I recently found myself on an early morning train to London. Aside from having to get up at a time starting with a four, an activity verging on the tortuous for an inveterate non-morning person, it was a tad unusual, ...
Barney has a new friend. When I say friend, it’s more of an enforced acquaintance. A bit like that weird cousin or creepy family friend who’s clearly a bit dodgy but we’ve had to tolerate and pretend to like so ...
If you’ve been on tenterhooks for the last few weeks waiting for news of the bantam’s fate (see 'The bantam menace'), I apologise profusely for keeping you hanging, but you can now relax and unhook your tenters as the wait ...
Our recent bank holiday weekend didn’t go entirely to plan. It started off well enough. Mrs Oz and I spent several hours in the garden, as planned, starting on our latest project, the details of which I won’t bore you with. ...
As you may know (I think I might have mentioned it a couple of times!), the beginning of February saw the official launch of my new book Practical Business Continuity Management 2, marked by an online get-together of around thirty ...
I don’t get out much these days. Global pandemics tend to curtail one's business travel, I find. Which is unfortunate for a couple of reasons, aside from the obvious one that pandemics can be bad for your health. Firstly it ...
The last few weeks have been quite busy - and, at times, a teeny bit stressful. I’ve prepared and facilitated four crisis management and business recovery exercises (two of which included actors and journalists and mock TV and radio news ...
A couple of blogs ago (see ‘It’s all geek to me’) I mentioned the fact that I’m not, shall we say, totally wedded to technology, at least not for technology’s sake. In that blog I also mentioned that I’m an aficionado of ...
Last year I had ‘one of those’ train journeys. I suppose it’s only to be expected when you’re travelling on a third world rail system. Like the one we have in the UK, for instance. Many of you will, I'm sure, have ...
I've just returned from a trip to the dentist. Not one of my favourite outings at the best of times, for reasons which I'll come to, but it had to be done. It started with a bit of tenderness in one ...
Despite waking again at three in the morning due to my body clock still being up the Swanny, day two of the conference went fine. The presentations were interesting and informative and I only suffered a couple of relatively minor ...
It would appear that my body clock has gone a bit haywire. Yesterday was quite a long day. By the time I got to the ironing episode (see 'Viva Las Vegas, part 2') I'd been up for almost nineteen hours, which ...
I've never been to Las Vegas. I'm going there soon and I'm really quite excited at the prospect. Not because I'm a gambler, I hasten to add. I have been known to buy the occasional lottery ticket and enter the office Grand National ...
The Osborne family has recently returned from a skiing trip in France, our first in four years (see 'Piste again'). Actually, for family, read family plus one, as this year we were joined by our lodger, AKA number two son's ...
I spent much of my time over the past few weeks in my own little world, largely oblivious to everything going on around me. No change there, some might say, but on this occasion I have an excuse. A small problem ...
I do a fair amount of travelling. It goes with the turf really, particularly as Evesham, where I live, being somewhat rural, isn't exactly a hotbed of business continuity consultancy opportunity. Much of that travelling takes place in my car. Most of ...
With increasing regularity these days I seem to find myself asking the question "why am I here?". Not in any deep, philosophical way, I hasten to add; rather when I've gone from one room to another then can't remember why. ...
Last Saturday was not one of my better days. Regular readers of my blogs (which, I have to admit, haven't been particularly regular lately, something I plan to address in the new year) will know that my chosen winter sport is ...
A few weeks ago the powers that be decided it would be a good idea to re-surface the main road that runs from the village where I live to just about anywhere I want to go. This was a good ...
You may be surprised to hear this (unless, of course, you've been a reader of my blogs for a while or are a member of my family) but I'm possibly not the world's most tolerant person. Particularly in the face of ...
This is a tale from the mists of time; from days of yore when it was difficult to get people interested in business continuity management and even more difficult to secure their involvement in exercises and tests (OK, in fairness, ...
Long time no blog! I've been a bit of a busy boy recently, with one thing and another and, as a result, I'm afraid I haven't had much time to indulge my blogging habit. I've half-written a few but haven't ...
They say that pride comes before a fall so perhaps I only have myself to blame. In my last blog I expressed my pleasure at taking delivery of a shiny new car (see "Pressure tested"), and very nice it is too. ...
If you've been reading my blogs for a while you may recall one I wrote a while ago ("Keeping it together") about my younger son's hockey goalkeeping exploits and the fact that he was hoping for selection to the under ...
After the day I'd had (see part 1) I thought things could only get better. Silly me. Unfortunately real life's not always that considerate and it clearly has a sense of humour, if a somewhat warped one. Suffice it to say that they ...
Yesterday was one of those days. In fact it was about four of those days rolled into one! It started at precisely 4.09am when I was rudely awakened by a loud but unintelligible shout from Mrs Oz who, as it turned out, was ...
In our family there's a phenomenon known as the "Thomas goodbye". Thomas is Mrs Oz's maiden name and the Thomas goodbye pretty much applies to everyone on that side of the family, whether or not they've changed their surnames through ...
A couple of weeks ago we reached a significant milestone in the Oz family history, when we transported number one son (number one as in the sequence in which they arrived, as opposed to any order of preference, I hasten ...
Warning : this blog contains bad language, violent scenes and images that some may find distressing. Particularly me and Mrs Oz! I'm starting to get a bit racked off now. I realise and fully accept that with the amount of hockey ...
It's been an interesting few days. If I had to sum them up in one word, I think that word would be "watery". Let me explain why. Large parts of the UK have experienced wet weather for a couple of weeks ...
Barney fans need fret no longer. He's here again. For those of you who aren't familiar with Barney, he's the fifth member of the Oz household - a two-and-a-bit-year-old Field Spaniel (not a Springer!). And for those of you who've read ...
It's finally caught up with me. I tried to ignore it and hoped it would go away but whatever I did it was destined to happen anyway. I was utterly powerless to prevent it. Resistance was futile. In the end I just had to take it ...
I've spent the past week hobbling about with a sore calf. Before you ask, no I haven’t branched out into veal farming or bovine veterinarianism (if, indeed, that’s a real word) – the sore calf in question is my latest ...
Sunday is cricket day for the Osborne boys during the summer. Last Sunday's match was away at Nether Whitacre, a lovely little village cricket club about an hour's drive from Chez Osborne. We set off with just about enough time to spare with the ...
At the weekend I bought a new toy and I've spent the last couple of days playing with it. The 'toy' in question is a chainsaw. Unlike other midlife crisis sufferers, I have no desire to buy a motorbike or a ...
Today’s schedule went something like this: 09:00 write post-exercise report; 10:30 call client to discuss forthcoming business impact analysis workshop; 11:00 write proposal; 12:30 conference call with client to discuss business continuity strategy; 13:30 deal with today’s e-mail mountain; 14:00 ...
I had a fabulous weekend, thank you for asking. It wasn't the usual, run-of-the-mill weekend of dog walking, cricketing, operating the Osborne taxi service or household chores, enjoyable as (most of) those things are, because this weekend Mrs Oz and I jetted off ...
Yesterday was, without wishing to sound overly dramatic, a momentous day for me. After a year and a bit of discomfort (and, prior to that, 30-something years of actually getting around to doing it) I had my braces removed and revealed ...
On Sunday, my wife and I took our dog Barney to Cleeve Hill, near Cheltenham for a walk. We had a very nice time, but it was ever so slightly marred by a minor altercation on our way back to the car. Now ...
Readers of my previous blogs will know that a couple of years ago I started playing hockey again, after a short break (of 20 years or so). I was roped into it by my sons when they moved up from ...
In my last blog I wrote about the trials and tribulations of working from home during a recent snowy period. What I didn't mention was that the hassle of trying to work from home amid the Osborne menagerie was compounded by a ...
I wasn't planning to write about Barney (our spaniel puppy) in this blog, but his antics last week sort of made it inevitable. Barney's rapidly approaching doggie adolescence and, as one of the books on puppy training that I read recently ...
My mid-life crisis, which has been bubbling away for a while now, took a serious turn for the worse recently. I was gutted to be asked to play for the veterans team at my hockey club. Some people's mid-life crises manifest ...
Last week was, to say the least, a bit of a week. It included a teenage son off school with a cold (a "man cold" that is, and we all know how serious those are), a visit to the physiotherapist for what turned out ...
My last but one blog ("A bit of a Barney”) featured our new puppy, Barney. He’s now had his various inoculations and is able to venture out into the world and a couple of weeks ago he spent his first day ...
I’ve been accused (a tad unfairly in my opinion) by a colleague of occasionally making somewhat tenuous links in my blogs between some of my personal experiences and business continuity management. So what on earth, you may ask, is the ...
I’ve recently returned to work after a two-week holiday – at least I think it was a holiday as it was extremely busy, for reasons that I’ll explain. We decided not to go away this summer and opted to spend the ...
A colleague and I recently facilitated a business continuity workshop for a client in Cambridge. It was scheduled to start at 9.30am so we arranged to meet at the client’s offices at 8.45 to set up. Because the journey can be ...
