It’s Monday in the UK.

I spent the week working in Norwich. It was great to fit back into the old pattern. Thanks to everything being based at Thickthorn, there was none of the stress that made City Road so hard at the end. I got lots done, designed an intranet. I’m even quite proud of my design, although I think later pages in the set may be tending towards link chaos a bit much. Got to tidy that up.

Insane as it may sound, what we are trying to acheive with Arena4 and this new intranet project is to get people to interact as well as they do in social situations like down the pub etc, when they are really relaxed. The key, as we see it, is to drive a core of social features through the usual business tools. Both are as important as each other.

So anyway, that was what I was up to last week. On Saturday we went to the cricket at Chelmsford to see Essex vs Warwickshire. It was an excuse to drink beer and have a picnic really. The picnic was great. Mart made a metric tonne of sandwiches. I made a big tub of cous cous and a batch of pigs in blankets and brought a bunch of crisps and a pork pie. Then Louise and Adam and Charlie turned up with even more sandwiches and all manner of exotic delights, stuffed vine leaves, antipasto, Green & Black’s and much much more. Topped off with beer and good conversation, I think we annoyed the people near quite a bit. It was great fun though, and the weather just made it an incredibly pleasant afternoon.

After we went to Norm’s Nan’s house to chill out. We drank and ate more and collected loads of plums from her trees. She’s in a home now and the plums were ridiculously ripe, they would have gone to waste if we hadn’t turned up and gladly started munching on them. We came away with a fat bag of them. We’re going to make jam. How civilised can you get!

Many many thanks to Norm, Martin, Lisa, Rich, Helen and Mat for letting me stay last week and making the whole thing great fun. I miss you guys already.