I’ve certainly got value for money out of today. I was up early enough to go to the gym, but had letters to write about the people who should have been publishing my book but instead have gone into liquidation, and mortgage-moving things to arrange, so instead made tea, burnt toast and sat down at the keyboard.

Fortunately, my first meeting was off-site, at half ten, so I could get a late train without any feeling of guilt and still be early. It was a product launch. Several, in fact, all from one company, with fairly short ‘keep it secret’ agreement, which was a nice change. Cool products, from the look of things, which I’m keen to try out.

It was in the screening room at One Aldwych, one of my favourite London hotels. They have fantastic chocolatey orange biscuits.

Will was there, and so as I didn’t have time for lunch, we took twenty minutes to sit outside in the sun on the Strand when it was all over and chat over tall lattes. It was very pleasant. Warm enough to be without coats, and bright enough for sun glasses.

I got back to the office and went straight into another meeting, then from that into yet another. Very frustrating, as I’m in the middle of testing some digital cameras and I wanted to get out in the sun to take photos.

By the time I got out, it was four, but the sun was still bright and warm. I scooted first to Soho Square, to take pictures of the tulips to test the reds and yellows, then worked my way slowly back through Covent Garden to the river. By now I was glad I’d left my coat at the office.

I crossed to the South Bank to take a look at the Canon exhibition in the windows of the Imax. As we’re interviewing one of the people behind it on the show, I thought it would be good to see it, as well as making a suitable test subject, being difficult for the cameras to handle because it was all behind glass.

As it happened, though, it was no good. There were too many reflections, and as the pavements swoop down below the road in that area you have to do a lot of walking if you want to get a good shot. I gave up and headed towards the Oxo Tower and, eventually, the Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern instead.

The Bridge is amazing. You don’t get any idea of how beautiful it is when you see pictures, but if you stand outside the front of the Tate, another extraordinary space, being an almost empty power station, you can immediately understand what they were talking about when they said it would be like a beam of light across the Thames. It really is fantastically thin, and it looks incredibly fragile, especially with just two towers to support it.

By now it had gone six, though, and I was playing hide and seek with the sun behind the clouds, so I followed the river towards Blackfriars in search of a tube. I didn’t find one, but I did meet Salmon, a guy selling the Big Issue in an underpass.

I stopped and chatted to him and he asked me what I did for a living. ‘Journalist,’ I said. He asked me what kind and I told him I wrote about technology. ‘Aah,’ he said. ‘Right. So, tell me. What do you think about the Unabomber? He hated technology.’

And there began a ten minute conversation on the in-built obsolescence of modern machinery, all the time observed by his dog (’don’t stroke her - she snaps’) Jenna. He asked me to look at his web site and I promised I would, so he wrote the address on the back of the issue I’d just bought.

I arrived back at the office just before seven, with feet that ached so much they felt like they might drop off. Mark and Leo were waiting to go to the Beattie Media party at Bar Red, so I packed the cameras back into the cupboard, locked them up for the night and we headed out.

It was fairly empty when we arrived, but it soon filled up, and within half an hour the downstairs room was full of familiar faces. Beattie had raided its games cupboard and brought along Hungry Hippos, Kerplunk, Connect Four and Guess Who. They had Buckaroo, but it had lost its rubber band - an essential component for providing the ‘buck’.

I was fairly lousy at them all. At one point, my Kerplunk tray had so many marbles in it it started to overflow, and Nat beat me at Connect Four every time. It was like playing with Dan, who is pretty much invincible.

I’d forgotten how time consuming Kerplunk it. You have to thread long cocktail sticks through holes in a tall clear tube to support a handful of marbles, then pull them out without letting the marbles drop into your tray at the bottom of the tube. It’s a bit like Mouse Trap, though, where you spent half an hour setting it up, all for it to be over within five minutes.

Still, we had fun, and it was exactly what I needed after a busy day.

One of the bar staff serving the food pointed to the plate of half-eaten food on our table and asked if it was dead. She didn’t spot the irony, even when I explained it.

For some inexplicable reason I later found myself wondering whether I’d feel too guilty to eat the food if Oxfam ever threw a party to relaunch its website.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 16th, 2002 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.