The rest of the UK trip

After all the excitement of John's party and the relief that it had gone well I was able to fully relax and enjoy the rest of our trip to the UK. On Tuesday I had to go to the final Investors in People board meeting since, now that it is being taken over by the UK Council for Education and Skills it will no longer be a Non Departmental Public Body which means it has no need of Board Members like myself. It was really sad to say goodbye to fellow board members and IIP staff who I have been working with for over 4 years. Many staff are not transferring to UKCES though some have taken the opportunity to go and do something completely different - Gary is going to do a Masters and train to be a social worker so I can't think of a more worthwhile thing to do in a redundancy situation. I'm sure the standard will live on, it is the only public sector super brand after all, but it won't feel the same without its own special company and a group of people who were so very passionate about it. Some of the board members still have a lot of work to do to ensure that everything gets transferred properly but I haven't been involved in this with being so far away so it was the last time for me. I hope I will have the chance to make a similar contribution in the future though whilst I'm in Abu Dhabi I'm not really in the best position to offer my skills right now.
John also spent time carrying out his 'civic' duties by chairing and attending meetings at the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Chemical Engineers so we made the best contributions we could to the UK in the short time we were there.
I was able to call in at the London office of Wordsearch and thank the team personally who had made such a lovely job of designing and producing John's book.
We treated ourselves to a lovely dinner at the OXO tower before leaving London and enjoyed a fabulous meal with the great view of the London skyline. The only beef I have with this place is the tables are just a little bit close together so you tend to find out rather more about your neighbours than you really want to! We had an air stewardess on a first date and a couple who preferred to go home rather than spend the night together because they couldn't sleep. Pretty intimate stuff which made me very cautious about what we were talking about!
We headed to Manchester on the Wednesday where we managed to get various crucial jobs done and visited my aunty Brenda and persuaded her to act as our proxy vote for the upcoming general election. We bought a super new HP notebook to replace the Dell, killed by a virus so we have all the necessary connections at home and I can hopefully start loading some new tracks onto the iPod again. We enjoyed several wonderful meals out - lunch at The Bull near Skipton with Mum, Selfridges and Cafe Rouge on top of the two Pizza Expresses last week so we fitted in all the old favourites. It's one of the thing we miss in Abu Dhabi is being able to wander out for a relatively inexpensive lunch with a nice glass of wine! We also went back to Rosso (I know it's the wrong team but as an Italian restaurant it's lovely!) When someone from Man City opens a restaurant in town I promise to go there as well. We walked in and found half of the old recruitment advertising sorority having dinner so it was good to say hello - though John pointed out that none of us could really be described as 'girls' any more. But then I've know Michelle, Nicola and some of the others for at least 20 years so we were girls once!
Sunday we had to head back to Abu Dhabi and I'm afraid it was with a bit of heavy heart as we'd had such a lovely time in the UK. The Manchester apartment is pretty small compared with Abu Dhabi but it's still lovely and the weather wasn't too cold. Whilst we are there spring arrived and the flowers on the Princess Parkway changed from crocuses to daffodils in less than a week.
I know they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder but I think I was always pretty fond of Manchester and loved living in our apartment in the city. However, we enjoyed a lovely business class flight back with all the trimmings so it gave us a suitable send off for the end of the holiday and once back we soon got into the swing of things. For a little while we have to get used to living in two places at once and feeling torn between two lives and they do say that things get easier as you get used to it!