Sloth or leisure?

And do I care? Nope.

Good afternoon, all!

The weather, which seems to determine so much of life here, this weekend has been unstable, at best. Yesterday, it was drippy and chill. Nonetheless, I biked with an office friend who lives here in Leiden to one of the city's three swimming pools, paid EUR 49.50 for a season pass, padded to the pool (in the rain) and took three excrutiating steps into the water. After a half-lap, the water was fine and we swam several laps. The nice thing is that we were virtually alone in the pool. Biking home with soaked hair and damp everything else (it kept drizzling) was fairly nasty.

Today is lovely (and my primroses and hydrangeas are revived by the rain) and while not warm enough to sit outside in the sun, I've put two big chairs by the southern window of my living room, added cushions, a fuzzy throw, my mother cat (Lady Alice Elgar), my coffee, the laptop and a delicious little book by one of my favorite small authors, Alice Thomas Ellis, who for a long time wrote a column in "The Spectator" called "Home Life". She is incisive and very funny. The little book is called "A Welsh Childhood", and since I know almost nothing of Wales, I'm eager to read it. I call this well-spent leisure, but it does feel a bit like sloth.

My trip to Lebanon on the 29th still hangs, looking more promising than it did a week ago, but still uncertain. I long to go.

Perspective is all, isn't it? I read in my firm's e-mail this week that our firm was rated #1 law firm in Europe this year. 'Wow', I thought. This being my first truly global firm, I'm still amazed to see ratings like that. Such ratings are compiled by various means: size and number of transactions, mainly (I think), so if that's the case, we're still riding the wave of the Royal Bank of Scotland/ABN AMRO Bank deal (the biggest in banking history), with which I had nothing at all to do (fortunately; it was a killer). It's interesting: in U.S. firms, lawyers are always urged to "cross-sell" to clients, which means to show clients how practice areas in addition to one's own are able to help client needs. In reality, this is tricky, since lawyers don't want to lose a penny of client business to other lawyers, even within one's own firm! However, in my global firm it's taken for granted that other lawyers and other offices of the firm can help clients, since the clients are also multi-jurisdictional ("cross-border" is the term). Most of our interaction so far has been with the London headquarters office, but this is beginning to shift, with regular communication with Paris, Frankfurt and Duesseldorf, Moscow and others. Such range provides for all sorts of help -- usual (tax advice in various countries) and unusual (other than translation from unusual languages to English, I'd better not say). When the phone rings, though, the caller ID often is hard to figure out, instantly, so one tends to answer in English and not Dutch.

The afternoon wears on and the sun shifts, so I'm off to enjoy "A Welsh Childhood", which is far from sloth!

'bye for now,
Pamela