OK so today, we’ve had our sleeves rolled up and working from 8am until 6pm, though of course it’s not so hard when you get to pop out at lunchtime and photograph grapefruit the size of footballs dangling from branches in front of your face! I am stunned at the size of these things and shocked that the trees don’t keel over or have boughs broken from the weight of them.

We’ve bounced around lots of ideas, worked up a few presentations, brain-stormed, moaned about our web-site (a commonly practiced sport in our team), picked all of the low hanging fruit we can find and generally got our corporate marketing house in order. (Blimey the borg are still within I can feel it!)

In one of my usual ‘can’t wait to get up on stage’ moments, I ended up presenting the findings from our brainstorming session because I opened my big mouth and volunteered. There is this irrepressible instinct in me to be a ‘participator’, not a bystander and it just won’t lie down! I would so much rather be presenting than almost any other aspect of my job. I just love it yet it’s a huge chore to many of my colleagues and it can often ‘break’ the career of young recruits who find they just can’t cope with the pressures of standing up in front of an audience. I must say though, presenting to your peers is the hardest thing to do in as much as they can be your fiercest critics.

What’s bizarre is that the weather has been lovely so far, after promises of rain here when I looked at the weather forecast before leaving home. This part of Italy is just about the nicest place I know of that’s not home. I have just phoned DM, who tells me it’s snowing a blizzard at home, yet when I left on Tuesday, the temperature was 18 deg C! How bizarre is that? The weather truly has gone completely bonkers.

Things had shrunk a lot this time last year!