Tag: Lars Schiphorst

Ten Days Spent, Primarily, Eating And Drinking, 15 to 24 December 1988

If you simply go by my diary notes, I spent the ten days in the run up to Christmas eating and drinking that year. What’s changed/who knew?

I’m going to be a bit light on details with several of these:

Thursday 15 December: Went over to Bobbies for dinner

I’ll guess that there were other people involved, but the diaries are silent on the matter, beyond the above information

Friday 16 December: Went to Ma and Pa for dinner

One thing I do remember about this visit was me gently but firmly letting mum know that, now that I’d moved to Notting Hill, I wasn’t suddenly going to be making Friday evening visits for family dinner a regular thing.

Saturday 17 December: Driving lesson. Annalisa came over for meal in evening

That was my second driving lesson in Notting Hill (I’d had one the previous Saturday). I think that meal I cooked for Annalisa that evening might well have been the first time I cooked for someone other than myself at Clanricarde Gardens. No idea what I cooked for her. There are some Thai recipes on my jotter but I can see, from the context of the other notes, that those were jotted after Christmas, probably after I discovered Tawana.

Monday 19 December: Driving lesson in evening.

My instructor in Notting Hill Gate was a gentle fellow. I remember his girlfriend (or wife) was an orchestra musician from East Germany and he spent much of our chatting time railing against the Honecker regime, little knowing how close we were to its demise.

Tuesday 20 December: Bobbie came over for meal in evening

This might well have been the first time I cooked for Bobbie at Clanricarde. This will have been a meatier affair than cooking for Annalisa and/but probably a simpler meal being an after work job rather than a weekend job.

Wednesday 21 December: Radius lunch in afternoon. BHMC [Binder Hamlyn Management Consultants] & drinks after work

I cannot remember exactly who Radius were, but I am guessing that they were a software supplier. That week, and the week before, I had switched away from Save The Children Fund (who wanted me to return to do most of my assignment in the new year, after their massive Christmas Appeal surge was over), so I joined colleague/mentor Lars Schiphorst at Holland & Holland. My guess is that I was brought in at that place to look at the financial/accounting systems aspects of a project long since forgotten by all involved.

Thinking about Lars, who, despite having to tolerate teaming with me on that assignment and others, went on to be a good friend for several years at Binders before he emigrated to Australia…I wondered if it would be possible to trace Lars 30 years later.

Yes. Thank you, Mr Google.

Here he is at the Australian Institute For Performance Studies in December 2018 – click here…

…or click here, where I have scraped the relevant page at the time, if you get no joy on the AIPS site above.

Lars Schiphorst – ludicrously still recognisable/barely changed all these years later.

Friday 23 December: Pub lunch with BHMC mob – little work after

The thing I remember most about that lunch was chatting with Geoffrey Rutland, RIP, who was especially friendly, welcoming and helpful with advice. He also turned out, strangely, like myself, to have been a former scholarship boy at Alleyn’s – although in his case a few years earlier.

Actually I remember everyone at Binders being friendly and welcoming that December – I felt quite at home in that firm quite rapidly, despite the fact that I knew I had been recruited as canon fodder in a turf war between a handful of partners.

Binder Hamlyn Management Consultants Christmas Lunch Virtually All Day, 14 December 1988

The headline captures the text from that Wednesday and that one sentence tells much of the tale.

The so-called lunch was at The Bleeding Heart that year. It is still a top notch place. Writing 30 years later, although I don’t go there all that often I have been quite recently:

Dinner With John White At The Bleeding Heart, 13 June 2017

But I digress.

Michael Mainelli had clearly made a special point of locating me near to his place. He conducted a rather unsubtle sort-of interview over the hours of the event. I had been hired despite Michael, not by him nor under his auspices, but while he was away on holiday for a week, somewhat in contravention of his request to the other partners not to hire anyone while he was away. So he was checking me out big time those first few months. History suggests I passed the test.

Reduced To Tears By My First Consultancy Assignment, 27 January 1989

I do also remember Peter Flory (who was my mentor on the Save The Children Fund project) “going off on one” afterwards, because he thought it inappropriate for Michael to grill me in that way at a staff party. It is my first proper memory of meeting Michael, although he is pretty sure we had a quick chat a couple of weeks earlier, when I first arrived at Binders.

I think I might have endeared myself to William Casey at that event too, by recognising and praising his choice of wine, Chateau Musar, which one or two less knowledgeable folk had been sniffy about, imagining “cheap Lebanese wine”. Oh no, this is (and was then) top notch stuff and a good food match too.

ChateauMusar1999

It clearly was a very lengthy and boozy affair. I remember little else about it. I would love to hear from others who might remember some factoids about hat particular occasion. We lunched at the Bleeding Heart for Christmas several times.