Wednesday 30 March 2011

Our New Year Begins!!

Regular readers may well remember that 'we' run our event schedule based on the financial year rather than the calendar one....and with that in mind the new year is just around the corner and this weekend sees the start for the new programme of events.

So what can you expect this year??

Pretty much the same as last year as it happens, a mixed bag of this and that culminating with an attempt to expand and improve on the Christmas event, thus putting this back to the pinnacle of our event year as it used to be. As such, an amount of the experimental work over the year will be going towards not just trying to improve our understanding of things, but also trying out new ideas and planning for the Christmas event, which is our best opportunity for both trialling new ideas regarding food at the Court of Henry VIII as well as showing them off to you all.

This weekend coming will be a fairly simple affair with little in depth experimentation as we shall be having a film crew round working on another Historic Royal Palaces project, there is a need for them to record fairly basic processes without any of our "mucking about" getting in the way...so that's what they'll get....the usual broad mix of roasting and boiling, chopping and grinding and the guys doing what it is they do best...talking for Britain.

Easter, which looms large at the end of the month, will be a different affair....can't give details just yet as I'm still waiting for confirmation, but I'll let you all know ASAP. The very next weekend though (May holiday weekend) , the Palace has the theme of love and romance to tie in with the Royal nuptials on Friday 29th..yes it's an extra bank holiday, so lucky us, we get to work!! As yet, the only thing I know that we'll be doing is that Dave has been asked to make something romantic in sugar....no idea what, but I'm sure it'll be fine...as for the rest of us....the jury is still out there, not really got any ideas yet, but hey, it's a month away yet!

After that, we should settle down into a more regular and sensible plan of attack for each event, as soon as things are settled planning wise, I'll let you all know.

That's it for now.

TTFN

Friday 4 March 2011

House Rules

Ok, so I suppose this is a post with a little explanation in it, something to let you know why there has been a vacuum of silence of late I guess.

When I started all of this blogging a couple of years ago, I set myself some house rules that I would always aim to follow. In the main, they are of no great concern to all of you out there, they set out how I was going to layout each post and things like that. They also detailed what I would and most importantly would NOT post about.
Like a lot of people, I was always told that if you can't say something nice about someone, then don't say anything. My self set policy is to not report negatives or disagreements either within the team or within the organisation...that sort of thing is, frankly, nobody else's business and let's face it, that's not really what people want to hear...well not in our situation I'm guessing.

Over the last year or so though, there have been a much larger number of disagreements and problems that have either lead to bad feelings or operational problems within the setup that we operate in. What they are is immaterial, they are the sort of problems that any team that works so closely together experiences, they do however affect the way that I personally feel and mean that more often than not there has been "nothing to say" to you all....both figuratively and in reality. Painful as it is to say, the last thing I feel like doing a lot of the time is being positive and trying to find something worth writing as a blog post!

Now, I suppose the $64,000 question is, will the situation change in the future?

To be honest, who knows? The ideas that are being thrown around for the new financial year are pretty good and should make for an interesting year if they get approved....so yes, I expect to carry on boring you for some time to come, just how regularly I can't say. Will it get back to the way it used to be, lots of pictures of recipes and lots of cooking stuff...that I'm not so sure of..the pictures, probably not in the way that we used to, the recipe stuff, possibly but more likely if I can coerce others to do some writing for you as well.

So that's the situation as it is right now, hopefully this makes some sense of the vast periods of nothing from me, perhaps not. Please don't bother asking what the problems are as I won't be saying....either you know already or you won't, so don't waste time asking as a lack of reply may offend ;o)

TTFN