Mr Sparrow seems to be regularly loggin on to see what I’m writing about the trip. He strenuously denies that he’s looking to see what I’ve written about him, but I think the lady doth protest too much. So, here’s the latest Sparrow news update.

Having been bitten by the hotel cat yesterday morning, it seems he has not yet developed rabies. Or if he has, he’s keeping the drooling madness well under check. His own fault, of course – he was attracting it to our table at breakfast by balancing some ham on the end of his outstretched finger, and it was a bit hungrier than either of us realised.

It seems to have kittens hidden in the rocks by one of the pools. If they are as thin and hungry as their mother, I don’t hold out much hope for the longevity of the chickpeas.

The Sparrow doesn’t swim. Something to do with sunshine allergy, which makes me suggest the black hair is actually naturally red, and dyed to make him look more distinguished.

He also sits in the front row in most of the briefings, which clearly points to some kind of hearing impairment, probably due to his very advanced age.

All of the above has been verified as absolutely true on the Da Vinci Code scale.

This place really is opulent. I was accosted by a peacock on the way to breakfast. The hidden speakers buried in all the lawns were playing the theme music to Dynasty at the time. It seemed strangely fitting.

Actally, to say I was accosted is a slight exaggeration. More accurately, we just stood there staring at each other, while he did the whole feather-in-the-air act to shield his wife and babies. It led to an across-the-table discussion about what you should accurately call mini peacocks. We settled on either pea-chicks or chickpeas, although none sounds quite right.

It really was blissful sitting there on the terrace eating exotic fruit and looking out over the pure blue sea. Already the sun was quite hot, and I could happily have stayed there all day. Instead, though, we had our first briefing at nine, in a large underground theatre.

All was going well until we were half way through a long film about technology and inventions when the guy sitting immediately behind me gave a loud, startling death-groan and fell into a seizure. He went as rigid as a board and slid down in his seat, his feet slipping under my chair and kicking my ankles in spasm. It’s the second time I’ve been in a briefing and seen that happen, and it’s really quite scary. Fortunately the whole event is bring fronted by a TV doctor who leapt down from the stage as the lights went up, and did some on-the-spot recovery position action, then arranged for the paramedics to sort him out.

All very professional. And they did well to get the presentation back on track when he returned to the stage. It was disappointing to see how many people crowded around filming it or taking pictures paparazzi style, though. All rather sick.

We were done by eleven – in time for a look at some of the kit and then a wander around the complex here taking pictures. It is not an easy place to photograph: there’s just so much of it, and there always seems to be something in the way. It was a fun way to pass the time, though, until lunch under the heat of the blazing sun. The food is excellent.

This afternoon’s session was fun. Out in the sun taking pictures, for the most part, after which we went for a swim, and then an hour lying around on the loungers chatting about cameras and lenses.

If I was here on holiday I think I would probably get bored, despite the amazing luxury of the place, but as we’re doing activities all the time, and following a timetable, I can tell already that the week is going to fly by.

We all had a pretty fab time in Leeds, by my reckoning, and despite the fact we spend every Monday to Friday together it was fun spending a weekend with the rest of the team.

We were all staying in the same hotel – the hotel in which the wedding was taking place – so it was inevitable we should bump into each other as we checked in over the course of the afternoon. After a long but fairly smooth journey up, Paul and I arrived around four, which left little time for anything than a quick change, some room-service pizza and then a brush of the teeth before meeting up with Chris of the Phin and heading down in our jackets and suits to the third floor.

Chris of the Brennan was there already; he and Danny, his best man, wearing very fetching pink ties. It seemed barely a moment later that it was all done. We took our seats – MacUser split across the aisle – for a ceremony that lasted just 15 minutes. Short and sweet and to the point, and pretty much a perfect example of how a wedding should be. They posed for their pictures with Leeds as the backdrop behind them, and then we all decamped for champagne and speeches and dinner on the floor below.

It was quite strange being in Leeds, somehow. We have all heard Chris of the Brennan tell us so many stories of what it was like growing up there, and particularly of his nights at Flares, the nightclub across the road from the hotel, which proved to be a source of considerable amusement to us all.

It’s the first one you get to after stumbling out of the station, so there was a steady stream of people wandering in and out. Pretty much everyone seemed to be part of a hen party or stag do. It was de riggeur – from the looks of things – to arrive in either a stretch limo or police van (as Pippa rightly pointed out, that was all that seemed to be going past at any time) and as the night went on you were expected to get more and more drunk.

The highlight of the night, though, has to have been the first dance. Chris had been keeping the song very secret from us all for the last two months, and we have played pretty much every song in the library at work trying to work out what it was. We did play it – once – but discounted it out of hand, convinced it was just too unusual to be the right one.

It was You Never Can Tell, by Chuck Berry. The song from the infamous dance scene in Pulp Fiction.

They carried it off with style – even managing to do the whole sweeping of fingers past the eyes moves. I didn’t catch that bit, but I did snap a short video of part of it with my camera, which I have compressed to smithereens to make it fit on the web. Click play…

The trip up went well. I’d still have preferred going by train

Well there we go. That was my last day in the office for a week. And after a week and a bit of fantastic weather, the good run finally broke, and I ended up walking home in the pouring rain. Fortunately I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, so I didn’t find myself riding the train in soaking wet jeans, which would be very uncomfortable.

I can’t say I’m too worried about the break in the weather; certainly not as much as I might have been. Tomorrow most of the team heads off to Leeds for Chris of the Brennan‘s wedding. There seemed to be something rather wrong in saying ‘see you all tomorrow’ to everyone as they left on a Friday evening.

And after that, it’s off to Tenerife for a week on a press trip. A quite bizarre choice of venue, but to prove it’s work I do actually have two meetings a day, every day. I suspect the fringe benefits will be worth it, though, and we seem to be staying in a lovely hotel.

So, in honour of Chris’s last night as a single man, it’s time we cracked open the last batch of photos from his stag do – the infamous sick-into-a-bin volume. Never before have I seen a man bend at a precise 90 degrees to be sick. He really should be applauded.

These pictures were all taken by Keith using a camera phone.

There are just so many things wrong with this plan, it’s difficult to know where to start. Apart from the most obvious point, which I posted yesterday, where pricing people off the roads and onto the trains, then off the trains and onto the roads again will just lead to a massive escalation of prices, you just need to look at the reasons for the overcrowding and the likely impact of the charges to see that it is unworkable.

According to the reports in Metro, the Association of Train Operating Companies says that many services are already running at more than 100% capacity and that ‘there are ideas for increasing capacity with longer trains…’

That’s funny. On my line, some of the morning trains have been reduced from 12 carriages to 8, and some of the most popular evening trains from 8 carriages to 4. No doubt this is so that they can be more crowded, ready for the introduction of extra fees payable for travelling on the most crowded services.

They have also put large gaps into the morning service to let the half-empty InterCity trains stream through the stations without having to stop. Halting one of these just once on its journey to London to pick up commuters at a major station along the way would do a lot to ease congestion and add only three or four minutes to the overall journey time.

But then, of course, you wouldn’t be able to charge the congestion fee.

Very few people have any choice about when they travel, as they have to be at work at a particular time. Charging more for travel will either force them into the cities to live, raising inner-city prices yet further while inducing a slump in the suburbs, or lead to greater demands for pay rises, hence inflation, hence… higher prices. My ticket costs

Four mornings out of five each week, it is impossible to get on at least one train from Chelmsford to London. It’ll be so full you just have to let it go and catch the next one.

Now, though, the rail companies want to introduce Congestion Charging for using the busiest trains. As the Times reports,

The association [of train operating companies] said that the pricing system would be needed to cope with the introduction of road tolls, which could overwhelm trains by encouraging thousands of car drivers to switch to rail.

Poor Valentine Victor Wear died, aged one, in 1893. Lumbered with an unfortunate name, which made him sound like designer clothing only ever worn in February, it didn’t help that his parents described him as ‘safely folded’.

Derek’s leaving cake took a lot of choosing, but it’s amazing what you can find online. And no, it didn’t taste of licorice, which was somewhat surprising. It was sort of non-descript sugary icing, all held together with chocolate butter cream. I’m not sure what the wanking man tasted of, or what kind of cream he was filled with, as we fortunately didn’t get that far before an early decamp to Jamies to drink ourselves silly on Pimms.

Fortunately plans for the stripper had fallen through, as we were sitting out on the street for the most part, and I’m sure Westminster Council has things to say about naked people running around its streets. It was a fantastic warm evening, though, as it had been all day. I’d spent lunchtime walking through Regent’s Park – right to the Zoo on the far side, and then back through the rose gardens which, I can say with all honesty, were home to more roses than I have ever seen together in one place in my whole life.

J’ai pass

I’m a big fan of Skype. It works well, does just what it says it should, is dead easy, and means you can talk to your friends for free. But… hmmmm.

I got quite excited when it let you register real phone numbers so that people could call you from regular landlines, and quickly snapped up a London number to supplement my non-London home number (and my non-London VoIP number). I see tonight, though, that there’s less than a week left to run on that number, which means three months must have gone by since I acquired it.

In that time, though, I’ve become a bit disillusioned with the service. As a phone replacement, it simply doesn’t cut it, and so I think I’m going to let the number lapse. I’ve had much less use from it than I thought, and really only use the PC-to-PC features with any kind of regularity.

I’ll hang on to my regular Skype account (username nikplus), so add that to your list if you’re a Skype-reading regular reader. In the meantime, though, in the last couple of days that the real-world Skype number has to run, how about an experiment.

The number is 020 8816 8861. It has voicemail. In the unlikely event you feel like calling it, I’ll download whatever you want to say and post the results on here.

So, call it.

Go on… call it.

Unless you’re too chicken…

(Download Skype here)