Jamie Oliver, eat your heart out. I think we must have the poshest canteen in the country. Lunch today was a starter of frogs’ legs followed by a main course of seared salmon, green peppercorn sauce, wilted leaves and sauteed new potatoes.

Not your typical school dinner!

My new employer is a big sponsor of the arts, and is currently sponsoring a Rodin exhibit at one of the London galleries that opens next week. By way of promoting it, they’ve commissioned a number of performance artists to interpret some of his pieces. These guys stood in our lobby, statue-still, for the better part of four hours.

Nearly statue still. One of them stuck his tongue out at me.

Way, way too creepy for 9am, if you ask me.

One of the reasons I wanted the new 35mm lens is that it captures the world very much as the human eye sees it, making it a great “walk-around” lens. To that end, I thought I’d include pictures of “us as we are.”

Jerome, surgically attached to his Blackberry

Matthew, pulling faces as usual

Aude, on the telephone

Daisy, cleaning her arse

Despite a late start, I managed to turn up to my birthday party in the end. It was fantastic, loads of food and great presents.

One of my presents was a lovely new 35mm lens for my camera, enabling me to take lots of great pictures. As you can see from the photograph above, the camera is no longer the weak link in the equation. (Aude will be receiving lessons in “how to use autofocus” shortly. In the meantime, please enjoy this blurry blob with a sharp brick wall in the background!)

It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Saturday was a warm, sunny day and the last little bit of the Indian summer that we seem to be having over here. Since I hadn’t had the Corvette out for a while, I thought I’d take the chance to take it out for a quick spin and give it a bit of a wash.

I made it as far as the petrol station about 8 miles from us before the ignition system on the car decided to give up the ghost – ironic as the previous owner had replaced the vintage mechanical ignition system with a modern electronic one to avoid problems like these!

There was a ‘modified car’ show in the area. All of which were breaking down left, right and centre. Which meant that I had to wait nearly six hours for a tow truck to appear.

No one wants to see their Corvette like this!

Which meant that I ended up being late for my own birthday party. My 31st year isn’t off to a stellar start!

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…