The Christmas break gave me the opportunity to send out some change of address and e-Christmas cards, and hence catch up with some old friends. Being a bit of a programming geek, I did it from my home-made Visual FoxPro application, so if you are someone I missed, Happy Christmas!

One such old friend was David Trench, who did brilliant work in London in the 1990s rescuing the British Library from construction disaster and making the construction of the Millennium Dome (as it then was) a success. Working with him was a great pleasure, as is working with people with huge talent usually is; he introduced me to working for the UK Government which turned out, to my surprise, to be great: the people I came into contact with in central government were not Sir Humphrey at all, but smart, effective, pleasant and flexible (they wanted to know exactly why I suggested particular courses of action, especially if they were novel, but having got the explanation, they always said, “Yes, let’s do it”).

More recently, David has been much involved with the Designing Buildings Wiki, who have asked if they might pick up some material from this site, starting with my piece on pendulum arbitration and putting it into their format.  I said “yes” of course. It is a great initiative, and I am very happy to support it.