It was all very elegant and youssoupoffian

(Above): entrance to the Cafe Royal in Regent Street. The Cafe Royal became famous in the 1890s as a centre of literary London. Now it is mainly used as a conference centre.


Friday, and I went to the Café Royal for a committee meeting on an international exhibition the company is participating in. For obvious reasons I cannot identify too closely what the company does, but in one aspect it has international partners, and the exhibition (a first in this industry sector) is intended to draw attention to this international alliance. Having come into the planning of this exhibition quite late, it is not my place to be too opinionated on how it should be organised, but just sitting and listening to the plans I began to be alarmed at how ambitious the show was, how close the date was, and how little practical work had been done.

Mitch Holmes (Sales and Marketing Director) and I got to the Café Royal more or less on time. The meeting was held upstairs in a private suite (pale green, lots of gilding, walls covered in mirrors). About fifteen other people were at the meeting, and we had to wait about until the Chairman arrived (a senior civil servant, quite elderly: “My taxi driver foolishly got tangled up in the Changing of the Guard” he apologised).

There was an interminable session when the minutes of the last meeting were discussed, and then ritually signed off. The meeting itself comprised an endless number of agenda items with clauses and sub-clauses. Considering we were in the heart of the West End, no noise from outside penetrated the room.

Mostly I kept quiet and just listened during the meeting, only once making a contribution (there is to be a conference attached to the exhibition, and I suggested inviting a well-known columnist from the Financial Times to chair this conference). The Indian organiser of the exhibition (Mahesh Mann) gave a report on progress to date with choosing the venue. No-one seemed keen to volunteer for any of the tasks that the Chairman was giving out (he chaired the meeting in a very formal way - all remarks had to be addressed through the Chair, you couldn’t just talk to the meeting directly).

We went into an adjoining room for the private lunch. The waiter and waitress were both incompetent, but the food was very good. It was all very elegant and youssoupoffian (a word invented by Alan Nixon to describe situations where out-of-touch elites imagine they are in control of events but in fact are teetering on the brink of disaster - see Felix Youssoupoff, author of Lost Splendour).