Saturday 18th January 2025

I had an enjoyable morning, with a late breakfast, followed by time to catch up with some of my paperwork for Tea Leaf, plus a bit of time on my blog and my diary. I then popped into The Grand Hotel just for an hour, because I wanted to catch my friend Sajeevan, as he hadn't been at work yesterday. I had a quick drink, but Mahinda was playing his saxophone, and he announced that I was going to sing, so I just sang 'Imagine' again, only a bit better than yesterday.

I couldn't stay long at The Grand Hotel today, as I was meeting a group of Tea Leaf staff by the racecourse to go to a carnival at 16:00. We went in tuk-tuks to where the carnival was supposed to be, only to find that there was no carnival (and the weather was appalling anyway), so we then went back to Sky Heaven, as some of them were staying the night there. We got everyone's rooms sorted, then we all sat round chatting over a cup of tea, and laughed a lot!

The weather continued to be dreadful - it really was bucketing down - and we had been told that we would be meeting at Milano's at 18:30 to have a celebratory birthday meal for Tim Pare. We would have walked down, but the weather was so bad that we had to go in tuk-tuk or we would have been drenched. When we arrived at Milano's a couple more staff arrived, then we got a message to say that we weren't going to have dinner until 20:00 now, so we had rather a long wait.

It wasn't too bad waiting, as we all sat round a large table and chatted over a drink. Tim arrived with 4 guys who are working with Tea Leaf on the carbon credit side of the Cookstove Project, and we eventually got round to having dinner. The food was great, and so was the atmosphere and the company, so it was well worth the wait. I think everyone really enjoyed the evening, as it was a lovely time for some of the senior staff at Tea Leaf to chill out and have some fun.

Today's photos show the group arriving in tuk-tuks at the carnival that wasn't there, chatting over a cup of tea at Sky Heaven, plus a couple of the lovely evening that we had in the end at Milano's.





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