Graham Davies and Catherine Millar

Online grocery shopping is the way forward. If you haven't tried it yet, then it comes highly recommended. Simple, quick and convenient. Don't know what you have in the cupboard? Just get up and look - then go back to the computer and order it! Can't think of what to buy? Just grab a recipe book or look at suggested recipes and click on a few ingredients. Feeling super cheap? Browse ALL of their offers on a single page and have a cheapskate field day. Not got time to go to the shop and queue for hours with the murderers? Not read up on your Izzard supermarket queue strategy recently? Just forgetaboutit - book a slot, order a few extra bottles of wine to lower the cost of delivery and get over it. Just remember to be in when they arrive with all the delicious goodies!

In the UK you can choose between Tesco, Sainsbury's and Ocado. Ocado is a strange joint venture / partnership between Waitrose and a dedicated grocery delivery company. Although somewhat more expensive than the other two, it sells super-ponce stuff and operates from dedicated warehouses so you get the good stuff, not the mush left behind in the local store picked out by someone that resents your very existence. Sainsburys is cheaper and is a reasonably choice, but you have to contend with substitutions or missing products - they are getting better but this remains a problem for those of use that want pak choi at 10pm on a Sunday.

When living in California you tend to forget about the most basic of living requirements. Washing up and laundry dried in about 7 minutes (great if you ignore the canyon-like fissures that were your knuckles after a few months), light and sun almost came through the walls and there were normally about 4 open WiFi networks within range. In Manchester it seems that achieving all three is more tricky. Catherine and I spent a year living in a flat in a particularly leafy part of already leafy Didsbury. The converted nursing home had tall ceilings and windows but had obviously been shoehorned into a former janitor closet and as such was a compromise of space over light. Despite being North-facing, the flat got amazing morning sun (on those rare occasions when 400 feet of solid cloud were not in the way) and warmed up like a little beauty. All great and good - but I haven't mentioned yet that the total floor space was about 40 square metres - which means little until I say that the bedroom had about 8 inches on either side of a 4 foot 6 inch bed. So we had to move and move we did - all of 100 yards across the road to a flat about twice the size. Yay! Buy hold on a cotton picking minute. Have a guess how long it takes Tiscali Internet Service Provider to move our account these few steps? 2 hours? 24? 5 working days? No - try over 3 weeks!

Our last apartment was so small that the idea of a fancy espresso machine was simply out of the question. Add to this the fact that once you have used the 'Grunstein Industrial Coffee Machine', you can't really go back to consumer level machines. However, to achieve this level of coffee splendour you need to replumb your kitchen, have a dedicated cubic metre of space and have your coffee flown in from Costa Rica.

The Moka Express is a classic invention that I have often seen people, especially Italians, using but had never quite realized how genius it was. Unlike crappy filter coffee machines and those stupid plunger things, these sit on your hob and generate the high pressures required to extract flavour from your coffee. They are simple to use, quick to clean and do a remarkably good job of making a coffee. Clearly they are not superior to the real thing - but at 15 quid a pop you can't really go wrong. I use a 6 cup one to make two mugs of strong coffee.

Using these it turns out that the really major factor in making a good coffee - wait for the shock here - is the coffee you use. The difference is amazing. Try Lavazza for a compromise between expense and taste (Carte D'Or Lavazza Latte Macchiato Ice Cream is also delicious!). Don't bother grinding your own - unless you have a dedicated grinder that produces exactly the right grind size / consistency. You will probably go through coffee pretty fast, and if kept in a sealed jar you should be good to go.

Thanks Jed Needle and Maria Vogelauer for independently making me aware of these things.

For a constant supply of delicious, 'fresh' sandwiches you must suspend disbelief and try this one. Take a good quality, unsliced, malted brown bread and on the day of purchase slice it thickly, put the slices back together to form a loaf and immediately freeze in the original plastic bag. On the day of sandwich requirement simply take out two slides, add sandwich filling to the frozen bread, wrap in cling film and come lunch time you will have remarkably fresh sandwiches. Honest. In fact, freezing the bread and doing this gives fresher sandwiches than leaving the loaf out over night and making the next day. Some fillings tested so far are in here.

In related news - another top tip is to buy fresh Italian base pizzas and freeze them. These end up being much better than an bought frozen pizza. Don't ask me why - but there it is.

In theory at least, assuming exam disasters, I am through the first stage of the MBA. It has been quite a roller coaster ride so far and last September seems so long ago that it appears that my life is now being measured in dog years. Although 'Not Rocket Science', the course is rather intense to say the least, with endless group work, lectures, fancy jargon and almost entirely meaningless two-by-two matrices. Sleep has mostly become a memory, weekends generally merged into weekdays, the pile of textbooks and reading stands as tall as a small pony, my eyelids now have lines where no lines existed before. Despite, or possibly because of, all this hard work, it has been a fantastic experience so far. Here is a list of things that spring to mind that happened in the last 10 months:

• Outdoor team building and adventure weekend at Brathay
• Accounting, Economics, Corporate Finance
• Soft Management Skills and Personality Colour / DISC Profiles
• Community Project helping market Wythenshawe Hall
• Business Research Methods, Managing International Business Systems
• Marketing with Stephan Henneberg
• Management Information Systems, Operations Management
• Strategy with Gary Davies
• People Management and Organisations (PMO) with Richard Phillips
• The Minto Pyramid - presented by Barbara herself!
• MBAT - MBA Sporting weekend in Paris
• Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) Project that went on forever
• Project working on mobile marketing in pubs
• Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) Finals in North Carolina
• Meeting loads of other MBA students from around the world
• Presentations from CEOs and Execs of blue chip companies

In September I go back to school - or at least 'school' in the American sense of the word. Not satisfied with only 6 letters after my name - B.Sc. and Ph.D. - I'm going for the full 9 with the addition of an M another B and an A. Yes, that's right kids, for the next 18 months I will be heading back to student town to soak up an MBA at Manchester Business School. No doubt I'll soon be redecorating the apartment with the once obligatory Reservoir Dogs poster, wall hangings, traffic cones and preparing myself for a year of being unwashed and cheap. Or perhaps not.

Catherine and I hoped on a fast ferry from Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire for a few days break in County Wexford, Ireland last week. Her parents built a house near the beach in the late 70s in a remote area of Wexford up the coast from Kilmore Quay. The region is charmingly known as "Bastardstown". The place holds many years of childhood memories for Catherine but she hadn't been back in about 10 years. Despite some new houses blocking the view, the area still seemed quite remote and you normally had the beach to yourself. The weather wasn't conducive to lounging on the sand; instead we went to a couple of local attractions. Original 1975 maps and tourist guides of the area were produced and we were assured that little had changed apart from the addition of the N11, which had been carefully added in biro to the map. Sure enough Hook head, described by Catherine's dad with the immortal words "It's just a headland", still sported "The World's Oldest Lighthouse" and a miniature version of Tintern Abbey; unimaginatively called "Tintern Abbey". Johnstone Castle was convincingly castle-like and views from the lake and Rapunzel towers were pleasant enough.

The trip included many classic childhood adventures. A neighbouring kitten dropped by and insisted on attention, at one point I was witnessed running the kitten around the garden using a long piece of grass as a pseudo-leash|lead. The cattle grid did not disappoint either and soon enough was complete with a plump hedgehog that needed rescuing with an impromptu ramp. I was given a lesson in hurling by Catherine's dad and our regression to childhood was completed by indulging in kite flying, collecting attractive stones from the beach and being coerced into household chores like cleaning out the guttering and trimming the hedges.

Some photos of the trip are available in the gallery.

Catherine and I lived in California for a little over 4 years. In that time I can probably remember nearly all the individual days that it rained. For example, I remember that it rained on Halloween night 2003. It also rained once in April forcing us to have lunch indoors. It rained one weekend and I took photographs out of the window. Apart from that it was basically either sunny or slightly overcast with a haze. When we left I had forgotten what damp was, clouds were a slightly strange sight, wearing anything other than a T-shirt was for wimps and the worst thing you could say would be that you were a little too hot.

Returning to England, and Manchester in particular, was always going to be a shock. It turns out that Manchester flourished as a cotton town precisely because it was damp; its climate suited the mills. Arriving in April we were treated to glorious sunny days and long evening with new growth of trees and birds singing everywhere. We even had a nest of baby birds near our window; how bad could it be? How wrong could I be. After about two week of this the weather must have noticed that we were back and identified our rain deficit. Like a soggy tax collector it decided we must pay and pay we did. The period from May until now has seen more rain than ever before - or at least since records began in the mid-1700s. It will come as no surprise that it is raining now and that if I were to drive somewhere I would need headlines because the cloud is so dark - yes it is 2pm.

I have finally managed to conquer the 8 Gigabytes of photos from India and have annotated the albums to give some potted story of our travels. I'll not mention more here but encourage any interested parties to view the India gallery.

Life continues, this time in Manchester. More to follow...

Well here one is in India. We are into our second week now and have done a speed tour of Rajasthan (Filthystan) and are now heading South towards the Jungle. Everything has been a little hectic to say the least over the last few months but we managed to escape from Los Angeles having sold all our stuff and shipped the rest. After a quick dash to Manchester to find a flat that wasn't above a launderette and covered in light layer of filth (vomitarium) we randomly flew into Dehli with no particular plan whatsoever. A quick visit to the Government travel advisor suggested that the most sensible plan would be to go 'super posh' and hire a car-and-driver. This we did and we have now be luxuriating in a range hotels from the spectacular, clean and totaly empty (except us) Havelli - to some slightly less exotic ageing hotels. Still - when you look out the window and see a large expanse of filth-infested trash coverered in an extra layer of filth with a dead dog on the top you can't really complain too much.

India is certainly a land of extremes - from the rancidity of the open sewers often spring fantastic palaces and forts clearly once (or still) decorated in sumptuous marble and gems. Ridiculously ornate stonework has been everywhere so far and yet as soon as you exit the gate you are met by hordes of touts, 'guides', beggers, and people selling random crap. Anywhere where 'supertourists' (rich, old, Western, people) have been you will be asked for money or just about anything -- photos of them, empty bottles of water, spare shampoo (rub hair), pens (writing motion on hand), money (rubbing of fingers and thumb), money for watching shoes, money for going to the toilet, money for carrying bags, money for not carrying bags, money for entering the museum, money for bringing a camera into a museum, money for crossing a border, etc... etc... etc... Neyhi Dandayvaad (phoenetic spelling of No thank you in Hindi).