Things didn’t start well when I realised after we left the garage that having given them my mobile phone number, I had left both my phones in the car.

We had promised to take a barbecued burger back for Gill at the garage when we returned. So in true Top Gear style we figured that to keep the burger warm we could wrap it in foil and place it on the engine for the journey. Strangely it turns out this was not exactly the best idea in the world. Halfway there we could smell it cooking. On arrival it was gone! It had fallen through and was sat on the undertray beside the exhaust flexi. However, we did learn that the roof bows make handy tongs for fishing out barbecued food.

On a less geeky note, planning for the annual Seloc Winter Warmer run is well under way now. MSA approval has been provided, the cafe down at Hayling Island has been warned they will be swamped, RLO’s have been sent the route maps for their approval and around 70 people have signed up. All that remains is to sort everyone into groups and pray the weather isn’t too bad for the day. Roll on 6th January!

‘They Might Be Giants’ sang ‘Istanbul not Constantinople’ but I guess they must have been staying in a different area of the city to where I stayed. In this case Istanbul was most definitely Constantinople. Every direction you turned there was another historic building, from the Blue Mosque to the Topkapi Palace and the Basilica Cistern. Each of which still has such a sense of grandeur and sheer opulence, I imagine that all those centuries go, they must have been mind-blowing.

Four fully packed days in Istanbul and I only managed to see a small amount of the Sultanahmet, Seragio Point and Bazaar Quarter.There is so much to see, that four days just doesn’t do it justice. This is definitely a place to go back to for further exploration.
Photos can be viewed in my Flickr account here

Work has pretty much kept me on my toes with some major changes happening alomost from the time I arrived there. We’ve had a split with our sister company resulting in half the network infrastructure needing replacing, installation of a Sharepoint server, firewall/AV/anti-spam replaced, restructuring of Active Directory and not to mention the migration to a new email server. All this on top of the usual maintenance of the network and user support. I had also taken control of the IT systems in our second office in Dublin.