Another suitcase in another hall

This should be the time of year to gently slow down as Christmas approaches, write Christmas cards, see friends and family and generally reflect on another year gone.

Sadly this year this plan will only be partly achieved. The seeing friends bit is, predictably, ticking along nicely. In fact, a little too enthusiastically perhaps. Friday night went from a quiet night in, through a lovely dinner out with a very good friend, perhaps unwisely to crashing another good friend's Christmas party and then simply inexplicably to Insomnia, where we drank more (as we really needed to by then) and shook our collective booty to cover versions of rock classics cranked out by a Filipino cover band. A quintessential HK experience that, like Christmas, really should come but once a year.

Work wise, something has gone seriously wrong. Tomorrow I fly to KL for a day. This is wrong on so many levels that they aren't worth counting. At the moment the one that's top of my list is that any allure that business travel once had has simply gone. It's dull, stressful and tiring, as well as being climatically disastrous, and I don't care how nice they make the lounges, it's not worth it.

I was remembering fondly today my first business trip, which I got seriously over excited about. Somewhat embarrassingly, with hindsight, it was a trip from London to Edinburgh. I got to travel business class and stay in what i thought was going to be a nice hotel. How wrong I was. I began to realise how unglamorous work travel was shortly after checking in. the hotel was in a grotty part of town, conveniently located next to the bus station. The rooms were cramped, chintzy and smelt of smoke. The other guests seemed to be mainly American tourists.

This in itself wasn't great. However, the final nail in the coffin was when a piper, complete with full Highland regalia, fired up right underneath my window. He proceeded to blast out Highland toons, about a tone flat, for the next hour. Simply dreadful. I later found out that the woman in charge of booking the trips was receiving kick backs from the hotel management for putting us all up there, and was duly sacked.

The KL trip will be a marked improvement on that, with a fighting chance of an upgrade and the hotel will certainly be better. But, bah humbug, NOT the way to relax into the festive season.....