Archive for the 'UK' Category

I’m not reading books anymore - I’m trying to “go shelfless”. With the technology available these days, it seemed to us likely that you could abandon all shelving with the consequential enlargement of your living space. That’s an attractive idea, especially if, like me, your home is already jam-packed with books, CDS and papers that have taken up all the shelving space available already - what do you do as you buy new items?

One friend is very efficient at monetizing her acquisitions - once she’s finished reading her books, she sells them off again on Ebay. She used to rip the music of CDS and then sell the discs on Ebay too. She also gets rid of old clothes and other items the same way.

I’ve been wondering if one could minimise the clutter at an earlier point ie at the acquisition point - by going virtual or electronic.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about taking virtual notes using Evernote, which has so far been a great way to cut back on the bits of paper and physical notebooks that I would normally use. I “write” notes on my mobile phone-PDA using the letter recognizer function so it feels just like scribbling in a physical notebook or on the back of an envelope and zap it across to my online account.

I’ve recently discovered audiobooks via Audible.co.uk, which is a subsidiary of the US-based company Audible.com. So I’m not reading books but I’m listening to them. With Audible, you pay for each book you download just like you might if you bought a physical book from Amazon. But you can also sign up an account and pay a monthly fee of around £8 - each month you can download one title. The latter option is good value as you can download a book that otherwise costs more at that £8 price. Once you’ve downloaded it, the audiobook is yours forever and you can stream it from the online site or download it as many times as you like. The only limitation is that you can only play it on up to 4 computers/ devices that you register with your account - this is to stop you sending an e-version to all your friends and doing Audible out of business.

I’m really enjoying my first two audiobooks. I can listen to them while gardening or sitting on the bus. It’s so much more time efficient being able to listen to a book and do something else at the same time. And activities that used to be boring and painful to do are now quite pleasurable. Also, lying in the garden staring up at the blue sky while someone reads to me in my ears is just delightful - I don’t have to strain my arms lifting the book to read it as I lie down or crick my neck to get the reading angle right. And the books don’t take up any physical space - although you can burn CD versions of them if you want to.

My only complaint about Audible UK is that they have only 18,000 titles compared to the US company which has 40,000 titles. Many of the UK titles are older titles and / or of the WH Smith variety ie non-intellectual easy reading (though there are a few exceptions). I tend to prefer Waterstones or Blackwells which have more academic selections - or Amazon where you can get the most obscure books so long as they are in print. I was very excited when I first discovered Audible.com, the US site, as it had loads of books I wanted. For example, the US company has Naomi Klein’s latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. My excitement fizzled out when I came to the UK site - where none of these books are available. The UK site has lots on Churchill, how to make a million, chick lit and the latest popular non-fiction, which is fine if your tastes are limited to those topics.

So why don’t I just sign up for the US site? The frustrating thing is that if you try that from the UK, it refuses to allow you to do that and shoots you over to the UK site. Their support team explained to me, “The availability of certain book titles is linked the geographic digital download rights set by the publishers. A title can have different publishers in different countries and the rights are set on a country by country basis. Where possible, we try and secure rights on a world wide basis (for our US, UK, French and German sites) but there are times when this is either not possible or discussions are currently ongoing to secure the rights.” So I have to keep checking back to the UK site in the hope that the UK publishers will at some point issue the UK version of the audiobook.

Still, I have found a few books on the UK site that will keep me going for the next few months - hopefully as time passes more of the kinds of books that interest me will find their way onto the UK site and I won’t have to terminate my experiment with virtual books anytime soon.

Illustration: thanks to Drylcon from Flickr.com (CCL)

Mark Wu and I have been reading each others blogs for awhile now but we’ve never met. He blogs at OneInchPunch.net and is also very actively involved in the Chinese community here in the UK. When Mark invited me to be featured on his website VisibleChinese.com, I was very honoured. I’m delighted to to return the favour and introduce you to Mark here on Fusion View.

Mark writes:

Unofficially named “Mark Wu” (my Chinese name being my legal identifier), I’ve led a quite straight-forward life. My parents came to the UK when they were teenagers and met and married young. My brother, sister and I were subsequently born into the British Chinese culture which labels a generation of young Chinese people whose parents immigrated to the UK, and where the majority of families were involved in one way or another, in catering. With a talent for drawing, at an early age, I was “destined” for the arts and eventually found myself drawn to digital design.

In the last decade, I’ve spent most of my life focusing on working through my co-founded design company Kibook Interactive Design, which at its peak in the dot-com boom, grew to eight people plus freelancers. Aside from working quite alot, doing the company thing also meant meeting and working directly with a variety of clients and living a life that combined freedom (sort of) and choice with responsibility.

Some of our clients were British Chinese organisations such as Yellow Earth Theatre and The Pearl Foundation and that was great for me personally, to be able to tap into my own culture professionally. Working with them in the last five years or so, meant being involved with what I perceive to be an important time in the UK’s Chinese culture, with its growth and development being quite passive initially but which is now continually increasing in pace, encouraged by the Olympics in China this year.

Promoting Chinese culture in the UK is something I am passionate about and as a result, I am a Trustee of The Pearl Foundation, Interactive Associate of Yellow Earth Theatre and a core member of The British Chinese Project which is an organisation that works to help integrate more British Chinese people into politics.

Visible Chinese

Bringing together my passion for promoting British Chinese culture and design for the web, I also created another website which came about through a simple idea. The website is at VisibleChinese.com and it aims to become an Authoritative Independent Listing of Achievers within the UK’s Chinese Culture. Pretty much like a Who’s Who.

Visible Chinese is a site that is focused on profiling just individuals, as opposed to organisations, putting faces to names, as I insist on a photograph to accompany each profile. Profiles can be flexible in what they say, as long as they are biographical in some way. People can also outline what they do professionally and include links to their websites, so Visible Chinese serves as a great advertisement for their services and a useful tool for networking. I like to think of it as the sum of its parts being greater than the whole. Someone I met recently mentioned how it would be useful to see what people looked like in order to help recognise them at a future networking event.

The site doesn’t take long to maintain, and also doesn’t have the same pressure as a blog requiring constant (perhaps daily) updates, so all in all, the whole concept is a win-win situation for both the people featured, and for myself in gaining the satisfaction of creating something useful.

Not so silent minority

The Chinese community in London seems to be advancing and growing in voice and confidence, from the media labeled “silent minority” it began as. Traditionally, the visible aspects of Chinese culture seemed to consist of takeaways, large suburban supermarkets and the annual Chinese New Year event around the UK’s Chinatowns.

However, in recent years, there are signs that the next generation of young professionals are beginning to influence the community. Young professionals who have grown up in both Chinese and English cultures, and who are not just comfortable, but fluent in both.

As the British Chinese population increases, the diversity of talent also increases and is steadily gaining exposure. Take The Pearl Awards for instance. An annual event which will be in its fifth year in 2008. Each year saw the awards grow in profile and diversity with the fourth awards in 2007 set in the Royal Festival Hall, including HRH The Prince of Wales as one of its distinguished guests.

The British Chinese Project is also a significant initiative, founded by the prominent Chinese Solicitor, Christine Lee and which is supported by the UK Chinese Embassy, representatives from the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and a variety of different organisations and Chinese community groups. It aims to encourage more British Chinese to take an interest in politics, particularly the younger generations, but in itself, also counts a number of young professionals as members, the like of who are increasingly looking to play active roles in the community.

Go Croydon!

In the North-South London debate, I was a classic, born North Londoner who believes everything there is better, alas more expensive, than South London. A few years ago, I moved down to Croydon to my partner’s place and have been there ever since.

Croydon has a kind of stigma attached to it, but one which I think is over the years, being slowly eroded. It might be because of this, but everything in South London does seem to be cheaper than the North. Redevelopment in some areas is happening, and so I think the South is in someways, quite an exciting place to live. What I can’t fault is the convenience of being so close to shopping areas like North End, and the fast rail links into Central London - a bonus since I’ve been able to avoid getting on the claustrophobic tube to work.

Bruce Lee still inspires

I started my first blog One Inch Punch in December 2006 - during a quiet Christmas break, when I felt I really had no excuse not to. I had been working in the web industry for more than eight years and aside from a small portfolio site, had nothing of my own to show for it.

Building a blog was something that I wanted to do for awhile and it was also a good idea for several reasons. These included knowing the ins and outs of the process - which I could easily advise my clients on. “Walking the walk” as they say.

For almost a decade, I had been nurturing an idea for creating a large and complex East-Asian community website. Several visual designs came about, and the idea was refined, changed, amended and refined once more. I had never got beyond that, partly because of the time required and also due to lack of technical know-how required to get the idea made. However, in the last few years, blogging technology has improved massively - enough for me to fine tune my comprehensive ideas down to a simple (and practical!) East-Asian entertainment link site. Hence, OneInchPunch.net was born.

Comprehensive as the ideas were, keeping things simple inspired the name OneInchPunch. I basically wanted to aim for one post update a day, which would consist of a visual and a link. Something short but effective, which literally speaking, is basically what a One Inch Punch is. For those who don’t know, the “One Inch Punch” is a martial arts technique, made world famous by Bruce Lee, which unleashes explosive internal (as opposed to muscular) power² from a very short distance. So the name was not just dynamic-sounding, but also indirectly name checks probably the world’s most famous East-Asian.

Note: This article has also appeared on Dulwich OnView where I am the co-editor.

These days I usually buy a coffee on my way into work - and that means most days. It feels very extravagant to spend £1.50 most mornings on a drink I could so easily make myself at home or once I got into the office. But it feels invigorating to walk up to my desk with the steaming ‘tall’ paper cup and the aroma of fresh coffee wafting up to wake me up. It also makes me smile to exchange inconsequential banter with the baristas at the local café who are now familiar with my regular morning stop-off on my way in from the suburbs.

I would never have bought a cup of coffee so easily or so readily in England 10 years ago. Back then, the UK was still a staunchly tea drinking nation and it was a rare thing to be able to get a good cup of coffee anywhere. You would be served instant or some semblance of filter coffee that was stewed too long and sour or so weak that it was tasteless. Either way it was disgusting. One time, I ordered a coffee in Hay-on-Wye, booklovers capital of the UK, in a wannabe trendy café-bookshop which had one of those fancy Italian cappuccino-making machines. The coffee here should be good, I thought.

But here is how they served me: they poured some thick cold coffee ’stock’ which they had boiled down in a coffee filter pot into a cup and added hot water from a kettle. It was the most hideous concoction I had ever tasted. And they were a bit miffed when I demanded my money back.

And then along came the Seattle Coffee Company that made fresh coffee, latte, cappuccino and all the other varieties that we’ve become familiar with. It was bliss, walking into their slick, clean, minimalist outlets and ordering coffee exactly how you want it, with all the associated lingo: skinny, wet, dry… The company was soon taken over by Starbucks, which then proliferated all London and eventually throughout the UK. I hope there’s now one in Hay-on-Wye.

Many people complain that Starbucks, as a global chain, destroys the local economy and makes every high street look the same and have the same shops. For me the significance of Starbucks in the UK is that it has raised the standards of coffee everywhere. For awhile after they arrived, you still could not get a decent coffee in restaurants and cafes - they would stare at you blankly if you asked for an Americano or bring you a weak cafetiere coffee or slop some thick filter into a cup for you. But it wasn’t long before most places realised that they had to keep up with the times and invest in the big Italian coffee machine contraption that hisses and spurts steaming water and milk into freshly ground coffee. Nowadays, you can usually be assured of good coffee wherever you are in the UK - and it’s a delight.

Photo: thanks to Roberat on Flickr.com (CCL)

Now this is just what you need on your Monday morning commute to work - some noisy young people dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” on the London tube…

It’s the passengers’ reaction (or non-reaction) that really capturers the London experience.

One of my favourite radio podcasts is Thinking Allowed on the BBC, hosted by sociologist Laurie Taylor. A recent programme discussed the sociological implications of the British Sandwich - whether cutting it in triangles shows middle class pretensions whereas cutting it into oblongs demonstrates working class earthiness. I had no idea there was so much that could be read into a couple of slices of bread.

I’ve never been keen on sandwiches. I tend to prefer the Asian way of eating - Asian meals do not involve much wheat or gluten or cold food so the sandwich is a strange concoction from that perspective. But in the UK for many years, the sandwich has been the staple of quick lunches so I tolerate it and have had my fair share of lunchtime sarnies. I’m glad to see, though, that more and more Asian style fast food lunching is becoming available - you can buy a nice hot meal with spicy chicken and rice for around £5 and take it away to eat back at the office, just like in Kuala Lumpur (though the price is probably 3 times more than Asian prices!).

The one kind of sandwich that I did love as a kid in Malaysia was a chicken sandwich with lots of butter and white pepper on soft white bread. Chicken sandwiches were a treat that we had when we went “out station” - meant to sustain us on the long drive to my grandparents’ in Taiping, but often devoured within the first hour or so of getting into the car! Their novelty lay in their being, well, Western but they also tasted great because the chicken was prepared with Chinese style ingredients and included the dark meat and the crunchy skin. (In the UK, shop bought chicken sandwiches are made from the bland skinless white meat so can be dry and tasteless, unfortunately.)

For pure evil indulgence, we tried a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich once - said to be Elvis Presley’s favourite. You butter the white bread on the outside and pile the inside high with the squishy ingredients, then deep fry the oozing slab. Yummy and gruesome all at the same time. I’m not sure what the sociological implications of this type of sandwich would be….

Photo: thanks to sheilaz413 from flickr.com (CCL)

It was Christmas Day yesterday and when I woke up, the streets in my neighbourhood were still and quiet. It was like a Sunday but the stillness was much more intense, perhaps because the background hum of traffic was almost silent. Christmas is a big thing in the UK and everything shuts down by Christmas Eve so that everyone can be where they need to be by Christmas morning - for most people, that means being with their families, wherever in the country that may be and no matter how arduous the journey might be to get there, given rain, snow, fog and other transport problems.

Sipping my coffee in the front room, looking out at the deserted street, I pictured all the households in the UK filled with people just getting up and gathering in their living rooms with the Christmas tree and presents. Some of them would have been up already for hours, working on the Christmas lunch of turkey, roast potatoes and the ubiquitous brussel sprouts. There’s an unspoken pact, it seems to me, that no-one is really allowed to leave the safe, warm confines of the house on Christmas Day, unless it is to go en masse for a family walk. Or to go for an early morning run, I noted, as a couple of joggers trundled by.

What did you do yesterday? How did you spend Christmas Day 2007? Were you with your family? Or perhaps you escaped it all with an overseas holiday? Did you, like some poor souls, spend in at the airport - due to delays caused by bad weather?

Angie and I had a quiet day together, just the two of us. Some Christmases, we spend with family and do the whole Christmas festivities thing with presents, party hats, carols and lots of people all around. But some years, like this year, it’s quite nice just to spend it quietly together in peaceful tranquillity. The first time it was just the two of us for Christmas, I felt a bit strange - as if somehow, we were sad, lost souls with no friends and family. But now, I really relish it - though only for some years, not every year!

We had veal escalope in a creamy mushroom sauce for lunch, followed by Sacher Torte given to us by a friend. It took half an hour to prepare and it was delicious. I’m not a great roast turkey fan nor do I enjoy spending a festive holiday cooking for hours, so it was just perfect for us. We watched the Bourne Ultimatum on DVD - a great thrills and spills movie to grip us while outside, the afternoon darkened and the drizzle continued.

We did manage our annual Christmas Day walk in the morning before lunch. In the rain. I reckon that if we had taken a photo every year of our Christmas Day walk, at least half of them, if not more, would show us wet, cold, bedraggled and sodden - just like this year. Because Christmas Day in the UK would not be Christmas Day without rain. It can get pretty grim, I imagine, if you don’t happen to get on with your family or extended family and finding yourself trapped in a small house for 24-48 hours while it rains endlessly outside and there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do beyond the garden gate. I think that’s why on Boxing Day, some people rush to the sales - it’s the relief of running away from the intensity of that enforced time with their families!

In the park where we walk, there’s a bench that is dedicated to the memory of a man who died about 10 years ago, in his early forties. Every Christmas, there is always a bunch of flowers there. This year, there were sprigs of mistletoe interlaced in the wooden slats. I don’t know who he is and we’ve never seen who places these tokens there. But he must have been - and must still be - very loved.

It always makes me think how lucky I am that many of the people we love are still around for us to share this holiday time with.

Let me know how you spent Christmas Day - please add a comment or send me an email via the Contact link at the top right of this page.

Here’s a clever but simple viral marketing flyer from Selfridges I received by email a moment ago from blogging massage therapist Melanie Crowe. Click on the links to download your web voucher to enjoy the discount and/ or forward the flyer on to friends.

By placing the voucher online on its own webpage as well being forwardable by email, Selfridges have also enabled bloggers like me to publicise their offer online on our blogs.

Enjoy - and if you do buy something using your voucher, why not come back and let me know what you got?

We would like you to have a special pre-Christmas gift. Just show this voucher at the till, before you pay, every time you make a purchase from Friday 30th to Sunday 2nd December 2007 and you will receive 20% off* your Christmas shopping, including our festive Christmas Hampers, with 10% off* our unequalled range of fragrance and beauty. So get your Christmas list ready. To qualify for your discount: 1. Simply click on the link below and fill in your details. 2. Print off the voucher. 3. Show the voucher at the till point before you pay to receive your discount.
	For store locations and opening times visit www.selfridges.com or call 0800 123 400.
	Enjoy your Christmas shopping!

This post also appears on my social media blog, ZenGuide

Now that it’s cold and wet, and the night seems to encroach steadily on the day, my body is yearning for comfort food. It doesn’t help that the central heating at home seems to be on the blink and the air-conditioning at work thinks it’s still summer and I seem to have spent most of the last ten days scrunched up in a physical huddle, feeling cold and miserable. All I want to eat is everything that is stodgy and unhealthy:

# Deep fried fish in thick batter with greasy chips, reeking of salt and vinegar - preferably in newsprint paper held in both cold hands as the grease oozes through the paper. And with that distinct greasy paper smell.

# Hot bangers and mash, in a pool of steaming gravy

# Steamed sponge pudding in a pool of treacle, drenched in hot yellow custard

# Juicy minced beef baked into lasagne, moussaka, cottage pie or shepherd’s pie

# Apple stewed with dates and cinnamon and then baked in the oven with a thick, sugary, crunchy crumble on top and enveloped in double cream or more hot yellow custard

# The ultimate English/ American breakfast and/ or mixed grill - bacon, egg, sausages, chips, toast dripping with butter, baked beans, mushrooms, tomatoes, hash browns, steak, grilled lamb chops, grilled pork chops, all washed down with a strong cup of milky, sweet tea

Funny, isn’t it, how the list is made up of primarily English food? Imagine being faced with any of that in the tropical heat, while you’re drenched in sweat and panting. In contrast, this icy, rainy November weather is perfect - especially if you’ve been out in the cold and wet doing something spiffingly British like going for a brisk walk in the rain up a hill or gardening!

What’s your favourite comfort food? Do you try and justify it first like doing some random exercise in the rain? Or do you just eat it anyway, to hell with guilt?

Photo: thanks to ukmari from flickr.com (CCL)

I was in a business meeting last week in the City of London discussing social media with colleagues and clients. As the meeting wound down, we chatted about personal matters, sitting back in our chairs and packing away our papers.

As we looked round the table, we realised that none of us was a native Englander. There was a Sudanese, a German, an Italian, a South African and a Malaysian-born Chinese. We laughed at how we were all speaking English and how we were so comfortable with each other.

The Sudanese marvelled at how in his father’s day in Sudan, the local people could not own businesses and were truly second-class citizens under the British Empire. And here he was running a thriving business in the City, with clients from all over the world, including the British who had once ruled his home country.

I shared the story that my father and his brothers had told us - of how they were not allowed to enter the gentleman’s club in Kuala Lumpur during colonial rule because they were not white. There have been other stories across the Empire of how even sultans and kings had not been allowed entry to such places because they were natives. And just earlier this year, I had walked into a gentleman’s club - a woman and a non-white - on Pall Mall and I had been treated with respect and even deference by the English staff.

The South African had an ancestor who was closely associated with the creation of apartheid, to her shame and embarrassment, and yet she herself had marched against apartheid in her youth and makes friends based on a person’s character, not their colour.

For many of our generation living in today’s Western, cosmopolitan cultures, it’s pretty much a given that we take each person for who they are and it’s not about colour or gender or orientation or whatever. It’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like for our parents and grandparents - to have experienced blanket unquestioned prejudice, or to hold such prejudices as if they were the unswerving truth. There are still people and places where racism, sexism and all kinds of other “isms” still rule the day, unfortunately - so I’m not saying we live in a perfect world. There is still much to be done to remove inequality. It was just that on that particular afternoon last week, we looked at each other and delighted in our differences and the freedom we had to enjoy those differences here in London.

Photo: from freestockphotos.com

My young nephew started boarding school last week and all of us were excited and anxious for him all at the same time. I remembered my first week at boarding school and all the new experiences to take in, the main one being that this was not home and I had to learn to adapt to living with hundreds of other girls who were all in the same boat as me.

One of the other difficult things I had to get used to was playing sport. We’re not a sporty family and in Chinese tradition, there is a veneration for “scholars” - ie “swots” to the Brits - and much less respect given to sporty types who are considered “all brawn and no brain”. So my siblings and I were never encouraged to play sports when we were in primary school in Malaysia. We all wore glasses at an early age and read lots of books. At P.E. time, my swotty friends and I would stand around on the sidelines while the other girls did star jumps etc and the teacher never tried very hard to make us join in.

So imagine my horror at being thrown out into the autumn afternoons in my first term at school in England to go and play lacrosse. The air to my tropical skin was icy. Sometimes it was grey and drizzling and in such conditions in Malaysia, we would stay indoors
or be sure we had a brolly with us. But while I hesitated on the doorstep, the other girls would pound out into the damp - and the sports mistress would hurry me along with words to the effect of: “A little bit of rain never hurt anyone”.

Lacrosse - or “lax” as the girls called it - was originally a Native-American sport. You can see a game of it in the Daniel Day-Lewis film “The Last of the Mohicans” - and it was pretty brutal, I recall. A History of Native American Lacrosse states rather ominously, “In the past, lacrosse also served to vent aggression, and territorial disputes between tribes were sometimes settled with a game, although not always amicably.” In photos of the modern American version of the game, the players wear body armour, as you can see on the right.

But we’re talking here about a British gals’ boarding school. Mention safety and body armour and you’re likely to get the response: “Stuff and nonsense, don’t be so namby-pamby - like those Americans”.

So there I was, much tinier and scrawnier than many of the solid, broad-shouldered Anglo-Saxon gals who had been brought up all their lives on brisk walks, fresh air and a belief that exercise and sport were good for you - for your health and your character. They all seemed to cradle the lax stick with natural athleticism and be able to run across the huge, enormous, vast, ginormous tracts of land that was the playing field without breaking into a paroxysm of gasping and panting and coughing. The ball is small but very heavy and yet, they could throw and catch it with the lax stick deftly and with control. My ball always just plopped onto the ground a few feet away from me - and I was terrified whenever I had to catch it ungainfully with my outstretched stick in case I missed and it hit me on the head.

But the most horrifying moment was when we were actually playing a game and I had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and the ball landed in my lax stick. The gals from the other team would all come bearing down on me, thundering like a herd of bison, mud kicking up in clumps. My team-mates would be calling to me to pass them the ball or to run into an opening but invariably, I’d scamper about rather ineffectually or just plain freeze.

Now, the thing about lax is that it all happens around the level of your head. You cradle the lax stick upright, the netty bit holding the ball switching back and forth in front of your face as you run. If someone is trying to get the ball off you, they whack your stick with theirs to knock the ball out. You’re supposed to body block them, twisting the stick away from attack.

So imagine a herd of thundering bison storming down at you brandishing lax sticks as if about to swipe your head off.

It just seemed so much easier to give the ball to them - like what you’re supposed to do if you’re ever mugged. Just give them the wallet or the money. Or the ball. So I’d make a pathetic attempt to throw the ball - not a proper pass to one of my team-mates but more a “here, take it, I don’t want it” kind of a gesture.

And off they would thunder, scrumming after the ball, trying to pick it up from the mud or tackling another braver gal, cracking and whacking at each other’s sticks. And I’d be left alone. Relieved and alive.

These days I’m a little bit more robust and a little bit more sporty. I go for runs. I even run in the rain. I’ve turned British, after all. But whenever there’s a team sport - like at various law firms where I’ve worked, some bright spark rustles up a game of football or rounders with another law firm or a client - my heart sinks and my stomach turns itself into knots. OK, it’s not lax or anything terrifying they’re proposing but the trauma and humiliation of team lacross and letting my team-mates down has scarred me for life!

Photos: thanks to devilblink via flickr.com and sportcamp101.com