Have just gotten back from a week-long professional development course in Cambridge where I behaved, I'm proud to say, very badly, and had rather a lot of fun.
The past few holidays I have had were very frenetic and I returned to work feeling more stressed than when I had left. Mostly this is because trips have been spent flying 10 hours home, and then trying to see as many friends and family as possible in a ridiculous amount of time. I barely have time to get over jet lag, let alone take a breath, when I'm scheduling 5 "meetings" a day, and inevitably I offend someone when I don't get around to them. If I haven't been flying home, I have had people coming here to London, where I play tour guide, setting itineraries, providing commentary, and generally fretting that people have a good time. In short, I have been in desperate need of some "me" time, haven't had any, and didn't see any on the horizon.
I reluctantly packed up my things last Monday to head to this course. It wasn't that I didn't want to go-a week out of the office is, after all, a week out of the office-but I didn't have the energy to expend the extra effort of packing a bag and getting on a train. Somehow, however, I managed to get myself to Liverpool Street for the 7:28 am train, and off I went to Cambridge.
I emerged from the train station and looked around for a taxi to take me to the college where my course was taking place. "You look like you're on holiday," remarked a driver as I approached the taxi rank. I sighed. "I wish," I said.
But from the minute I arrived at the campus of the college, with rolling expanses of green lawns, impeccably maintained gravel walks, and yellow stone buildings, I DID feel like I was on holiday. Even when the course organisers loaded me down with a huge textbook and binder of materials to study for the week, I wasn't phased. It was so tranquil and peaceful. "Perfect," I thought. "I'll go to bed early every night, and return to London refreshed and ready for more work. It'll be like a spa. I'll run every morning early, and go to bed as soon as it gets dark." I would be professional, reading a chapter of my text each night before bed and making notes of questions to ask in the next day's session.
Oh, if only it had turned out to be so. However, I forgot to keep in mind that I was on a course full of other lawyers. Lawyers like to do two things when gathered together: 1) talk over each other, and 2) drink. And, although it took some time for us to warm up, warily eyeing each other from our conference tables, by the end of the first night's welcome drinks, we had all made fast friends and we were well stuck into the college's "own label" merlot and chardonnay by 6 p.m. each night.
On the first evening we had a quiz night. I bonded with two very tall boys from a rival firm as we swept to first place-okay, tied for first place-okay, came second after we lost the tie-breaking round, and we commiserated over our near-win and heartbreaking loss at a local pub (I had unfortunately lost us the tie-breaker round by over-estimating the time it took the first Eurostar train to travel from Paris to London by 17 minutes or so). Using their on-board PPS (pub positioning system), the rest of the lawyers on the course seemed to find us, and the pub became our "home base" every night after the day's educational events had ended. So, there were no early evenings, really. And, by consequence, no early morning runs either, unless you count the frantic hurry to make it to the college's dining hall in time for breakfast each morning. I felt like I was 17 again.
By our last night in Cambridge, we had visited a number of the city's finest drinking establishments, rented punting boats and travelled lazily down river in the August heat, taken walking tours of the other colleges, formed gossipy cliques, and, oh yes, managed to attend a few lectures...
