Executive Rewards

As regulars will know I travel around Britain quite a lot. It means I get to stay in many different hotels and fly with many different airlines.

Hotels and airlines are pretty keen to secure the loyalty of busy executives so they have entire teams dedicated to improving customer loyalty. At British Airways they came up with the idea of BA Miles (now Avios Miles), I have enough to get to Hong Kong and back. British Midland have their own BMI miles, I have plenty to take the family to Barbados and back. Hilton have HiltonHonors where you can get a free night or two, I have used this to take Mrs Blog to the Waldorf free of charge. Hilton also upgrade you where possible to a bigger room, great!

A couple of months ago I joined the Holiday Inn reward programme. Clearly their budgets are not as big. Last week I received my first benefit from the programme when I checked into their Bristol Filton Road Hotel, a paper bag.

I rushed up to my room to open it.

"What could it be?" I thought.

Surely something they have researched that the foot weary, tired executive will want after a long busy day....
It was a bottle of water and a Crunchie.

In case anyone from Holiday Inn is reading, could you swap the Crunchie for a bag of mint Aero Bubbles?

Blog the artist

In an idle moment I decided to create a work of art. I call it "a picture of Mr Blog on a Scottish summer day"!

Those who have followed my art work in the Tate Modern will realise it bears a remarkable similarity to my famous piece "a picture of Mr Blog on an English summer day".

Planking is back

Son-blog and I went out to the pub quiz on Thursday. I, sensibly, left after the quiz and came home. Son-blog, less sensibly, went on drinking with his friend Scobie. Rather than come home he decided to copy Scobie. One of them "Planked" on a bollard and the other on a local monument to our our local hero the Salmon (Fish, not first minister!)

Isle of Man

The Isle of Man has a pizza parlour, no real surprise there.However it is called "Stone Willy's". Can you imagine asking,
"Can I have a 12 inch Stone Willy please!"???

Plays what he wrote

Was at the local pub quiz last night, always an entertaining evening.

Sat next to myself and mate-blog Paul was a team of students, including three followers of "Drivel and Wisdom". The group included grubby-blog who was sporting a brand new pair of ears. The students were a little nervous that their poor scoring was going to be a source of embarrassment on this posting.

Lucky for them there was a team of maltezers (brown on the outside but blonde on the inside) on the other side of us.

In answer to the question "Which Shakespeare play inspired the film "Ten reasons why I hate you?"", they decided to cheat by listening in to Mr Blog and mate-blog's answer. Sadly for them they misheard and wrote
"The taming of the shoe"!!

Higgs Boson

Having now been found the elusive Higgs Boson (God particle) decided to go on a bit of a tour. He headed off to Rome where he was keen to see the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican guards refused to let him though...
The Higgs Boson pleaded,
"You have to let me in, you can't have Mass without me!"

Mistaken identity 2

Leaving Church this morning with Son-Blog, the Priest asked Son-Blog if he was Spanish. He explained that with dark hair, dark complexion it was an easy mistake to make.

"Don't worry, Son-Blog" said I. "I was mistaken for being Spanish when I was in the south of France."

"Is that cos you were slow?" says Son-Blog.

15  Love

The Hobbit

On the same trip to the Isle of Man mentioned in the last posting, I had a team meeting. One of the team, Tony-Blog, worked with me at two of my previous companies where he was often called "Frodo". This was due to him being somewhat height challenged and portly, giving more than a passing resemblance to the famous Hobbit.

Somehow it slipped out during the team meeting during an unguarded moment that this was his nick-name. He took it well acknowledging the truth.

Then he slipped up badly. he went on to tell me that his fingers are now much bigger than when he was married. As a result, he cannot wear his wedding ring on his finger anymore.

"I wear it on a chain around my neck." he confided.

"Hang on!" I said quite loudly (well, loudly enough for all the team to hear).

I continued, "You are  nick-named "Frodo" and you wear a gold ring on a chain around your neck???"