Hardly a recipe for the adrenalin-fuelled après-ski antics I'd envisaged.
I'd envisaged becoming an immediate expert, but the reality was more painful, slower.
I'd envisaged rainforest and Mediterranean areas, keen for it to be the greatest ever collection of plants useful to humans – a sort of cathedral to economic botany.
Having worked with [the Tories] at close quarters, I've been pleasantly surprised that they're not as I'd envisaged them". I remind him that he once described chancellor George Osborne as "out of his depth".
And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I'd envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.
"If I can match a rider's trajectory to what I'd envisaged, I've got complete control over them," he says, "so, like Hitchcock, I can take people through an emotional journey".
Sipping G&Ts on a private train isn't quite how I'd envisaged my first day in Benin, not least because, thanks to underfunding and lack of demand, passenger rail travel has as good as ceased to exist here.
Despite some frenzied speculation about the fate of the show, Tate did the first five previews with the aid of a crutch - an interesting twist on the blackly comic sexual fantasy scene I'd envisaged.
"It's not been surprising, no, and I'd envisaged an offensive tournament before we started," says Gérard Houllier, the former Liverpool manager who is working as head of Fifa's technical study group out in Brazil.
From early on I'd envisaged these voices as being attached to particular characters and stories, but also being temporally fluid, able to move between younger and older versions of people, between then and now, with youthful voices appearing in the mouths of elderly people, and vice versa.
