Last week, the Broken Glass (the
post-modernist conference centre adjacent to the Toppled Bollard public house
and family boutique) hosted a highly charged (i.e. £840 per ticket) conference
on Direct Mail, Sustainability and the Environment.
As a well-known commentator on the topic, I
was invited to share my thoughts from the platform, and I accepted on the
grounds that the fee offered would indeed do quite a lot for my long-term
sustainability.
The organisers co-operated by offering me use
of their private jet to fly me back from Delhi where I had been doing a bit of
self-sustaining by advising an ensemble of itinerant mining executives on the
economic advantages of getting haute couture gowns made in the Khan Market just
behind the mini-mart that sells imported veg next door to Dr Siddharta’s dental
surgery and travel agency.
As an extra reward for this interruption to my
normal routine, I was offered a luxury lifestyle-enhancing patio heater in
olive green. A nice touch, I thought.
The resultant event was magnificent even by
Bollardic standards, with sausages and black pudding washed by Portuguese 2006
Chateau “Webeatyoufairandsquareonpenalties” left over from a cancelled wedding
two weeks earlier. The pudding was Baked Alaska, introduced as an appropriate reminder
of the melting ice caps to which the conference was dedicated.
Sadly, it was at the moment of the serving of
the aforementioned dish that disaster struck.
Billy “the dog” McGraw, the Bollard’s publican and something of an
aficionado of the “final course”, was so incensed at the sight of his pud
melting under the glare of the arc lights, that he charged onto the platform
and demanded that my fee should be used to buy the Broken Glass a new deep
freeze. The policy change was quickly agreed (I being the only one to vote
against) and within a trice the old fridge was loaded on the back of Billy’s 4
x 4 ready to be shipped to foreign parts where it would be refurbished before
being reintroduced into the community.
Tony Attwood
PS: I am told that next year’s conference will
be held in Bodmin, but I personally think I shall decline any invitation, to
allow me to return to my forte of helping the universe attain enlightenment
through the achievement of higher response rates in shared mailings. Send me a
copy of your promotion and I’ll cover it in meringue.