However you cut it, education in the UK, is woeful. Really came home how bad this lunchtime, talking about language teaching with a Dutch colleague. My English is reasonable (native speaker, so there are certain expectations); French, I can handle; German, ok; Spanish not too bad. Competent enough in all of them - just - to order meals etc.

They, on the other hand, speak four languages fluently - their English is enviable, written and spoken. Learnt them all as part of the state curriculum, which additionally involved them reading 30 books in each of the four languages. Not soppy romances or kids primers either, but heavyweights like Camus, Sartre etc. I thought I was bold and new wave reading them in translation in my late teens, early twenties...but as a school kid and in the original?

I feel like a street urchin...well, I did, I have read two books in the original: Grimm's Fairy Tale and Le Petit Prince, some struggle though.

Baccalaureate system needed here. I can think of only one other developed country which has as primitive an educational system as ours. Please step forward, Uncle Sam.

"London is not romantic, no, London has the violence of a bolt of lightening ....(where) ...the pulse rises fast and plummets as quickly, things get done and undone in split second...". Agree, agree, agree! The city is a force you contend with. It is a game living in London. No start, no finish. You're plunged in. Who can outwit who first? You or this confounding, ravenous city?

Everything's a snake or ladder, or both. Especially dear old transport. There's a full tube map driven into my head (then again I am a man, that old "men can read maps thing"), just so I can re-route myself out of one dead-end, closed tube station for engineering works, or whatever obstacle it is, and get back on to the open road.

Knowing not just where to sit, but which carriage to aim for when the train pulls in is all part of the game too. But I'm not going to spill the beans on whereabouts to stand on the platform at Holland Park. My secret

The quote is from Agnes Catherine Poirier. Could n't have found anything better to sum up this city that can leave you breathless, infuriated, baffled, and deeply, deeply fond of, in the sweep of a few seconds.

I've spent six months or so working "virtually" with two people, one in India, the other, in America. Apart from a fleeting handshake in an office in Delhi with my Indian colleague, that's as far as any physical contact has gone - we've never all been around the same table, everything's been handled through phone calls, e-mails, and latterly, IM'ing.

Yes, you do build up pictures, it's like piecing a jigsaw together in a sense - the way an e-mail is worded might be a piece of sky; tone of voice on a call, a bit of the edge; a casual conversation before a business call starts could make a corner, and so on.

Today we finally met. Yet, it's not how close, or not, they were to my imagined picture I'm left with. Something much different. I could n't stop myself thinking on how it symbolised our relative economic clout - me, a Brit, or the Old World; my American colleague, on the other hand, with Today's World, figuratively, in their grasp; and together, the pair of us looking at our Indian colleague as the New World. Tomorrow's World. I could feel a baton being passed on.

I spent a month in India earlier this year. There was nothing I saw to undermine the idea that India is not en route to becoming an economic powerhouse. It can't be anything but. There's almost a communal sense of mission to educate, develop and uplift.

So Les bleus did n't "gagne le coupe du monde". A pity, I was hoping they might. Still, for reasons we all know that game continues to echo, which makes me wonder how long it is before "Zinedine" becomes a verb, or shorthand to describe a particular state of mind.

Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands right up in the air. I guess we've all had that sentiment at some point. But that simple gesture has changed it's shape over the years for me. The context has altered completely. As a youngster that would have been a serious display of uninhibited joy, maybe in a club, or at a gig. Recognised anywhere, just like the VISA card symbol.

Put a distance of twenty years or more between than and now, and it's all change. The message is different; I'm signalling pain (exasperation really). My grumpy nerve endings have been slapped and this is all I can do. There's nothing else.

To be, or not to be. That's as good a capsule description of indecision as I've ever come across. But what does it cost to actually be? Forget the metaphysics here. How much do we spend each day just being? Ourselves that is.

I'm not thinking of the top rung of Maslow's hierarchy, it's not self-actualisation I'm on about. It's much simpler: how much leaks out of purses and wallets just so we can be. Every morning, unfailingly, I leave the Tube Station outside where I work and head in the opposite direction, until I find a coffee shop. Ignoring any physiological, possibly psychological, needs that may also be present, my work day does n't start until I've gone through the paper and sunk a capuccino. This is me being me. And that costs me a couple of quid every day. Get the sense of being I'm aiming for?

Another example of beingness. I like chocolate; it's my glass of red wine, or pint before getting the train home, or cigarrette on the walk back from the shops. I don't do any of those three (well, an occasional wine), but when I break open that chocolate it's me being me, just as any of those other things are for others being themselves.

Confused? I'll try to explain this way: it's not existential being, or philosophical being, it's plain old human beings being, well, human. Doing things for no especial reason; you just do them, because if you did n't, it just would n't be you.

I reckon I spend around a fiver a day on being. Would I really be better off if I took a flask of coffee into work and read a freebie newspaper?

She's gone. Early this morning. Everything simply came to an end. All that time. We'd been together for sixteen years. Both of us knew that after that length of time, everything that could have been said, had been. There was nothing I could say to bring her back. Irrevocable. Broken down.

Opening the door last night, I knew something was wrong; she sounded different. Laboured, almost like she was on the point of sobbing, but managing to hold it back. But only just. And she was shaking, I'd never seen that before. That shocked me. What the hell had I done? When I'd left to go to work, she was fine, humming like she always did. It's true: lives's really can change in a heartbeat. Mine had. I went up to her. If anything that made it worse, the staccato, punctured noises seem to deepen. Why was she doing that? All of the days and nights we'd spent together, she'd never howled like that. Never howled at all, in fact. I reached out to her. Hot to the touch and sweating.

Yes, I'm a man, so I agree what I did next, might be unfeeling, harsh even, still would n't a woman do the same as I did? It was the only thing. There was nothing else. I bent over, almost on my knees, stretched my hand out... and unplugged her. My fridge breathed it's last fresh breath yesterday. I'd caught it in it's death throes. When a fridge has the inside temperature of a cooling oven, is shaking, and starting to drip, that's all you can do.

After a long and radical defrost - if electrical goods stores are looking for that extra customer wrap, then every fridge they sell should come with it's own pasta bowl, blunt table knife, and hammer, because for me there's no better tool kit than this when it comes to emergency defrosts. The pasta bowl of hot water left in the belly of the fridge to thaw the iceberg that's built up over the years, and the gentle tap, tap of the hammer on a blunt knife to loosen it all.

If I look in my kitchen right now, I simply see the beached hulk of an old friend. In a couple of days time, the council are going to turn up, take it away and inter it on some fridge mountain. Me, well, got to buy another. It's too hot to leave milk on the window ledge, and even if it was n't, it'd be too tempting for the local squirrels not to want try a dairy diet. Tomorrow, I have to be domestic, I have to buy a fridge.

Allez les bleus. Peut-etre peuvent ils vraiment gagner le coupe du monde!

It's unavoidable that you unconsciously absorb your workplace's jargon. Eight or more hours a day, the same people all talking in the same code. Inevitable. It's a part of the office (or wherever the location is: factory floor, workshop, studio) we all take home with us. We don't just take that, there's more; there's the gossip, the bitchiness, the scandal, the grievance. But that's really shortlived, you tell the story, seek solace or agreement, whatever, that's it. Done.

Jargon is different, at least it is for me. It seeps in, it stays. I don't consciously recycle what I've used or heard...well maybe if it's a real humdinger, then it's odds on I will. Perhaps it's just because I like words. I don't know, let's just say, there's probably more receptive ground for these words to take root than there is for others.

Recently, I heard some one in a meeting talk about "Agents of change". God only knows what the context was, I've long forgotten. The term has n't though. It lives and breathes as effectively in the private world as in the business world.

It's the term I use for those people who brush against in you in life, and without them knowing it, they change you forever. Something catalytic happens. A fuse is lit. They turn thoughts around, lives around in some cases. Clearer, sharper vision on things. I don't know what Dan Brown has in mind with his novel "Angels and Demons". I've not read it, the likelihood is I won't, nevertheless the title carries weight, and extending it beyond the literal, then there are Angels who help share the burden of life, the people we talk to, swap confidences, look for reassurance; the Demons, there the ones who provoke, who challenge us - go on, try it.

Yet neither transform; it's either guidance or stimulation, and that's it. In my experience, it's only these rare people, and they've no idea they carry this power, the agents of change, that truly change lives. There is nothing magical, or supernatural, they've no "gift". But somehow, you're changed after they bump into. Reawakened. I've only encountered a handful, and that's all it's been, of this rarest of creatures. I'm in their debt, they've turned me around