Or so Mirinda said. She had a couple of meetings miles apart and barely time to register my presence. But before that…
She has decided to take her netbook away with us rather than the portable DVD player. This way she can load films/TV programmes onto the netbook and watch them through iTunes. All well and good and a lot less to carry when you consider the player AND the DVDs AND the fact that she’d probably bring the netbook anyway.
Trouble is, when we loaded something onto the netbook it didn’t render very well. It was all jerky and impossible to watch more than two seconds of content. It looked like it was going to be the extra suitcase full of technology unless I could do something miraculous.
So, stepping into a handy telephone booth I quickly changed into my secret disguise as Mr Fixitup and hightailed it up to Canary Wharf to secretly fix the netbook. Actually it wasn’t so quick. I spent a few hours last night working out what the problem was with the help of a few forums and techies that know stuff that I can only imagine. To be fair, I can’t even imagine most of it.
Arriving at the flat I immediately set to work (with the IPL cricket on in the background). It was a long, drawn out process (quite the opposite to the cricket) but I managed to fix it. And I take it back. As much as I hate all things Apple, it wasn’t their fault. It was the high spec of the netbook which needed taking down a peg or two in order to play the antique Apple generated files.
Meanwhile, Mirinda was starting a meeting which consisted of a ridiculous amount of individual five minute presentations with nary a breath for pausing. It was late starting and, eventually, late in ending. We had already planned an elaborate meeting which took ages to work out. The change in time merely meant I had longer to watch the cricket…I mean, fix the netbook. Which I did and then wandered across to South Quays station, where I hopped the DLR to meet her near the young ballerina sitting on her chair.
The view of the DLR tracks from South Quays station
This is the view from where I sat in the sun, reading and waiting.
A row of red telephone boxes
It was very pleasant, particularly as I was sitting beneath a rather scrawny but effective for all that, tree.
Eventually Mirinda met me with the rather irritated remark that our lunchtime would now consist of walking to her next meeting which was to be held in Portcullis House which is opposite the Houses of Parliament. She was meeting a man from the government to discuss something important (again, I am sworn to secrecy and all I can say is that it wasn’t David Cameron she was meeting).
The area around the Houses of Parliament is renowned for two main things: Firstly the crowds are always horrendous made worse by the ever present roadworks and, secondly, there’s very few places to eat. For starters, the Nero’s is so small it can only fit one bar stool in it and a barista. I guess they (the politicians) don’t want to encourage people to eat too much. What with the obesity levels the way they are.
For whatever reason, we ended up buying sandwiches from a girl in Boots who didn’t understand Mirinda when she asked if the building we were in was Portcullis House (it wasn’t). After Mirinda had left, the girl asked me what she’d said. After I repeated it, she was still no clearer.
We found Portcullis House and ate our sandwiches beneath one of it’s arches before I left Mirinda to enter the heavy security through which she had to pass to reach her top secret meeting. She tells me that during the meeting a loud horn went off and all the ministers jumped up and ran out, yelling over their shoulders that they had to get to the House and vote. Given the crowds out on the street, I can only assume they have a secret passage.
And then I went home (after picking up a certain fridge magnet that a certain person asked me pick up). And that was it. Mirinda has since apologised for being irritated. I told her she was a lot better than she was in her last job. It think that made her feel a whole lot better. And, by the way, she thought the person she met with wasn’t up to much.
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And just a glimpse of what Nicktor’s week in Germany was like. He tells me he drank the beer first.
