Away Day: Dinner
Mar. 5th, 2009 10:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylAfter lazing around in the bath — I noticed, with a certain amount of guilt, a yellow ring left around the top of the tub by my stuff from Lush — I went out for a wander round the town. I can see now why my grandparents liked it. It reminded me of a slightly larger version of Kingsbridge.
I got back from my walk just in time for supper. Rather through luck, I ended up assigned to the least rowdy of the tables. Although, talking to one of the women from Brandscape later, I discovered that we'd actually be very well behaved — she mentioned that she'd worked at some corporate events where they'd had problems with people having sex in the corridors of the hotel!
Dinner was nice, although vegetarian menu choice was mushroom stroganoff, but the staff were very nice when I asked for something — anything — veggie that was free of fungi. After dinner, Alan Hinkes, the only British mountaineer to have been up (and down) all 14 mountains over 8KM, spoke about the challenges and risks of climbing. He mentioned how important it was to concentrate on the job at hand — he had film footage of himself almost falling off a couloir because he was intent on catching his buddy's decent on camera rather than watching his own safety — and how important it was to decide to cut your losses if things weren't going right so that you could live to fight another day. As he said, no mountain is worth a life and no mountain is worth loosing a bit of your anatomy to frostbite.
Official festivities were rounded off with a quiz which my table won by default, most of the more extrovert tables being blind drunk. We won, for the record, a bag full of chewy, E-number heavy sweets. I decided to call it a night at around half-ten, when some of the others started to settle in for what was clearly intended to be a serious drinking session.
I got back from my walk just in time for supper. Rather through luck, I ended up assigned to the least rowdy of the tables. Although, talking to one of the women from Brandscape later, I discovered that we'd actually be very well behaved — she mentioned that she'd worked at some corporate events where they'd had problems with people having sex in the corridors of the hotel!
Dinner was nice, although vegetarian menu choice was mushroom stroganoff, but the staff were very nice when I asked for something — anything — veggie that was free of fungi. After dinner, Alan Hinkes, the only British mountaineer to have been up (and down) all 14 mountains over 8KM, spoke about the challenges and risks of climbing. He mentioned how important it was to concentrate on the job at hand — he had film footage of himself almost falling off a couloir because he was intent on catching his buddy's decent on camera rather than watching his own safety — and how important it was to decide to cut your losses if things weren't going right so that you could live to fight another day. As he said, no mountain is worth a life and no mountain is worth loosing a bit of your anatomy to frostbite.
Official festivities were rounded off with a quiz which my table won by default, most of the more extrovert tables being blind drunk. We won, for the record, a bag full of chewy, E-number heavy sweets. I decided to call it a night at around half-ten, when some of the others started to settle in for what was clearly intended to be a serious drinking session.
