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I didn’t get to the Expo yesterday, in the end. Instead, I spent the morning in the officeI didn’t get to the Expo yesterday, in the end. Instead, I spent the morning in the office, signing off pages, and then headed off to the Hurlingham Club for rehearsals after lunch.

It’s a fantastic place, with a history that stretched back to before the Norman invasion, when the land on which it is built belonged to the Bishops of London. During the Second World War, it was used as a staging post for barrage balloons, and so was bombed 27 times. In between, it’s been the home of the governor of the Bank of England and the headquarters of polo for the British Empire, and is now a private members’ club.

It’s also the perfect venue for a party.

The afternoon flew by. It was six in no time, and I’d been to the hotel and back to change, and was drifting around the club’s grounds with a glass of champagne waiting for people to arrive. The whole place seems to be a mesh of tennis courts, but if you stride out across the rear lawns you find yourself on the banks of the Thames, looking across at the posh yuppie flats on the northern bank.

An hour later, there was about 400 people to share the place with.

My piece was mercifully brief. I wrote my own speech (and the rest of the script) so I could concentrate on shaking hands and drinking wine and doing a lot of smiling along with the rest of the team.

Dominic Holland hosted the rest of it, and was very good. I only had to do my Sale of the Century modelling bit for the charity auction.

I had a fantastic night. As things drew to a close at half two there was still a good couple of hundred people there, which is perhaps a benefit of holding the party outside of central London, and about half of them batted on after riding the bus back to town. I’m afraid I wimped out, along with the rest of the editorial team, and was in bed by three. Exhausted, but happy.

Except my bed was distinctly damp.

It still felt wet when I woke up this morning, which made me feel creaky as I stepped out and into the shower.

So today, then, was spent in Olympia at the Expo, flitting between our hospitality room and our stand. It’s always better than you think it’s going to be, and certainly being an exhibitor is better than being a general drifted mooching around the show floor. Particularly as you always have sandwiches, crisps and beer in your hosiptality room. I munched my way through too much unhealthiness in the eight hours we were open.

It’s just a shame it was all the way over in Olympia, which isn’t the best place for journeys. It took more than two hours to get home, sharing the tube with three kids bragging about the fact they didn’t have tickets, being pushed back through the ticket barrier at Chelmsford as I was trying to exit the station, by another fare evader coming the other way on my ticket, and then getting into an argument with the bus driver who insisted on charging me more than the advertised fare.

I’m so glad it’s time for the weekend.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 28th, 2005 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.