30 September 2015, 12.30 pm
Unlucky Gary and I go for lunch. It is almost exactly a year since he joined CIPA and I figure if he thinks too carefully about this he might just leave. So I treat him to a bowl of pasta and a diet coke, to say thank you for everything he has done to help me keep my life on track since I became President. I fear it is scant compensation for what he has had to put up with. I consider asking him why he sighs a lot. But actually, it is obvious why he sighs a lot. He works opposite Mr Davies and next to me, and the only thing I have ever done to help him is to make a mug of tea now and then. He receives approximately 12½ emails per hour from me, averaged over any 24-hour period, and about the same number from Mr Davies but with more swear words in. I think I would sigh a lot too, if I were Unlucky Gary. 30 September 2015, 4 pm One of London’s most unfriendly taxi drivers deposits me outside the hotel where CIPA Congress is to be held. His idea of customer service is to flick the “boot open” switch from the comfort of the driver’s seat and hope that someone else will remove my ten-ton suitcase for me. Or perhaps his idea of customer service is that it is a bad idea. He is already miffed that I asked him to help me put the ten-ton suitcase in the boot in the first place. I think he would have preferred me to strap it to the roof bars for him instead. The hotel is a posh hotel – although obviously not as posh as my son’s new student lodgings – so I am looking forward to relaxing in my room for a few hours and practising my speech for tomorrow. It turns out, however, that the posh hotel is not quite posh enough to have a functioning booking system. So although there is a room ready for me to relax in, they do not know which one it is. They do not know who I am or indeed whether I am booked in at all. They can do nothing. The hotel is, at the moment, less a hotel than a rather posh waiting room. I wait. The concierge has my ten-ton suitcase, which he has promised to bring straight to my room, except nobody knows which my room is. There is no wifi: the staff think this may have gone down with the booking system. There is no mobile phone signal either, although to be fair, this happens pretty much everywhere I take my phone which suggests it may not be entirely the fault of the hotel. In the lounge bar, they are playing background music of the type designed to emphasise the passage of time: a kind of fatuous metronome of bass notes. I am not a happy bunny. I have to go to a drinks reception tonight and I will need at least two hours to make myself look presentable for it: I am already trying to decide which parts of my beauty- and skin-care routine can be ditched if I am only found a room half an hour before having to leave it again. I think I can probably dispense with the bit about squirting on perfume and the bit about ironing the dress that’s been screwed up in a ten-ton suitcase since this morning, but probably not the bit about deodorant.
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