The Curse of the Garden Furniture
11 May

April was the loveliest of months.

It was dry, it was warm and it was sunny.

So, as soon as the garden furniture came out, you can be sure that the rain came down.

This has been great for our gardens. The skimmia, out front, is particularly good this year and looks as though it is about to get large enough to benefit from sunshine coming over the top of the wall as well as round the side.

Farmers around here will be welcoming the rain as well as the water utility companies. In East Anglia and the South, however, there remains concern as water levels continue to drop and the rain gets turned away from those areas. Let's wait for produce prices to rise in the summer.

Ross and I watched and loved New York I Love You. It is another portmanteau film in the Valentine's Day vein. Its theme is also love but it is a little more acerbic in its view of the world - well, I guess it's East Coast whilst the other is definitely West Coast.

There's another cast to die for including Andy Garcia, Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman, Orlando Bloom, Christina Ricci, Ethan Hawke, James Caan, Julie Christie, John Hurt, Shia LaBeouf, Carlos Acosta (yes, the dancer Carlos Acosta), Robin Wright Penn, Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman and those are just the ones whose names I happen to recognise.

I could certainly watch this film another time.

One of the good things about having a friend like Roland is that he gets me invites to events that I wouldn't otherwise be able to attent. Last year, he got me into a rehearsal for Mahler's Symphony No3. On Friday evening, he got me into the RLPO season launch.

There was a lot of rabbit and marketing talk. Vasily Petrenko joined us briefly from Madrid by live Internet link-up. And then it was out and into the foyers in order to pick up brochures. There was free champagne too.

Well, I knew that I would want to attend all of the remaining Paul Lewis Schubert recitals after the first and second in the series. So that was £100 committed before I started. I also knew that I would want to attend Vasily Petrenko's performance of Mahler's Symphony No9 - a work which I have loved for many years now. So, that was the start of my deliberations. There was free champagne too.

Beethoven's Missa Solemnis also caught my eye but that clashes with Siegfried at FACT and so the opera wins out. Bach's St Matthew Passion next Easter is also a must and Rossi and I would certainly like to go to the concert performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeoman of the Guard. There was free champagne too.

Then there was a nice array of Sunday concerts which my Rossi and I might well attend. Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No1 coupled with Beethoven's Symphony No3 Eroica sounds good. Shostakovich's Symphony No7 Leningrad is a must. I'd like to hear Vasily Petrenko's account of Beethoven's Symphony No4 as his other Beethoven has been very good. There was free champagne too.

There were a couple of other orchestral concerts that I may take in depending on energies and funds. But, luckily, there wasn't a lot of must see concerts. I was momentarily caught by the idea of the complete cycle of Beethoven String Quartets but I honestly don't need that depth of commitment just this moment. And, by god, that champagne is just slipping down nicely.

We also met Nigel there. He was drinking lots of champagne too. We chatted about his change of jobs and I explained about my major change coming up. Nigel and I were lovers over 25 years ago. Although there was a long period when we lost touch, he still knows me quite well. Having heard my story, he looked me up and down and said "Do you know, of all the people I know, if anyone can make something like that happen, then it's you." I'm fairly certain that that was meant as a compliment.

I also took delight in telling Nigel that I had recently met Mr Petrenko in my workplace.

We are a test centre for Life in the UK the citizenship test for those non-UK citizens who wish to reside and work in the UK. As a consequence, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 9:30, 12:30 and 15:30 we run regular test sessions.

Many, many people come through our doors as a consequence. We have had at least one Everton footballer.

So, there I was walking down the corridor when this tall, blond, gorgeous man came striding towards me. I did a real classic double-take. For it was Mr Petrenko come to take his citizenship test. I was beside myself with excitement that he was on the premises.

None of my colleagues had any inkling as to who he was. And it is a measure of the man that their impression was of someone who was courteous and gentle rather than someone with a world-wide profile in his own sphere. I tip my hat to his music making but I also now tip my hat to him as a man as well.

The following night was an RLPO concert. Schumann's Genoveva Overture got us under way and Brahms' Violin Concerto followed. Isabelle Faust made the best possible case for the work but I still don't get it. Some works just never speak to you and this is one of those for me.

After the interval came the reason for my visit, Nielsen's Symphony No4 The Inextinguishable. Thomas Dausgaard is an expert in Nielsen's music and he gave this piece some welly. It was good.

On Sunday I got up early and drove to Runcorn. It wasn't a whim. I was getting myself into gear for the following day when I had my GTP (Graduate Training Programme) interview. I was doing what I tell my lads on the training course for unemployed people to do; I was testing out how to get to the interview location.

So, on Monday, I was there in good time. I had all my documents with me. I had my forms completed. I had the numeracy test completed. I had my presentation prepared. I sat through the literacy test and then I gave my presentation and interview. I was the first candidate to be interviewed on the first day. The panel had five more days of interview ahead of them. I wanted to make sure that, at the end of the week, they had enough to remember me positively by. And I wanted to make sure that I set the bar high early on.

I think that I achieved those aims. All I can honestly say is that, if I don't get offered a place, then others were considered better or more suitable than me and I don't wish them ill because they must be good. I feel that I did myself justice and I feel good about whatever the result may be. And, if the answer is disappointing, then I still have my place at Liverpool Hope to fall back on.

And I've now told my colleagues, Ian, Steve and Jill that I'm intending to leave by the end of August. Which is a relief. Gradually the process is unfolding.

The process is also unfolding with Hugh Baird and, frankly, not unfolding well.

At Connect, we are a small team. We see our failings very clearly but we also have very high standards of delivery and support. Either within the commercial training wing or on the social training side of things, we would not dream of treating our customers/learners in the way that I have been treated by the authorities at Hugh Baird over the past six months.

Given the fact that the complaint was demonstrably not going to be resolved easily, we would certainly have talked directly with the customer to try to ascertain how best to reach a just resolution. I know this because I was involved in writing our Code of Conduct and Complaints Procedure.

I have worked in both the public and private sectors, I have worked for three Universities and I really cannot remember encountering such blinkered intransigence before. And so, for some time, I have been trying to understand the corporate mind set I have butted up against.

The best that I can come up with is that their response holds fast to the idea that, providing what has been done falls within the parameters of their own definition of correct procedures, nothing wrong has happened. I find the complacency inherent in such an attitude jaw-dropping. It is as though twenty years of best business practice (starting with Kaizen, Six Sigma, etc) have never happened.

Six Sigma, for example, stresses the customer's perspective rather than the service provider's. It urges service providers to look at their processes from the outside-in. Six Sigma offers the insight that, by understanding transactions from the customer's point of view, you discover what they are seeing and feeling. With this knowledge, you can identify areas where you can add significant value or improvement from their perspective.

Nothing in my experience of Hugh Baird tells me that this practice is part of the core corporate culture and, given that I have been dealing mainly with someone whose job title is Head of Quality and Performance Improvement, I feel that this is a damning indictment of the organisation as a whole.

Currently, the process has now been escalated to some one else. I've not been told what this will entail, what evidence will be used, whether or not I will get the chance to refute any of the College's assertions and so, if anything, I feel even more despondent than I did before. Most of all, I don't know how long this procedure will take. It really doesn't feel as though the College authorities are in any way concerned about my academic progress.

I went into the CTLLS course simply because I wanted to learn; I had no professional need. All of the other students were there because they had to be. Their continuing, professional livelihoods depended on them becoming qualified and so therefore they had a vested interest in keeping their heads down and accepting everything that came their way. That I should enter the premises simply wanting to learn and leave so downhearted is, I believe, a damning indictment of the organisation as a whole.

As things stand at the moment, should they (and there's a great grammatical qualifier there) say that I can walk away from the whole situation without paying a penny and without any qualification, I would do so like a shot.

I would do it because the other process which is going on is my dad's increasingly rapid descent into senility. My mum is playing silly buggers. I attended a meeting between the two of them and a local voluntary help agency. Mum nodded and listened and made positive noises and then, over the past two weeks, she's gone off and deliberately found all sort of ways of not taking up help.

I think that she's in some sort of denial and she's finding whatever way she can of keeping herself and my dad off the radar because she fears that, as soon as the professionals realise the extent of what has been going on, they will seek to intervene. She's as bonkers as he is if she thinks that any agency is willingly going to spend money on them without being asked first. Anyhow, that's the position we're in at present.

They're fine, on a day to day basis, but it will only take one small thing going wrong and they are likely to be in real trouble. But mother is unlikely to recognise this until it has happened.

Oh, and I suppose as a matter of record, I should note that Osama bin Laden was assassinated by American forces in Pakistan on Monday 2 May. To call it other than a state-sponsored revenge killing would be a nonsense but I would have to say that what goes around comes around. And it will mean that the USA can approach the 10th anniversary of 11 September with some ghosts laid to rest.

The event did generate a fine line in jokes as well.

For example, linking football to Islamic extremism is a big jump but we all have to admit that we have done things in haste, on the spur of the moment, out of sheer exhilaration or excitement that we went on to regret after a period of time.

Monday night's football match between Arsenal and Manchester United was full of incident and the fact that Arsenal won was a sweet thing for many football fans. However, it probably wasn't the best time for Osama bin Laden to run into his garden and shout "Come on you Gunners!!"

Or, more scientifically, it has been revealed that the DNA of Osama bin Laden had a reading of 24% cocoa, 52% coconut, 18% sugar and 6% milk. Experts say this is probably due to the Bounty on his head.