Death in London

An early start today to catch the 7.45 a.m. train at Salisbury for London to attend the Health Claims Forum. The car was covered in a thick frost with a temperature of -2 degrees Celsius. I arrived at Salisbury railway station with about 10 minutes to spare and met Nige from our Technical Claims Department on Platform 2. We were joined by Susan H and two of our claims assessors. The journey was uneventful and we arrive in London on time at 9.17 a.m. The venue for the Forum was a superb new conference centre behind the Old Royal Mint close to Tower Bridge. It was interesting to meet up with old colleagues particularly the former FP ones. The theme for the day's forum was death claims rather than income protection or health claims. We had excellent talks from the Essex Coroner and a leading overseas investigator in the morning. both were stimulating and entertaining. Following an excellent hot lunch, the afternoon session kicked off with my own presentation which seemed to go down well - it will be interesting to see what the feedback forms say! - and I received a good few questions afterwards. My PowerPoint presentation will be published on the HCF website in due course. Our train back to London was on time and I arrive back just before 6 p.m. I dropped in at Tesco's to get my daily free war film DVD - today it was Dunkirk starring Richard Attenborough and John Mills. Tom was proud to show off his new I-Touch and I was able to link it to the router to allow him to gain access with it to the internet. We had six people at our House Group tonight where we discussed "getting back to basics" on the lines of Steve Chalke's "The Apprentice" and questioned whether the church's hierarchy and bureaucracy were destroying the true message of Jesus. We had an interesting debate, also, on whether Christ's message was simply to reform Jews until it was pointed out that Paul had been sent out to "enlighten the Gentiles". Klynn stayed behind, as usual, for a glass of whiskey (yes it was Irish in case you are challenging my spelling!) and to discuss babble-speak in the workplace. Talking of the workplace, yet another one of our directors announced his departure from the company today and I have to be off early to Dorking in the morning.