Friends and Family

Been down with the folks the last few days. Its always nice to go home, you get forced to drink all this free alcohol and stuff your face with loads of food. Its great! I?ve done a bit of a test flight with Lee?s present but I?m waiting for a slightly less windy day to give it a full flight run down.

The thing about visiting home is bumping into people you knew when younger, and then going through the painful memory recollection process that says you should know who this person is but you memory has failed. Yesterday started with one of my friends little sisters (if twenty something can be regarded as little anymore!) saying hi to me as I brought some batteries. You also start getting into the routine of compressing your last 10 years experience down into a couple of sentences to summarise your life. I gave many people this summary last night in the Rose. I caught up with J, working in Oxford as another Software Guy. A, also in Oxford as a brain surgeon no less (or ?hack and slash but with smaller parts? as he put it ;-) ). N who I used to tabletop with and was always into films is now in LA doing media stuff. L doing telecomms work down near one of the science parks (probably using kit I used to develop at Marconi). P is a starving musician who been touring all over the place (who played at Glasto this year, if only I had known!). There where a few others I?m sure but my memory of the night is more than a little hazy. I remember frothing about LoTR (?I can see you haven?t changed much? according to L), discussing driving in LA (?6 lane gridlock? according to N) and a host of nostalgia. All in all it was a good night. Plenty of email addresses where exchanged so hopefully I?ll do a better job of keeping in touch with people now.

Anyway Happy Christmas all! I?m off to eat, drink and be merry ;-)