Right I’ve now been here a few days and now feel a little more normal…I guess it would take at least a week for the body clock to get use to the big time difference between the UK and the American west coast, luckily I’m here for two. A handful of people I work with fly here on a regular basis…I take my hat off to them as I’m sure it doesn’t do the human body any good. That probably also includes Ed Brill although I hear he’s banned from the state of Washington. So what’s the Seattle area like? Well the first thing to appreciate is that Seattle is a long way from anywhere else in the United States. Yes, Vancouver is about 90 mins drive away but as that’s in Canada for many Americans it doesn’t count. The locals are friendly but not in the usual pastiche of sincerity you see elsewhere in the US and for many locals they are as different from their fellow Americans as we natives of Blighty are from the French and Germans. The city is pretty spread out on around Puget Sound and Lake Washington so there are thousands of private boats, the mountains make for a beautiful backdrop too. One problem is that Seattle suffers from the West Coast car culture like LA and San Francisco and has no mass transit system thereby making you very dependant of having some kind a vehicular convenience. A rental car is a must if you intend to move more than a couple of hundred yards from the hotel and this is what a bunch of us did on Sunday, firstly to check out one of the outlet malls (it’s the cheap dollar again) and to see the countryside. If you live in this area you have to like the outdoors as there is a lot of it and only an hour from the city centre we stumbled on our first ski resort. As it was a warm day I could have gone sailing in the morning and skiing in the afternoon…now that’s fookin’ brilliant.