It's 5:30 am today, and I'm in my downstairs bathroom brushing my teeth.
(For this blog, a toilet will be a bathroom, American style).
I'm heading to Germany for the last work trip of a year of crazy work trips—the craziest I've ever had.
My flight is at 9.15 am from Birmingham, but I now have to get in the car, queue for petrol, and then drive down a busy M42.
I then get to the airport and try to park in car park 1, which is prepaid, even though I won't find a space until the sixth floor. Then I'll get into the airport, and I've got priority security, which means there is a 20-minute wait in security instead of a 22-minute wait at the non-priority security.
Better than that, though, the next bathroom I stand in is the one in Birmingham airport.
I get access to the business lounge, which is great for me, isn't it? But it doesn't have a bathroom, so you go outside into the main area to the bathroom, and you wait for a cubicle (too much information).
As you're waiting for the cubicle, a guy comes out of his cubicle after about five minutes and shakes his head at you and says it's a mess in there, with that look of someone who went into a bathroom, which was a terrible mess, but had to use it anyway.
I decided to wait for a bathroom in another country.
I then have a revelation and realise there are other bathrooms in Birmingham on the other side, and I go to those, and it's worse, so I continue with my plan to go to a German bathroom instead.
It's amazing when you get to Birmingham Airport to realise how rubbish it is.
In the middle of that pedestrian concourse where all the gates go off are dozens of restaurants, packed to the brim this morning with people having fried breakfasts and pints of Lager or Prosecco.
There are literally hundreds and hundreds of people breakfasting there, so the rents for those places must be pretty high because they're making a killing, yet the airport will not invest in its bathrooms or even keep them clean.
When did we get to the point that shareholder value is more important than bathroom hygiene?
I just don't get it.
We queue for ages to get on the plane at gate 58; it's laughable.
Everybody who comes to join the queue asks incredibly, "Is this the queue for Frankfurt?".
And then we get on the plane, and the service is excellent (Lufthansa), and we arrive at Frankfurt, which is one of the biggest airports I've ever been at.
I walk for miles; then I go to the bathroom, which has an automatic door and three pristine cubicles. And it smells (not like a loo), and I wonder why all the European bathrooms are 1000 times better than all the British bathrooms.
The purpose of today's trip is to arrive at Mainz at the Hilton Hotel on the River Rhine and to do an hour-long presentation with two other guys to the board of the ITI.
From a distance out there, this seemed like a big thing. It seemed like a cool thing, and it seemed like something to be very excited about.
We're asking for money from the ITI board to develop the ITI Academy over the next 2 to 3 years into something very special.
But my late father-in-law, Mike, taught me a long time ago that when the hotel door shuts click, you're nobody, and that is, in fact, the truth of these trips.
This is effectively a voluntary position (although there is some reimbursement for these meetings in October, but it doesn't make up for not being at work).
And so, you have to reconcile the fact that you're trying to make a positive difference if you feel that's actually the case because, in fact, it seemed while I was brushing my teeth in my own bathroom this morning that it would have been a hell of a lot easier to stay at home.
If I'd stayed at home today, I would have worked in the shed outside and then seen patients in the afternoon.
The problem is that that gets to be boring or seems to be boring, and so the excitement from six months away of travelling to Germany to present to a board seems like something fantastic and amazing.
I was nervous, and it was exciting, but then I went in, and it was just like presenting to everybody else.
I could have been in the academy teaching a course or talking to my football guys on a Thursday night.
There was one member of the board who was a member of the Straumann Board, and he was very bored to be on the board and mostly sat on his phone for most of the meeting apart from asking a question at the end about making sure Straumann was protected.
It's an interesting world to be in this, and I do feel like we're making progress and making a difference, but it's fascinating to watch the dynamics of everything happening.
I will be part of the ITI Education Committee for the first time tomorrow.
Again, this looks glamorous from a distance, but now I've presented it to the board, it's less glamorous and much more functional.
I'll return on Wednesday (probably delayed through passports at Birmingham) and then back into the routine of work on a Monday in my shed, patients in the afternoon and back home by six in the evening.
From where I sit now, that seems wonderful, but soon enough, I'll be bored and try adding something else to make it 'more exciting'.
I'll never learn.
The needle returns to the start of the song.
Blog Post Number - 3591