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| The pool where we have spent this weekend lazing in the sun and shade |
Hi everyone,
It’s Sunday again
and the time to write this week’s post.
I’m not feeling very inspired this morning and keep putting off
starting. But here I am ready to tell
you all about this week.
On Monday I went
into the office as I did several times this week. It was mostly to work on our press activities
for the 18th July “D Day” 4G launch.
I had coffee that morning too with Javier. Right afterwards Olivia was live on TVE at
13.10 reporting on the case of the Madrid Arena New Year’s Eve party venue
where 5 young girls lost their lives. It
is a very high profile case in Spain at the moment and Olivia did a good job as
she excels reporting on court cases. You
can see her here if you go to 13.10.
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| Olivia as seen in the TV studio reporting on the Madrid Arena Court case on Monday |
On Tuesday the abuela (grandmother in Spanish
and my mother-in-law) left for Montrondo, after her two week stay with us. José Antonio, Dolores and Sara, their daughter
who recently returned from China, picked her up at midday and they left with a
very full car, including their mongrel dog Nuba.
I was busy that morning and missed Olivia reporting on
a children’s summer camp but saw it later on this link. You can too if you fast forward to 13.19h.
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| Olivia reporting on Tuesday on a children's summer camp |
On Tuesday I
had a lunch appointment with an old colleague from Motorola, Xavi M. He now works for Blackberry in a senior role
and one of his new responsibilities will be the Yoigo account so we had lots to
talk about. We had lunch at La Española
in Pozuelo (a great place by the way), after which he had a very illustrious appointment. He was off to see Iker Casillas and his
beautiful partner Sara Carbonero.
Casillas, of course, is the Real Madrid goal keeper. He is also the club’s
Captain as well as Captain of the Spanish National football team. Xavi, who is from Barcelona, is naturally a Barcelona
football fan and the connection with Casillas comes via Pujol, the rival team’s
captain who is a friend of Xavi’s too.
You won’t be surprised that the object of the meeting was to help Iker
set up his new Blackberry phone. When I
worked for Motorola and Nokia, I had plenty of these sorts of meetings with
celebrities. The first one ever was with
Pedro Delgado, the Spanish cyclist and that first meeting led to a lifelong
friendship.
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| My ex colleague Xavi with whom I had lunch on Tuesday |
Wednesday was
a crazy day work wise. I was up really
early to join a conference call with Stockholm to go over the company’s second
quarter financial results. Results days
are always stressful, as we have to send out a press release before breakfast
and also an internal release to the staff.
Yoigo’s results were excellent, as the press reflected in nearly all the
national daily newspapers the next day.
Net sales went up 20% in local currency.
Even better was the increase in profits (EBITDA) which went up a mighty
51%. I was proud to see that Spain is
now the second most profitable unit within the Mobility Services group, behind
Sweden but ahead of all the other Nordic and Baltic countries.
Wednesday was
touch and go all day on what to say in our press release the next day when we
would be going live with 4G – the new super fast mobile internet. I didn’t have the final text until very late
in the evening. However my mind wasn’t
on the press release when Fátima prepared our dinner that night. We nearly always eat the same sort of dinner
(Gazpacho, Spanish cured ham, salad and fruit) and this time I asked her to
come up with something different. So she
made a new Moroccan dish for us. It’s
called “msemen” and we had huge laughs as to what this could also mean. What it really is, is a square version of “rghayef”
– flat Moroccan bread. She stuffed it
with a minced meat concoction and it was truly delicious. I think the photo below doesn’t do it
justice.
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| Fátima's delicious "msemen" Moroccan stuffed flat bread |
My mind was on
the food of course (I am such a foodie) but also on my daughter Susana as that
evening she was meeting another old colleague of mine from Motorola: Antonio
A. He heads up a huge American
advertising company worldwide and I think out of all my former colleagues he
has climbed the highest on the professional ladder. He lives in London and I had asked him to help
Suzy in her quest for a job; not necessarily giving her one but coaching her or
leading her in the right direction. He
very kindly took her out to dinner in London and then, as the true gentleman he
is, he took her home in his car. From
what I heard the next day they hit it off immediately. That didn’t surprise me
as I have always had a special chemistry with Antonio and it is natural that Suzy
would feel it too as she is so similar in character to me. I look forward to seeing him myself in London
when I go there with Eladio to visit Suzy at the end of August and to celebrate
our 30th wedding anniversary.
Suzy’s life in
London seems to be one endless party.
The weather has been great almost since she arrived in May. Right now the UK is having a heat wave, or
what they think is a heat wave. If they
had the temperatures we have in Spain I think they would not know what to
do. Here is a photo of her last Sunday
with some of her new found friends; mostly Spanish I think.
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| Suzy partying with friends in London (red haired and dark glasses in the middle) |
And finally
Thursday 18th July arrived and Yoigo launched 4G. The launch was to take place in Madrid (the
capital and province) and we will be rolling out the network in all towns with
over 70.000 inhabitants in the rest of the country in various phases. By December we shall cover almost 50% of the
population and will continue to increase that number next year. I was delighted
to see that I already had a 4G signal when I saw the LTE abbreviation (another acronym
for 4G – means “long term evoloution”) on my phone just as I left our “urbanization”. So I stopped my car and took a screen shot
and immediately posted the photo on Twitter and Facebook to demonstrate 4G was
live and working. People asked me to do
a speed test. However the speeds on the Yoigo employees’ phones will be lower
than usual because of our mobile email application which slows it down. Even so I noticed the lack of latency (or
buffering or little round circle which appears when you are trying to open a
page or app on your smartphone) when accessing internet on my phone and was
amazed at the speed and quality.
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| The first 4G signal on my iPhone, how exciting (see the letters LTE in the left hand corner at the top) |
On Friday I had
time to attend to my own projects and the number one project on my home to do list
was getting a new passport to replace the one I left on the plane when I came
back from Ibiza. I scoured the internet
to find the instructions and the forms which I filled out and got counter
signed by a colleague at work, Tony. Olivia
had to renew hers too so we decided to go together to the British Consulate
that morning. Miguel, her boyfriend,
came along for the ride. We couldn’t
believe what we heard when we arrived at the reception of the consulate at the
very imposing Torre Espacio building in the Castellana. The bad news for us was that you can no
longer process a passport at the Consulate. Everything had to be done online at
https://www.gov.uk/overseas-passports/y. The problem is this was not evident when I
first scoured the net or tried to ring the local consulate (I say try because
they don’t answer). Thus I spent the bigger part of Friday afternoon
downloading new forms and filling them out just as the 30 odd page guidance
document told me I should. The whole “palava”
is very complicated. I now need to get
the new form counter signed by Tony again and will then send off the forms in
two separate envelopes to Her Majesty’s Passport office in Belfast of all
places. I am worried now I may not receive the new passport before I travel to
England on 21st August as it can take up to six weeks. The new procedure to get a passport is a real
pain and not at all easy to do. But
anyway I now have everything nearly ready to send. It would be Murphy’s luck if my previous
passport left on the airplane turns up in the meanwhile. Even if it does it will be no use as it has
already been cancelled. Let’s hope my
new passport arrives on time and that I don’t lose it or have it stolen again
as has happened on various occasions in my life.
As I enjoyed
another Moroccan meal on Friday with the family, I was kicking myself for
having lost the previous passport. But
that didn’t stop me enjoying more of Fátima’s wonderful Maghreb food. This time she had made lamb tagine with caramelized
prunes and fried almonds, accompanied by her unique rice.
For me Friday
afternoon is already the weekend. And our weekend started by the pool as it has
continued until today. It has been so
hot it is the only place to be during the day.
At night we have needed full blast air conditioning every day this week
without which it would have been impossible to sleep. Eladio took a great photo
of the pool overlooking one side of the house.
It is so good that it is the photo I have chosen to illustrate this week’s
blog. I hope you like it too.
In the
evening, skipping our walk as it was far too hot, Eladio and I went out to
dinner as we do nearly every Friday night.
This time we chose De María a steak house in Majadahonda where we ate
outside on the terrace. To cool off, the
outdoor air conditioning included sprinklers so every now and again we got a
little wet. But we didn’t mind.
On Saturday I
fancied a little clothes shopping excursion, so telling Eladio I was going out
to pick up some ear rings, off I went to the Centro Oeste shopping centre in
Majadahonda. I was in search of white
t-shirts which I seem to be running out of.
I have to admit I came back with t-shirts of all sorts of colours and
patterns, not just white.
That afternoon
whilst I was by the pool, Eladio was watching the last mountain stage of this
year’s Tour de France. I was really
happy to hear later that a 23 year old Colombian of the Movistar team, Nairo Quintana, this year's best young rider (hence the white jersey) had won the stage (you can watch the last km here). It happened
to be the national day of Colombia, their Independence Day and I can only
imagine just how pleased his cycling enthusiastic countrymen would be with this
victory. Nairo, who is racing his very
first Tour de France, will now have a second place on the podium which is a
first for Colombian cycling history. The
last Colombian to be on the podium before Nairo, was Fabio Parra who came third
when my friend, the famous Spanish cyclist, Pedro Delgado won his legendary
Tour de France in 1988.
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| Nairo Quintana after winning the mountain stage yesterday |
So what you
may say? Well to me, it means quite a lot.
You all know my background in cycling when I worked for Motorola and went
to many Tours of France and Spain and other races. I know from my time in professional cycling
just how much the sport is followed and loved in Colombia. I remember the radio commentators from Radio
Caracol and Radio Nacional de Colombia who would commentate sometimes non top
during a 6 or 7 hour cycling race and always in a very excited Latin way. Yesterday when Nairo Quintana won, I can only
begin to imagine just how excited the Colombian radio journalists would have
been when they reported on his victory.
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| The Colombian radio stations in the 1996 Tour of Spain - a picture from my archives. |
The Colombian’s
feat yesterday made me remember a Colombian cyclist on the Motorola Cycling
team I became quite close to. That was Alvaro Mejía. He raced first in Postobón and in 1991 was, like Nairo Quintana,
the best young rider in the TDF. In his
debut with Motorola in 1993 he came fourth in the Tour de France. He was a lovely gentle young man who didn’t
speak very good English and I remember very well how the likes of Lance
Armstrong used to bully him. When I saw
that I decided to befriend him and of course it was easy to do so as we had the
Spanish language in common.
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| Me with Alvaro Mejía in the Clásica San Sebastián race . 1993 I think, also from my cycling photo archive |
I would often
find myself mothering him and realizing just how much he missed his native
Colombia I always looked him out and spoke to him. Then in the 1996 Tour of Spain which I was
attending, he crashed on a stage in Galicia.
No one from the team could accompany him to the hospital, so I did. I went with him to a nasty little hospital in
Orense and guess what? The radio commentators from Radio Caracol and Radio
Nacional de Colombia followed us. It was me they wanted to interview later to
report live on the medical diagnosis. I
can’t quite remember but I think he had broken his collar bone and of course was
out of that year’s Tour of Spain. At the
same time it meant he would be returning to his beloved Colombia to
recover. I spent the evening cheering
him up by telling him his Mother would be looking after him soon and in reply I
got a wan smile. I am sure yesterday
Alvaro Mejía was also very happy for Nairo Quintana yesterday.
The Tour de
France ends today and will be won by Christopher Froome, the second British cyclist
to win the Tour in two consecutive years after Bradley Wiggin’s win last
year. The Spaniard Alberto Contador, a
contender for the final victory, will have to be satisfied with a fourth place
which I am sure he is not. There will be
another Spaniard in the podium though, Purito Rodríguez, who gained more points
in yesterday’s mountain stage together with Nairo Quintana.
Whilst Contador
was licking his wounds after the stage, there I was with Eladio enjoying the
peace of our pool, with no visitors for a change or group of the girls’
friends. At about 20h, Eladio left so that
Fátima, our Moroccan home help, could enjoy a bathe with me, or rather a walk
down the steps in the shallow end as she cannot swim. It was her second
experience. Afterwards she told me it had
helped her revive from the stupor the fasting of Ramadan causes her poor body
in this heat – I mean 17 hours of no food or water from 4 am to 9.45pm can
hardly be healthy.
Later we went
for our walk and once home, although it was nearly 11pm, we decided to have
another dip in the pool before going to bed.
The evening swim is my overall favourite time to do so. It’s so cool and peaceful.
And today is
Sunday, the last day of the tale of this week’s blogpost. Olivia and her boyfriend Miguel were here
this morning for lunch. But now they have gone. Miguel has gone back to Valencia
where he works as a cameraman for Spanish TVE and Olivia has gone off to Galicia
where she will be reporting for her programme all of next week, La Mañana de la
1 (TVE). She has taken her friend Dave
with her and they will be driving all the way to Santiago in the north of Spain. We look forward to watching her live reports
on TV next week which always brighten up our days.
Next week will
be busy for me too with more projects coming to a fruition that I am working
on. I can’t wait for our holidays in
August and some mental reprieve. We had
booked a holiday in Cádiz in July but because of too much work this month I had
to cancel it. At the beginning of August
we will be off to Montrondo to join the rest of the family for the annual
gathering and later we will spend some time at the beach at our flat in Santa
Pola near Alicante, after which we are looking forward to a week in
London. These are all nice things to
look forward to.
Meanwhile I
have to slog a bit before that happens.
Whether you are on holiday or at work, I wish you all a great week
ahead.
Cheers till
next week
Masha
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