Nul Points

We had a large Zoom call this morning, linking colleagues from around our regional programme. Philine, top right, who is our resident intranet / tech / Microsoft guru and who was sporting one of those ethereal call backdrops people are now using, said it felt like the Eurovision Song Contest when she was asking people for inputs. She was the Terry Wogan of our call, except she is more German than Northern Irish.

Right on cue, our colleague Toupou in Guinea, piped up with a ‘bonjour....’

Gugs is getting me reinstated onto her rapid food education programme. She asked me to look out for kefir, which I’d never heard of, and which I surprisingly honed in on in the chiller cabinet betwixt the Frijj milkshakes and Starbucks caramel iced lattes. When she was describing it, what sprung to mind was the unforgettably hideous sampling of kumis, fermented mare’s milk, on a hillside in Kyrgyzstan. I will need to be convinced about kefir.

The daily escape from the house is proving so good for the mind that even though I was drenched and cold today, it was still worth it. The weather was the grimmest of the grim. One of those days on which you could plop someone in the country from a foreign land and ask them to state the month in which they find themselves. It could count as a miserable day in any month of any season, such is the ability of the British weather to take a turn for the worse.