I am, you may have noticed, supposed to be going to Warsaw next week. They asked me to go ages ago. There was a flurry of communication, I booked my flights and a hotel room, send in an expenses claim form and began to wonder what I was supposed to be doing with the students when I got there, and what I might do with time when I wasn’t with students, never having been to Warsaw before.

I was beginning to get a bit anxious by the complete lack of communication from the Property people. Even my pal the administrator wasn’t replying to emails. Someone else had offered me a lift to Luton and had then vanished. I didn’t even know who the course leader was. Might this all be an elaborate scam designed to get me to Warsaw at the busiest time of year to absolutely no purpose?

To my immense relief, one of the senior property academics rand me yesterday and asked me to go to a planning meeting to sort out what we were all going to do and when. It was someone I had heard of! Even someone I knew. WE all met, Nick the academic, some academic from Nottingham Trent, the course administrator (who had offered the lift to Luton) and me. We sorted everything out. I noticed with pleasure that I have all of Friday afternoon off.

I was just pondering the possibility of finding a guided tour of Warsaw that runs on Friday afternoons when Nick the Course Leader said: Right. That’s sorted. Which more or less means that Prague’s sorted.

Prague? Waddya mean: Prague?

They looked at me in consternation. You are coming to Prague, aren’t you?

I didn’t even know we had a cohort in Prague. Nobody has ever mentioned Prague to me. When are you going? Mid-October? Highly unlikely I’ll be free in mid-October. Let me look. Oh look, by some absolute miracle, I do happen to be more or less free those days. I shall enquire of the boss if I can go.

I’m going to Prague in mid-October :-)

I have booked a place on a coach tour of Warsaw on the first Friday afternoon. Assuming the same timetable in Prague, I though a lunch cruise down the river?

Bernard and Sleepy Hippo are coming with me. The Builder is seeing if he can have the Thursday and Friday of the Prague weekend off. If he can, he’ll come too – although probably not to my teaching sessions, unless he wants to see what I really do when I say I am going teaching!!

It seems not to be raining