Sitting here on the balcony of my room, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, typing my diary seems like quite a good way to while away an hour if I am to be in Barcelona anyway. Amazingly today’s meeting finished early (a phenomenon more rare than the Dodo in my experience) and it’s only just after 5pm so I actually have a good amount of time to chill out a bit, do my own ‘stuff’ which really means get a photo, write my diary and phone home. One of the things that is a pain in the arse about being in a different time zone is the difficulties it causes in getting in touch with DM when he’s still in bed as my meetings are starting (while in Europe) – I do though get to speak to him late at night when I get back from whatever restaurant I have been wined and dined in. While in the USA, his mid-afternoon is the only opportunity I get to speak to him before I get ensconced in meeting rooms for the rest of the day and by the time I’m out, he’s tucked up in bed long since.

I read a comic-tragic tale in one of our tabloid rags on the plane on the way here (it’s the only time I ever look at a newspaper of any description) about how one of our best loved but most notoriously petulant and drunk soap opera actresses used to phone her husband thirty times a day when he was away. She was jealously guarding him with the rationale that if she was on the phone to him, then he couldn’t be shagging someone else!!!??? To a mere mortal like me, it’s hard to understand how she could imagine that he would have looked twice at another woman with her on his arm.

With the background of a sorry marriage when my ex would be lining up his conquests while I was away from home, I have to battle really hard and make a supreme effort to trust to my instinct that DM is loyal to me. It takes every ounce of self-control to avoid falling into that trap when I’m in bed through those long hours between ‘bed time’ and the time when most will be waking but I am sleepless. I have learned to face the truth that if it’s going to happen then it will happen however much I try to prevent it. BUT I know that DM is not the same as my ex, that he is all of the things I know him to be, without surprises except of the nice kind. I have to show my trust and loyalty by making sure jealousy doesn’t drive that sort of behaviour in me.

But for now, it’s a glorious day, the sun is shining and there are wind surfers in the sea not three hundred yards away. My hotel is only separated from the beach by a road and I have (once again) been very lucky with my room – it’s on the top floor (so least noisy) and one of only two rooms on the front of the hotel looking at the sea. Fortunately for me, the architect had the forethought to build balconies on these two rooms (though weirdly, he/she didn’t think to put more bedrooms on the front) so as I said, I am sitting overlooking the Mediterranean with a light breeze blowing around me while writing – how cool is that?

I am planning to amble over the road in a few minutes to get my picture, before getting togged up later to go to a restaurant for supper with a dozen or so of my colleagues – the Americans and Canadians I was with last night, plus a lovely French lady called Veronique and some of my colleagues from Britain too.

Strangely, the three ‘Brits’ I will spend the evening with are virtual strangers to me. They work for our International team and our paths rarely cross as they don’t even ‘live’ on the same floor as I do in our offices in Epsom – they are on the floor below me.

For me, one of the nicest things about coming to meetings like this is that I am ‘forced’ to socialise with my colleagues, most of whom are charm itself but when we are in the UK we are all scurrying home to our families rather than loitering in Epsom with colleagues. That means it’s a chance to get to know something about the folks around me over and above their work skills and areas of expertise. It’s always nice to see the human faces of people rather than their business façade or ‘grey suit’ as we describe the business culture.

I am known by them all as the flamboyant one who brings spice and noise to the team so of course I use it as an opportunity to ham it up, which I will be taking full advantage of later.

Now – to get that photo, I’m going to have to cross the road to the beach…….now there’s tough!!!

LATER: I got in the lift and was surprised when its door opened a couple of floors down and one of my colleagues was just climbing in to go out for a walk herself, then we met another group in reception who were just doing a ring round of all our rooms, all with the same plan. So, half a dozen of us strolled along the beach, where I got this shot of the wave breakers that have been put into the sea to ease the relentless bashing of the waves on the shore. Cool!

Last year I was singing the praises of my best mate, Claz.....whose birthday I forgot this year! The year before I was paying tribute to the late, great Geoff Hamilton - the man responsible for my love of gardens.