Sunny afternoon

Between 1991, when I went freelance, until 2004, when I started Meantime, I reckon I had eleven different contracts of varying lengths for a number of companies, including Barclays, BT, and Asda.

And although it's not something I ever expected to be interested in, over the years I came to realise that the overall attitude of the people on the different projects varied quite wildly. I mean, take a project of say twenty or thirty people, and you might expect the group to tend towards some kind of mean culture but that simply wasn't the case. And to a large part I put that down to the culture of the organisation, which I became increasingly interested in.

In this respect, the worst company I ever worked for was BT and probably the best was the Royal Bank of Scotland. In fact, while I was working there, in Edinburgh, I was asked to spend two days a week in London, running the equivalent team at NatWest (who were part of the same group).

And that was when that difference in working culture was most starkly demonstrated to me: RBS, everyone up for it and on the balls of their feet; NatWest, everything seems to be too much trouble. (Not unrelated, I don't think I was too popular at NatWest but that's a story for another Blip.)

I mention this, today, because there's an equally significant contrast between the two classes I've been in at college. Now this I can't put down to company culture, just the curious difference between two random groups of people. Well, not quite random; we all have an interest in electronic music production in common.

But whereas the first group was lively, fun, and interesting, the current one lacks a certain oomph. Not that they aren't nice people, there's just no real get up and go at  the group level. So I wasn't particularly surprised when Yoss (the tutor) rang me at ten to twelve today to say that class had been cancelled. Since, I'd just bought us both a coffee, he came down to join me, and then we decided to go to the pub for a pint.

But then I found myself with an unexpected free afternoon. Happily, the Minx was taking her mum out for a Mothers' Day lunch, and I was invited across to join them, so we had a very enjoyable lunch at Salvi's in the Northern Quarter before taking a mooch around town.

It was such glorious weather that we ended up sitting outside Foodwell in Spinningfields, which was terribly over-priced (and the beer was warm!) but that was mitigated by the Minx's company. And after that we finished off at our old favourite, Lo Scoglio, which I was delighted to see was absolutely packed.