the best example of

a case in point. I'd just referred to a line from the "Love song of J Alfred Prufrock" and when my manager looked blank I'd given him a small serve about being an educated brit .. his response was pure value.

Jonathan "When it comes to poetry, no, just no. I know it's a bit philistinic, philosthropic, philosomething".

I've never heard of a better case in point.

Expensive?

I've started to read The Economist which I have to recommend as being one of the better bastions of journalism around (yes I know all you regular readers of it know that already, but many don't!). One thing that got my eye in the latest edition was this article. Basically it confirms what I've been saying for some time, that London is one of the most expensive places in the world, certainly more expensive then the places that typically thought to be more expensive (NY and Tokyo being the main culprits). Coming in 4th it was notable to me that 2 of the cities more expensive then London were Scandanavian (Oslo at one, and Copenhagen at 3rd).

Skiing

Well I'm just back from the Winter park resort in Colarado where I was on my first skiing trip. Skiing (bizare spelling actually, I had to verify that "skiing" was actually the correct way to spell it as while I initially just spelt it like that when you look at the double 'i' in English it's fairly rare.) was a lot of fun. I was spoilt by all accounts as the weather was pretty much perfect for skiing, the first day was bright and sunny, with about 2 feet of snow the night before meaning that I could fall over over and not hurt myself as well as the fact that I had good snow to learn on rather then the infamous ice that the resorts (perisher and thredbo) in Australia are mostly associated. All in all I was relatively happy with my progress. By the end of the week I was able to hit a black run and not fall over, though admittedly I was more comfortable on the blue runs. I was very glad that I had decided to ski rather then snowboard as watching the poor unfortunates trying to learn to snowboard I saw them fall over every couple of minutes, and often hurt themselves. Skiing on the other hand was fairly forgiving, I'd guess I only fell over about 10 times during the entire week, and didn't even come close to hurting anything other then my pride on each occasion. Of course the weather didn't remain perfect, there were a few days where the temperature dropped to -30 centigrade, before wind chill, and where skiing was a little harsher, still as most people that read this blog will know I don't really feel the cold and as such my jacket and tshirt kept me perfectly warm, except my fingers which I've come to the conclusion that after all these years of typing suffer from low blood pressure and consequently get cold, so aside from my whinging about cold hands, i got to sit there and chuckle as Adam and John complained about being cold in general.

The Rockies are a beautiful place, to date they are the most impressive mountain range that I've seen, though to be fair I didn't see much of the alps when I went through them on the train. There was one point where the ski lift we were on in the middle of a blizzard, seemed to be just ascending to heaven as the incline was ~70 degrees and due to the snow you couldn't see very far at all but we were just going straight up it felt like. So while I won't be quitting my job to spend a season skiing in Whistler (/wave john!) I will definitely be organizing another skiing trip!