Great Weather Today for a Barbecue...

Unfortunately our planned barbecue was yesterday, and it didn't stop raining all day. An inch of rain fell before lunchtime and it didn't get any better after that.

It's the face-to-face meeting this week at work, where 20 or so people fly in from their various places around the world for 3 days and meet with our guys in the office to talk about tech stuff I don't understand. Last time we went to a pub in the middle of nowhere and played skittles (see Keith's post for the full story), and this time we decided that as it was summer, the chances were that we would have good weather so we booked a barbecue pit in a local country park so we could have a ball games evening. Fortunately we checked the weather forecast at the beginning of the week and found out that it was going to be wall to wall rain all day, so we made other arrangements. We took over a couple of rooms at a local pub and had a meal and played a quiz that Clare and I put together on Tuesday afternoon.

To say that Ben was annoyed that the winning team was using a mobile phone to get their answers is an understatement (in fact, three of the seven teams used their mobile internet access to help them out). We didn't have a prize to give out, but when Ben's team lost by one point to a team that had cheated, it was like they had lost out on a million quid. His argument was that no one remembers the team that came second; I pointed out that no one will remember the winners either - the only thing anyone will remember will be Ben harping on about how they were robbed... Still, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and it made a nice change - I haven't taken part in a pub quiz for years.

Shame we couldn't have had the barbecue, but this is the Great British Summer after all, so we should have known. I heard that we've effectively had the best of our summer weather this year - there was a week in April, then a week in May (when I was in Turkey and it was warmer here than there), then the two weeks I was housebound after my accident, and that's it. The rest of the 'summer' is going to be rain, rain, rain...