A CORPORATE DAY OUT

Long, long ago, in the days when I almost willingly actually went to things, I attended the corporate day out when this picture was taken. You can just make me out, despite my very best efforts to treat the image enough to protect the innocent from coming face-to-face with their dim and dismal pasts, all dressed up in my very best suit trying to hide behind one of the big cheeses right at the very back, my usual trick of just moving behind someone as the photographer says “cheese” having failed on this occasion, presumably because I didn’t think they were referring to me when they said it.

Before I found this picture, I had a vague memory of attending some kind of event, but I didn’t really remember what this event was in aid of, although the caption maintains that it was a “Long Service Dinner, 9th December 1994” so I suppose that I must have passed my five years mark at that stage, a five years, incidentally, that seemed to pass far more slowly than any similar period of time since. I’ve wracked my brains trying to remember the name of the hall the event happened in, to no avail, but there is obviously documentary evidence that I was there, but I suspect that I was obviously there because I had run out of excuses, or available annual leave, and someone had persuaded me that I really should go, that it would be in my best interests and so on.

Seeing as those stairs were about as high as I ever climbed on any corporate ladder, I would have to query that particular notion, but people have these strange notions about such things when you’re young, foolish and gullible. My own cynicism always got trumped by the “professionalism” card that has since been proved to be utterly worthless in those particular corridors of power, but I was malleable enough back then to be persuaded otherwise, although in later years I would be forced to leave such things as toadying your way up the corporate greasy pole to minds more suited to the task.

I also had a bit of a track record at ducking out of these events back then, magically finding that they clashed with a day’s leave I just happened to have booked. At another, previous and utterly compulsory event, I had once been literal enough to take the response to my utter grumpiness at having to attend quite seriously. “You can always bring a book,” they’d said. So I did, and I studiously read it throughout the “entertainments” that went on after the “official” bit. “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” by Harry F Saint. I remember that clearly enough, if little else of that day.

I never did like what I call “organised fun”…

I remember another ill-advised attempt to try to make grumpy old so-and-sos like me interact more with members of the sales team at a Christmas event at a large Chinese Restaurant in town. Instead of the usual - allegedly factional – approach, someone had the bright idea of setting up a seating plan that would integrate and intermingle us so that we’d all get to know each other a little better, perhaps not realising that that’s (possibly) not really the point when it comes to letting your hair down at a Christmas function. You want to feel “safe” enough to “relax” amongst people you know.

Well, you do if you’re me, at any rate.

Anyway, we duly took our allotted seats, and a sales rep sat down at our table and almost the first thing she said was “Shall we all play a game?” to which I replied “I don’t play games.”

That went well.

Anyway, back to that “Long Service Dinner”. As is the nature of these kinds of events, I don’t remember the meal, any of the conversations or the speeches, so I guess that, as far as I was concerned, that was money well spent. Heck, I’m not even convinced that I really remember the picture being taken, although we all do have enough of a general air of decorum about us for me to think it was most likely taken on arrival, so my mind was probably still gripped with a sense of impending social angst and not really paying much attention to the taking of photographs. Strangely enough I do remember that impending sense of doom filling up my soul as the coach approached the venue, much as I always did with these kinds of occasions, and, thinking about it now, I can vividly recall being on that particular coach, on that particular day, but not the arrival, departure or the event itself. That I think says a lot about how my mind works. After the whole thing was over, no doubt with a moderate amount of bubbly fluid whizzing around my system, we were dropped back at the offices at which I worked, and, strangely enough, of all the events of that day, I do most clearly remember my journey home.

Late on in the afternoon, we were transported back to the office by coach and decanted back into the street to make our many different ways to our various homes. Some, I’m sure, planned a night on the town, but I was already in the frame of mind most familiar to me, i.e. getting the hell out of there. A colleague of mine offered two of us a lift back to town and we gratefully accepted and during that journey, our benefactor announced to us that his partner was pregnant with their first child. This was in the days when I still had a vague understanding of the sorts of things you are supposed to say when people tell you such things and so that short journey passed and we were deposited at the approach to the railway station without my having managed, as far as I remember anyway, to put my foot in it.

As my remaining colleague and I walked along the approach to Piccadilly station, at around about 5.00 in the evening, one or the other of us, probably not me, said, “Do you fancy a beer?” Six hours later, after ducking into various drinking establishments about town before ending up drinking Whisky in the Station Bar whilst waiting for the last trains of the evening, my colleague placed me safely onto my own train and then headed off to find his own, but first he needed to find a telephone (a concept I’m sure that modern readers might fail to understand) so that he could tell his wife that he was going to be a little bit late.

That, of all of the things that happened that day, is still the thing that makes me smile the most.