Back at work after what seemed like a long weekend, it was different. It was different because I was going to work in a different office in a different country with a different view of how I should be conducting my role. I also had a different wake up time.

Yes, I was awake at “yuck o’clock” in the morning so I could take my girlfriend to the airport, enabling her to get to work for the second half of her working day. I don’t much like this time. I would much rather have had a lie-in, with the lady in question of course, and forgotten all about the whole going to work, going home thing. But no.

We got the concierge to order a taxi for us and were amused when the man at the reception desk summoned me to ask why I was leaving for the airport with my girlfriend and a suitcase when I had clearly not paid them and was also booked for a longer stay. A few words of “I’m staying, but she’s not” seemed to relax him somewhat. Ah the misunderstandings.

Anyway, with her on a flight, I took a taxi to the office and got an early start on the day. In fact, the start was so early that I went to a nearby coffee house/smoking room/bar (not sure what exactly) and drank tiny cappuccinos, costing 170HUF (or about 50p) while I wrote notes on a workshop I planned for the following day, and got my mind woken up.

Then into the office. The day was not too long, sped up by long conversations where I tried to turn command into introspection and understand what a particular member of my team was asking from me, rather than oppose some of his views on the basis that they did not look like mine. This proved to be a good combination of learning and peacemaking. I have learned a lot.

In the evening, I got a quick dinner at a Turkish café, where they put the food from a hot-plate into a microwave and managed, somehow to make it colder (I think their plate was spinning the wrong way around). I lacked sufficient language skills to complain, my only Hungarian being the words for “thank you”, “cheers”, “street”, “bridge”, “island” and “stapler”. I ate it anyway.

Then back to the hotel, which involved a very long walk across a very dark Island, with the sense that I might be being followed by bandits out to get the phone I was using to talk to my girlfriend along the route. There’s nothing like the paranoia regarding marauders to make you speed up and get more exercise on a nice healthy evening stroll.

I got to my room, got a shower, and then settled down to watch Doctor Who DVD number one – a classic episode called “The Three Doctors” in which Doctor Whos 1 – 3 are united to tackle a common enemy – “Omega”. This is a fun episode indeed, and showed the adult me how enjoyable Patrick Troughton was in the role. I followed this up with the episode “The Five Doctors”, which is also a bit of fun, though flawed in a number of ways and a bit of a cheekily named episode, since one of the five – Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor Who – doesn’t truly appear in the story. Still, it romped along, as such things do, and I managed to unite some of my childhood memory of originally watching it in 1983 with the present tense of my 35 year old self actually watching it in 2009.

I love the fact that I was watching a DVD that was released as the 25 year anniversary of an episode that was, itself, part of the 20th anniversary of a programme. That’s a whole load of anniversaries.

I got to sleep late. DVD watching makes the time pass.