Eiljert Gabbles On

Fearless Leader, Box-Ticking Account Guy and I headed off to a conference last week: the highlight of which was the breath-takingly vulgar hotel in which it was to take place.

“Your conference is taking place in The Astor Ballroom, just through The Warhol Bar” smiled the (very pretty) Receptionist. I held her gaze a while longer than necessary to see if there was a flicker of either humour or despair – but no, and so I headed off to the conference, gawping at the repellent furnishings (framed Warhol quotations over Warholised portraits of Warhol, lining the bar; a chess set the size of a billiard table, populated by chessmen the size of new-born children; lime velvet and claret silk abounded – and a general over-abundance of what appeared to be silver foil), and feeling my heart sink ever-lower.

My room continued the variation on a theme of vulgarity: black and silver bedroom, purple velvet and sparkling white drawing room, a shower with ever-changing coloured lights (but – OH JOY: a television IN the shower), but it was big and the bed was the size of a standard London garden, so I was fairly cheered by that.

Of course, the joy was not to last for long. Fearless Leader was in top form: excited and beaming because she was at a conference, and was thus able to inflict her ever-dwindling stock of stories on those of us who have already heard them a million times. Box-Ticking Account Guy seemed nervous and concerned, possibly because he was not in immediate proximity to an Excel spreadsheet, with a “To Do List” upon it. I took up my standard position by the coffee and proceeded to down astonishing volumes of it, as I scanned the room.

There is nothing to write of much of the conference: it was the standard combination of fucking around with flipcharts and goddawful ideas from people whose horizons are somewhat lower than their kneecaps. But there was a totally new kind of horror lurking: “the fun team activity”. I had clocked this on the agenda, and had already mentally Rolodexed through the possibilities, including the clichéd (but disappointingly elusive) “Building a raft to cross a river” and the more sedate “Constructing a statue out of Lego, through fleeting and very occasional observation of a master statue that has been constructed earlier”. This was so much worse.

“What we want you to do,” beamed the event organiser, with the sadistic smugness of one who is exempt from the task “is to create value. We want you to take a pair of plastic gloves and swap them with strangers to ever-increasing value. You’ve got three hours, and the team that makes the most money, wins. You have a pair of gloves, a driver, and five team mates. See you at 5pm.”

Of course, my first temptation was to say: “OK, clearly, we all put in a fiver of our money, go to Oxfam to buy something plausible, and then spend two and a half hours in the pub before we return, don’t we?”, but I was with that worst breed: enthusiasts. And so it was that an hour later I found myself walking out of a branch of Tony and Guy, looking amazedly at a hairbrush that they had given me in exchange for the Marigolds. My team and I broke all the rules of modesty, shame and propriety, and I hated every stinking moment of it – but worst of all was the knowledge that we would have to return and pretend to have learned something from the experience that we could take into our every day lives and careers. All I could think of is that I would have happily tried to gnaw off my own scrotum if offered that as a choice versus sponsored begging, but I didn’t feel that was going to fit the ticket, so I made up some arse toffee about” focus”, “learning by doing” and other some bumhole-clenchingly dreadful phrases, which were received with great enthusiasm as I knew (disgustedly) they would be.