Efi to say he was back at the hotel, so we jaunted back.

Sitting in the hotel lobby sofa, we were up until 0100h sunday morning; there was a coachload of Welsh women having a slightly drunken sing-song in one corner of the lobby, and talk about identity, security, services and upcoming training had to be shouted progressively more loudly until we called it quits.

Efi and I came over to GMP this morning, collected some cables and stuff, and will be taking hardware over to Frimley in a moment. We collected Joel, had lunch at my place, and are now back at GMP.

Training setup TBD. Tomorrow it starts. Eek.