BLBG meeting 25th November – “State of the Nation”

Her Majesty’s Ambassador’s annual address to the British Lebanese Business Group (BLBG) is eagerly awaited and usually results in the best turnout of the year. Last night, over seventy braved heavy rain in the dark to get to “the residence” in the hills above Beirut, and they were not disappointed.

Rather than stick to the tried and trusted formula of describing the regional political situation, HMA Tom Fletcher first described the successes of flourishing trade between the two countries. Annual exports from the UK are now running at well over the half billion pound mark, with Scotch salmon, Scotch whiskey, high end yachts, British Airways and Perkins engines getting special mention. There has also been a dramatic increase in UK brands on the Lebanese High street, Lush cosmestics have just opened their third branch here for example. An historical parallel was drawn between the Phoenicians, (the old name for the Lebanese), and the British as maritime trading nations.

 

He went on to talk about increasing links in many other spheres before drawing inspiration from a recent Lebanese invention for measuring the human body’s vital signs. Worn on the wrist, the “Up”, as it is called, measures heart rate, number of steps taken, breathing rate etc. before regularly uploading them to a handy iPad. The rhetorical question posed was what would such an instrument show if put on Lebanon’s hypothetical wrist. Still alive and functioning but in need of external support was the net of HMA’s view.

The whole event was fueled with excellent canapés, some using one of Scotland’s exports mentioned above and lubricated, if one wished, with the other one, or, of course, with Lebanese wines.

An excellent evening, lively, informative and fun.

So, you had a bad day!

Yesterday the bad decisions started early. The first one was to get up at all. No, it wasn’t Friday the thirteenth, I hadn’t walked under a ladder or strayed across the path of a black cat or cut my nails the day before (Thursday for losses).  Given the myriad superstitions that my mother and grandmother had, I must have transgressed at least one and probably more.

The first discovery was that a document had gone missing. Desk turned upside down, draws and cupboards inside out for a half hour or so – nothing. OK, back track through when last seen and the little video in my head revealed a foggy image of a colleague picking it up at a meeting the previous day. I called him and, sure enough, “oh, I just borrowed it, I’ll bring it to the pub tonight and give it you back”. Great.

Later I set out for what I hoped and expected would be an enjoyable session of cards. The bad decision?  To take a quick power nap before leaving. Tournaments start at five, but at that time, I was still sitting fuming and fretting in an almost endless traffic jam. Late and stressed is not the way to succeed at anything and so it turned out, enjoyable as it was. Oh, and a “power nap”? It’s shorter than a “pensioner’s nap”.

And now to the pub. Warning! Bad decision coming, I took the car (no, that wasn’t it) to my usual parking lot in Hamra and let the car jockey do his stuff for me (that was it!).  Convivial Friday night atmosphere, lots of friends and acquaintances and the list retrieved. Happy hour slipped by. “let’s move on to another place down the road, cheap drinks, plenty of atmosphere and loads of history, it was open before and during the war”. “OK, let’s go”. A snap decision, and a bad one. If I’d left then, disaster might have been averted. Great atmosphere and time ticked past. Walked back to car park and waited for the car jockey to find my car key.

I became aware of pockets being turned out, tins emptied and cupboards searched. There followed a hurried conference between the car jockeys. Cars were then searched one by one and after half an hour they admitted that the key had been lost.

Now what use is a car without a key? I had no choice but to leave the car and get a taxi home. Now we’ll see if not going back until morning was another bad decision.

And when I got home, I realised that the retrieved document had gone again too, left somewhere while the key was being searched for.

Better to have stayed in bed.

PS today is better, car retrieved with spare key and document found in car.