May 2001

Thursday 3rd May 2001

Yuki and I got married yesterday!

I'm sure by now you think I must be mad, or just plain stupid. That's three weddings in the space of a couple of weeks. Well, it's true this time and we have a certificate to prove it! What happened was, the man at the office on Saturday had not collected all of the right paperwork from us. I went down to the office yesterday, with the necessary documents, one of which I had translated by one of the waitresses in Mad Mulligan's. A couple of hours later I returned to the Minato City office to collect two copies of a very nice wedding certificate. One copy will be translated into English and sent by the British embassy to the UK for registering our marriage there. So we finally married, by law, on the second of May 2001.

Today is another of the Golden Week national holidays, National Day or Constitution Day, and tomorrow will be People's Day, giving us a four day weekend. Golden Week is concluded with Children's Day on Saturday.

Tuesday 8th May 2001

I am currently in Helsinki sipping on a banana smoothie in an internet cafe.

Friday 18th May 2001

Completed a grueling tour of Finland last week. Meetings, meetings, meetings and even having to work on the trains, planes and in my hotel rooms.

The silver lining to the trip was that I could spend a couple of days in the UK at the weekend. To my great disappointment, the cloud grew much larger than its silver lining when Arsenal were robbed of the F.A. Cup on Saturday. I don't blame the referee. Anybody could have the same total lack of vision of such a crucial handball, given some sort of temporary distraction. No idea what could have distracted him so much though, at such an important occasion.

Since arriving home I have joined the gym in the same building as my office. To my surprise, the company already had a membership, so I just have to pay a nominal fee of about five pounds fifty each time I use it. For the record, at day one my stomach had bloomed to a hefty 97 centimeters and my weight was 78.9 kilograms. The diet I tried last year was a failure. Let's see if this works! I thought a before and after picture would be good here, but some people may be eating when they read this.