Sven’s guide to…

The most hectic week of my life is over now and wouldn’t you know it, I’m ill.  I know it’s my own fault because I did too much all at once:

• Open Day at work: timed to perfection to take place two days before the busiest weekend ever planned;
• The Thirtieth Anniversary celebrations for my department.  Three days of conferences, talks, exhibitions, films, and then the drinks and socialising in the evenings.  I should have known better than to get in at 4am and start work three hours later.  (Is it unprofessional to text the staff you manage and ask them to ring you half an hour after you are meant to get up just in case you oversleep?  Yeah; not my finest hour.)
• Shipping the furniture to Australia, because it’s just not stressful enough to work flat out in the office when you can’t come home and wrestle with the following paradox: is this box of (insert shippable object) worth sending to the other side of the world whilst also being something I can live without for three months?

So, with all that being over I’ve got time to indulge in a little man-flu, although in my defence my throat is red raw, all my limbs hurt and every time I cough I swear I can feel my brain crashing into my skull.  (I’ll be back at work tomorrow: I only stayed home today because James talked me into it.)

In other news, I’m thinking about re-jigging the blog.  Back when I started this in two-thousand-and-something I tried to stick to a weekly edition because RSS and bloglines didn’t exist and I thought it was nice to know there was something new to read at work on a Monday morning.  Now, and with such a big change coming, I don’t know if I can really stick with the format for much longer.  Plus, I fancy a change.  Over the next few weeks I’ll give some thought to what I want to do once I get Down Under and roll out the changes ready for the big departure.

Any way, I’m going back to bed (I’ve spent 36 of the past 48 hours in there, so why stop now?) and when I am fully recovered I’ll get looking for a place to hold our leaving party.  Keep the date free - 8 November - for a big Bristol-based goodbye to Blighty!

Good night x