Sometimes things just turn out nice, said no-one ever, seemingly, in recent times. Well I’ve come over all optimistic and positive this morning. I’ve been fulfilling the role of an IEL. You don’t know what that is? Shame on you. IEL is an Itinerant Executive in London. Obvs. Wandering around looking for a good spot to do bit of work before my impossibly inconvenient meeting. The meeting is inevitably held somewhere that’s nowhere near anywhere else. At a time that makes it unlikely anything else can fit around it, so it pretty much consumes a whole day.
But here’s the good bit. As I wondered how to fill the two hours before we begin, I remembered that one of my favourite restaurants is around the corner – Jamie’s fifteen. I popped my head around the door. The restaurant’s closed, doesn’t open until lunch time. Shame. But instead of telling me to bugger off, the nice people asked me in and offered me a table where I could do my stuff. So far so implausibly excellent.
It gets better. A restaurant, where the staff are doing lunch prep, turns out to be an excellent working environment. There’s just the right level of background music (and frankly it’s better than what we play at my office – don’t tell Simon). There’s a pleasant background buzz of people milling around being busy, but they’re not disturbing me. And from time to time, someone wanders over to offer me a coffee (which is excellent).
The fact that everyone here is impossibly beautiful also helps. Maybe I’m easily pleased. Or generally in an unusually good mood.
If I were creating a scene in a TV commercial or a corporate video to show cool young people doing general, undefined ‘business’ stuff, this is what I’d look to recreate.
This really is just rambling nonsense isn’t it?
The Aspidistra 