Maximilian Pegasus

Do I want to go for a short break at the Marriott’s Club Son Antem? Possibly not. It has to be a golf club of some sort if Katherine’s suggesting it and Google verifies my presumption. I suppose I could consider it as a trade off against Chocolate Week at Fortnum’s.

Success is a double-edged sword. If one more person congratulates me about that Wedgewood exhibition I may have to do something dramatic, like lock myself in my office with all the Krispie Kreme boxes so that I can ritually toss them out of the window. We’ve had far too many boxes of doughnuts arrive in the last week. Croquet tells me he has no idea where they’re coming from but he signs for them anyway. I suspect that he’s celebrating the extension of said exhibition. It’s running till August next year. Next year. Even I don’t think Wedgewood’s that interesting. Should probably arrange for parents, parents-in-law, Katherine & entourage, associates and just about everybody to attend anyway.

Tesco’s Danish Cinnamon Whirl for breakfast doesn’t even begin to make up for the poor location of this hotel. I can see what they were trying to do with the skyscraper idea, I can even see why they thought this was a fabulous location to place said skyscraper but that still doesn’t detract from the fact that they’ve forced a skyscraper into the landscape of one side of Birmingham city centre where it’s surrounded by 19th century industrial architecture, 1960s architecture and Chinese-style ornamentation. Stylistically it’s completely out of place and when I look at the interior I’m really not all that sure what they were trying to achieve. My ‘presidential suite’ has a kitchenette after all.

I know that scones and clotted cream aren’t a suitable dinner but I haven’t had proper Cornish clotted cream in months or real scones. They don’t seem to make real scones in America and what they do call scones aren’t much like the real ones. I don’t care if it’s undignified or that Croquet walked in on me licking clotted cream off my fingers, though he did turn an interesting shade of scarlet now I think about it.

Why am I never in the UK for occasions like this? More importantly, why doesn’t New York grant me random bouts of Egyptology?

Well, last night was fun but I can’t say that I fancy sleeping on my own couch again or waking up to the dulcet tones of Croquet snoring. Unless that’s Anastasia or Petri or one of the others. It was a strategic meeting after all and what one always needs to help that sort of thing along is pizza and alcohol. Perhaps there was a little too much alcohol. Not that that explains why I ended up on the couch while Croquet managed to make it to the bedroom. He is in the bedroom after all which really speaks volumes about the magnitude of his snores.
I do also suspect that I’m still drunk. And when I’m drunk I’ve an alarming tendency to stumble on things like this. If you manage to solve the solution to the Ramisis, it reveals cryptic riddles and enigmatic clues leading to thousands of pounds worth of silver and gold hidden in pyramids around the world, indeed. You too can raid the Pharaoh’s tomb. Honestly, I know marketing is a dirty business and sales even worse but this is really stretching things surely.

This may well contradict this sort of affair but it still suggests that there’s growing interest in just who owns what and how they came to acquire it. The how of that procurement being the more pertinent detail.

Croquet is right; I could go to the gym but I’m not sure I want to. Not unless it has a very slow treadmill anyway.

On May Day, a day of organized disorganisation, fast food snubbing or local elections dependent upon preference, I feel like I should share a tale. So while I sit in traffic with my laptop and occasionally attempt to catch Croquet singing along to Sarah Brightman, in lieu of not being able to lower the partition glass fast enough to actually catch him out I’m going to instead tell a rather curious story.


( Once upon a time... )

It’s not everyday that I wake up to a voicemail that begins “Max, my son, you must do something!” and then proceeds to inform me that my father has bought himself a water pipe, my mother has just fallen asleep but would agree that indeed I ought to do something, mint molasses compliment something else my parents have been smoking and that Frau Hirschboeck made some lovely cookies and if I’d had the good sense to be in England I might have had some. And of course returning the call proves fruitless which leaves me to suspect that my parents are busy politely and civilly expressing some civil disobedience today.

Not quite being of their measure as yet I suppose I’ll just have to go back to eating prawn cocktail with a caviar spoon while I sort out some documents and maybe later smoking a cigar. I have a conference call set up for later anyway and seeing as making use of a Russian interpreter was precarious enough last time, I can’t imagine that it would be in my best interest to be civilly disobedient when there are at least five interpreters involved in today’s proceedings.