A day in London

I rose at 5.30am on Wednesday to go to London. Any later and it becomes hard to get a parking space at the railway station. Madness - people commute from Swindon and further to London every single day. I'm so glad I live and work in the country.

I had a couple of meetings to attend, one with some investors and one with an old colleague (and customer) from eZoka days.

I got to London before 8am which was great. No rushing around and it was a warm morning. My first meeting wasn't until 10.30am so I took it easy getting to near where it was and finding a Starbucks for that first good caffeine hit of the day. The meeting was a few mins walk from Vauxhall so I took the tube and found a Starbucks right outside. Ordered by triple shot Mocha and sat out on the pavement watching the world go by. Across the road was the MI6 building and the river Thames. After my coffee I wandered across the road and had a closer look at the spy HQ. I imagine that lots of people must work there as its a bug building. But in the whole time I was there I only saw a handful of people go in the gates. Very odd. Perhaps they teleport in...?



I walked around the front of the building that over looks the Thames and watched the boats go by. A few barges and tugs pulling waste, some water taxis and a water Police boat. It was very quiet. A security guard in an unmarked flak jacket with an earpiece appeared from no where and walked past me slowly as I lent on the guard rail at the edge of the Thames... I imagined all sorts of things, and noted that there were security cameras everywhere I looked!

My phone rang and I snapped back to the real world, Tim had arrived and was looking for me at Starbucks where I'd text'd him to tell him I was waiting. We met up and walked to the first meeting with our investors. A good one.

Later on after lunch I headed north again and met up with Evelyne who runs Pretty Pregnant (http://www.prettypregnant.co.uk) a chain (how many needed for a chain?) of shops for pregnant ladies. I used to work with her years ago at eZoka and have kept in touch as she and her husband have built up their business. We provide their web hosting for them. Our hosting business has a few really big users and they are suffering from the traffic that the bigger guys get slowing their site down. So we discussed the way forward. Its good to see them doing well.

After that I headed back to Paddington and home. To get there I used the newly installed Google Maps feature on my Nokia N95. First time I'd done this and it was brilliant. I opened it up and within seconds it told me where I was, I typed in where I wanted to walk to and it told me the route and showed me the map. Keeping it open all the way I could see my progress. I knew I wasn't far from Paddington, but had no idea which direction it was, and couldn't have walked it without this device. The wonders of technology.