I’ve just returned from a week-long residential training course, a kind of ‘Finance 101’ designed to teach me all about the services that my new company sells. It’s also designed as a way to get to know some of my colleagues.

As courses go, it’s one of the best organised, best run courses I’ve ever been on. It was interactive, incorporated plenty of role-play (including quite a few of my colleagues cross-dressing, which is an image that will stick with me for a long, long time). It was tough work, though – quite a few of my colleagues come from an industry background, not a consulting one, and we spent as much time learning the ropes about how to work with one another as we did actually learning about the various service lines.

Somehow, though, someone found out that it was my birthday – and arranged for a cake on the final night of the course. Given the international group on the training course, they sang me happy birthday in twelve different languages, each rendition accompanied by a toast.

It turns out that a hangover transcends translation. We all felt rough the following morning.

At the end of the week I returned home to a lovely birthday dinner and presents from Aude. I was so shattered from the week that I headed straight to bed…