It's been the longest gap in this blog since I started it ten years ago. Yes - I'm still 'here' and we're very much all OK and around - indeed busy.

After Christmas and the new year, we have become very used to returning to work to a great swathe of unbooked hotel rooms, and a training diary that's more green (vacant) than any of the other colours through to red. This year wasn't all that different - except that there was marginally less green floating around ... but then things started to fill in quickly. I've presented Learning to program in Ruby, Ruby Programming, Introduction to Rails, private special courses "Page application Layer part 1" and "Page Application Layer part 2" which cover a PHP Framework that one of clients uses (see our public PHP courses [here]. I've travelled to Bristol, to Manchester and to London - and coming up before the end of January I've got a PHP Techniques course next week, as well as a private day looking at CodeIgniter for one company. Then private courses in Liverpool, Preston and Warrington and a day covering the Object Oriented elements of Perl - from Perl for larger projects on 31st ...

In February, we have public courses on Tomcat deployment, C and C++ and Python as well as private courses - a few gaps of 1 or 2 days remain - please ask. And then in early March more private training and a set of public Perl courses. Before we know it, it will be Easter.

"No-one travels in January". Not quite right - for sure, hotel bookings for business guests were down at the start of the month, and weekends are quiet. Yet it was only a handful of years ago that Well House Manor was closed at weekends in winter, but this year we already have bookings for 4 our of the five coming weekends. Staff holidays (a good time for vacations as far as we are concerned) have coincided with shift pattern changes that were generally requested to help freshen up and give people a change, and rebalance extra shifts to busy days. And one of our team - Poppy on her gap year - has decided to widen her experience by working for a different employer for a while, and to see some of the world too. We wish her well - it's a good move to have that wider breadth of background going into "Uni".

"No-one travels in January". And yet this is the time at which we're looking to tell people about the increased TransWilts train services, and get people using those trains - "we" being the TransWilts Community Rail Partnership, which is the train operators, local council and community working together, and my role being "Press and Pubclity Officer". So far, so good - encouraging use, but my goodness what a wide range of enquiries and little teething issues com cup, and how challenging it cane to get them all answered / sorted. Great fun (should I say that), but it all takes time.
(written 2014-01-18, updated 2014-01-19)

 

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