Over the last two months I have travelled over 1000 miles for work, from Glasgow to Slough to Leeds and London several times. I have started staying in Marriott hotels enough to warrant a loyalty card and already have nearly enough points for free night!
Travelling for work is hard, it means early mornings, late nights and a lot of eating alone. I don’t think I will ever really get used to booking a table for one. Although it’s a tough life and I am glad I only have to spend a day or so a week on average away from Leeds I am starting to enjoy certain aspects of it. The variety of the work is something I really love, along with meeting all sorts of characters. It is amazing to think that I spend a lot of time chatting to strangers in the hotel bar or at service stations whilst I am refuelling on relentless.
I am starting to look at moving on from my current job as I want to progress my career, but I am starting to think that I don’t want to move somewhere where I lose the opportunity to travel and experience the things I have experienced over the last few months.
I mean, as I write this I am chatting to a really interesting guy that works in real estate. he is currently setting up a deal to buy a warehouse and turn it into a contemporary opera space in East London.
The Fire have had a tough couple of months, failing to win in May and struggling in June as well. The team played in the Sister Cities Cup,a friendly tournament between Chicago Fire, Red Star Belgrade, Legia Warsaw and Paris St. Germain. Fire lost in the semi-final to PSG and then lost the 3rd place play-off against Legia Warsaw. Belgrade went on to win 7-6 on penalties in the final. The team also failed to win in the MLS during May and suffered a 1-0 defeat to AC Milan in a friendly.
The team broke its bad run by beating New England Revolution 1-0 on the 27th June. Chicago have only lost two of their games this season but have been guilty of drawing too many (six in total now).
Team USA didn’t take any Chicago players to South Africa for the World Cup so hopefully the team will benefit from having a full squad to choose from for the rest of July with some big games coming up, including the start of the SupaLiga.
Quite a lot of stuff has been happening over the last six weeks or so, I gave a presentation at Enquiry 2010, I moved in with Chris and George and Liz left me.
I will deal with the Liz situation first as it is the hardest one for me to write about and I am hoping that writing the second two bits will cheer me back up. About six weeks ago now Liz told me that she had had enough of being in a relationship and that she wanted to experience some of her life as a single woman so that she could really develop herself and come to terms with where she wants to be in life. I was gutted when she started to explain this to me as these ‘breaks’ are almost always permanent. The more she explained herself though, the more I came to understand where she was coming from. Liz has not been single since she was 17 and 7 years of solid back to back relationships is pretty intense. The way she argued her corner was something I respected too. She really sold the idea to me, that this was a key part i her growing as a person and that it was the right thing to do for me to let her go. In the back of my mind I thought that after a suitable length of time we would be able to rekindle the romance and get back together, but I was wrong. So very wrong.
We split up on a Sunday and by the following Saturday she was shacked up with another guy – John-George Salter (someone I considered a good friend until all this kicked off). After everything Liz had said to me, she had left me for another man. Apparently this had been obvious to everyone but me so i guess I didn’t know Liz as well as I thought. Her speech to me the week or so earlier had been a lie. The worst thing about all this? Well, Liz and John might have got together so quickly after we split up but they didn’t tell me about it for another three weeks!
I could probably go on spouting venom and vitriol about the situation – which has really thrown me off course if I am honest – but neither Liz or John or worth it. They are both small people with small minds and no grace, dignity or honour. I shall leave that at that.
The second major event over the last few weeks was Enquiry 2010, a two day conference in Birmingham run by the Chris Worfolk Foundation. I spoke on the need to reinvent the branding and marketing strategies of the atheist and humanist movements to better suit today’s marketplace. I will post the text of my speech soon.
The final big thing was moving house. Obviously I needed a new place after Liz moved in with John. Initially, I looked at Morley as it is close to work, relatively cheap and totally away from memories of Liz. However, as time ran out I still hadn’t found anywhere suitable Chris made me a offer I couldn’t refuse. He offered me the box room in his flat in the city centre. For many reasons I felt this was a great choice. First up, I get to live with Chris and George, which is going to be fun! Next was cost, it will work out really cheap to live with two other people. Finally, it means I am not on my own. I have a history of not dealing with personal issues particularly well and I think the inbuilt support network of flatmates will really help offset my traditional head in the sand approach to my own issues.
despite the rain and floods!! 
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