Today has been another long one. It’s one of the main days in the calendar for OTC (over the counter) medicines in the UK with the annual conference and dinner for the OTC industry.

I’ve been in a dark room watching presentations and then on to a gala dinner, served up in the most formal of settings, the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane. The name Hilton has been terribly devalued in recent years, with Hiltons springing up everywhere that are no better than your average Holiday Inn or Radisson BUT this original Hilton is swanky. In fact, it’s probably one of the original swanky hotels in London, along with the Savoy, the Ritz and the Grosvenor House.

Each year, as I walk up to its front door and past the doormen dressed up in their uniforms, I think to myself ‘how can I be going in here’ and ‘this place is for posh people, not people like me’. The evening event is remarkable, it’s the only time I ever hear ‘grace’ said before dinner and there are somewhere in the region of 5-600 people all standing round tables, heads bowed while a dignitary says ‘grace’. As a complete atheist I find this ritual extremely bizarre, if for no other reason than the room is populated with probably 20-30% people of other religions and those like me who just shun the whole religious experience. Once the room is seated, the dinner is a five-course affair, appetiser, soup, main course, dessert, chocolates and coffee. Throughout the proceedings there is wine flowing and an after dinner port or brandy.

A number of speakers speak at the event, including the Chairman and the Secretary of the organisation and a paid after dinner speaker. It’s all very formal and very stuffy until after dinner when people can get up and move about and there is a bar and disco until 2am. I have learned through bitter personal experience, to book a taxi home at 11pm because staying till 2am is the road to ruin, both in terms of talking nonsense to people who you’d normally like to impress (and for some reason you think you will achieve this after a couple of bottles of wine) and in terms of how you feel the following day if you stay. I got home at 12.30am even from leaving at 11pm.

This year, the event was ‘enhanced’ by the footie. England were playing in Euro 2004 and needed to win the game to stand a chance of going into the next round. The PAGB (the name of the industry association) organised the day so there was a two-hour break between the end of the day meeting and the footie so my colleague and I sloped off round the corner to a real old-fashioned London pub to watch it away from the pressures of clients. It was good fun.

Today’s photo is the only shot I took and it’s a statue made from chicken wire in Waterloo Station’s Jubilee Line entrance. I’ve been looking at it for some time thinking it’d be a good subject for PotD and today’s meeting gave me that opportunity.

The Jubilee Line is a strange tube line, it’s one of the most recently built lines in London and has been extended Eastwards in even more recent times. Interestingly it was going to be called something completely different but due to the delays in its building and subsequent opening, it got renamed the Jubilee Line because eventually it was opened in 1977, the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Its original name was to the Fleet Line, so named because the line follows the path of the river Fleet, which flows under London in a concrete tunnel these days and out into the Thames. When I was a teenager, the line was being built and I’ll never forget travelling on the Central Line into London on many occasions and going slowly through Bond Street Station which was closed for the duration of the building of the new line. It was so weird going through a station with ghostly lights glowing in the distance but not seeing people, rather like this ghostly elephant guarding the entranceway.