This is Your Brain in Leicester

Leicester used to be the place from which I caught a train to Hinckley. I spent so much time in Hinckley during 2008 that I developed a fondness not only for that place and its wide variety of cheap curries, but for the unprepossessing railway platforms of Leicester. One incident in particular stands out: I had just come on a Sunday night from enjoying a leisurely coach journey from Hinckley, necessitated by engineering works on the railway. The journey was so leisurely, in fact, that when I arrived on the platform I’d missed the last train to London.

I remember well the compassion of the Midland Mainline employee as she regarded me with head cocked in disbelief: “The LAST train to LONDON left TEN MINUTES AGO!” as if I alone in all the land had not memorized the timetable. I had to find a hotel room.

Now in those days I was living in London on £400 a month, something many people, including my friends at Her Majesty’s Customs and Immigration, thought was impossible. And I was living well, eating three meals and a TV time snack in a comfy room in a nice neighborhood. But even with what help my loved ones could give, the travel demands of my training were hard on the budget. Rent included utilities, so everything I had left after the landlady came around on Monday for 80% of my weekly budget was divided into a) food and b) everything else. Everything else often included a monthly rail journey to Hinckley for my Master Practitioner training.

So when I found myself facing taking the cost of a Leicester hotel room out of the bank, you might imagine my dismay. A lovely taxi driver drove me to a hotel quite near the rail station, where I negotiated a rate that made me feel a little better, and all was well, as usually happens, does it not?

So now Salad’s trainings are being held in Leicester, where I was for the past week. I had no internet connection worthy of the name, hence the lateness of this post. So I’ll say that Leicester was a great place to spend a week, that Carluccio’s and Mem’Saab offer a great menu for the price, and that the U.S. needs more pie shops. I ate most of my lunches and a couple of dinners from Urban Pie, and a fellow delegate, seeing me tuck in to my pie and mash, said “Oh, that’s so ENGLISH!” And so it was. And so was she; I was the only Yank in the room aside from our trainer.

Christina Hall has got to be one of the most amazing trainers in the world, and that sentiment was echoed by several delegates who had taken NLP trainer training with others at the top of the field, including from Bandler and Grinder themselves. The training was spectacular. When she’s through with me in July I ought to be able to teach any subject with a lot more skill and a lot more understanding of the learning process; when this is done I may actually have earned my “Jedi Master” title. I made new friends and continued old friendships, and made new understandings from previously-acquired knowledge, and ate lots of pies and mash. What else could one ask?