Sorry about that. I vanished for a while - a crushingly busy period at work combined with a knockout bout of sinusitis followed by a cold to render me incommunicado for a week or so. Let me tell you, there’s nothing fun whatsoever about sinus cavities swollen to the point that they are impinging on the nerves in your back teeth. Yeeesh.

And then, a week offline and outdoors in Highland Perthshire. A long-overdue holiday. We ran away to a cottage in a remote glen not too far from Loch Tay, which enabled us to indulge in some gentle exploring (bimbling by car, by train, and on foot) , some delicious dining (including super-fresh fish, local steak, haggis with a pepper sauce and a divine bacon butty on a cold railway platform), some happy drinking (Oh, how I miss Bellhaven 80/- or Best down south…and there was a lot of tea, too!) and some serious snapping, the results of which are gradually emerging into this flickr set.

And to top all of that off, we stopped off in Leeds on the way home for a night in a swanky hotel and a lovely evening with friends exploring the city’s eateries and pubs. It’s changed a lot since I lived and worked there (in, er…1992/3) and is a place I would like to return to at some point for a proper poke around.

Anyway, this week I’m back at work, though speaking at a bunch of conferences and attending associated nibbles and events. I’ve got a ton of stuff I want to write about - including structural holes, the triumph of tinkering, linguistic malapropisms and what I overheard in a changing room the other day….but it will all have to wait, I’m afraid, because right now there’s a rather grumpy cat winding around my legs and complaining that she hasn’t quite caught up on missed attention yet. Such is the burden of responsibility…