Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Monday 24/06/2002

Back from visiting my friends Julian and Tony in Belgium, where gin and culture walk unsteadily hand in glove. To my delight, the weekend marked their 8th anniversary of itemhood. Given Julian's previous rep as a wild child of the first order, you'd have got better odds for Henman to score the winning goal in the World Cup final, but there he is, plump, content and spoiled rotten by his partner (quote of the weekend: "Oh Tony, not quails' eggs and asparagus AGAIN!").

On the downside, the general state of the IT industry means he's at work not designing suites of splendid software as befits his talents, but hand-converting old code to fit a new database system. We'll know when things have really taken a turn for the better not when the various indices start twitching upwards for more than three Financial Times editorials in a row, but when people like Jools have the confidence to kick off some of their good ideas with the expectation that they'll still be kept in quails' eggs. And anyway, it's a better taste index of confidence than the Economist's famous Big Mac-based economic indicator.