Tales of customer service

Wenge and I went to Frederick's on Friday night.  Hidden down Camden Passage in Islington, it's a conservatory-like room, and features the kind of service that makes you feel special but not suffocated.

After a tartiflette starter I went for a cote de boeuf, a ribeye on the bone that should have been bursting with flavour.  It was OK but not as good as I'd have expected, so I ended up leaving quite a lot of it on the plate.  When the waiter came to take our plates away he asked if there was anything wrong, and I explained that I was disappointed in it.

No sooner had he taken the plate away than one of the management came to send the chef's apologies and to tell me that they wouldn't change me for it.  The desserts, when they arrived, were exceptional as was the gigondas that the sommelier had recommended to go with our meal.  So we'll definitely go back.

Contrast this with Ministry of Sound's favourite caff, Terry's.  I took Brian there on Thursday as he'd never been but had heard all about it.  As we walked in, licking our lips in expectation of eggs, bacon, cumberland sausages, chips, beans, mushrooms and the rest, we were met by the boss who casually informed us that he wouldn't be serving fryups today.  I thought that maybe there was a problem in the kitchen but no, the reason Terry's weren't serving fryups was that they had too many dinners and wanted to use them up.

A restaurant that won't serve what's on its menu?  Ridiculous.  But we'll also be going back to Terry's, no question...

Good times

I haven't written a great deal about my days in the corporate communications and live events industry - probably because to make sense of many of the stories you kind of had to be there...

Paraphrasing 5 years, I ended up forming a production company that produced conferences and various live events for clients such as Dixons Group, Virgin, Universal and others. My partners in this crime were Simon and Helzo, and during this time we became about as close as any working colleagues could be.

Being a small company, in the high pressure environment of live events was tough. It was exciting, sometimes it was scary, very often it was fun. A lot of fun.

In the end, it was us against the world to produce results that clients would appreciate and we could be proud of. I'm pleased to say that more often than not we achieved that.

So last night, meeting with Helzo and Simesy, dusted down some great memories. Some of the stuff that we went through is for us only, but maybe I'll share some of the classic moments in another post.

Good times, and a great night.

Still good...


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A painful walk home

City of London from Alexandra Palace

To get home from work, I take the tube and then the train to Alexandra Park station. It's then a 15 minute walk up the hill and round the Palace to my house.

I've remarked before how stunning the view can be - the whole of London spread out before me in all its splendour.

My walk home on Tuesday night was unremarkable. A cold, clear night meant that the vista was at its most impressive, but unfortunately for me it wasn't the city view that was taking my attention.

Sadly my colleague Claire had lost her grandmother the previous day, and had been off work. I texted her to find out how she was, and as I was walking along with my eyes on the phone - BAM!  My first thought was that I'd been mugged, but I realised very soon that I'd just created a comedy moment by walking straight into a tree.  A big bugger at that.

The tree (pictured) stood right in the middle of the pavement, but to be fair to it, it's been in exactly the same place ever since I've been in London so I can't really say it was malicious.

Anyway, the result was that I walked into my house with blood flowing from my cut nose, and I've now been called Mikhail Gorbachev on more than one occasion.

Don't try this at home...

I write this on my way home from a night out with the team - so already that's a warning for you. We've done that before and come unstuck, haven't we?

Somehow the subject of melvtopia came up during the evening - some of the team had read it, others hadn't.

It got me thinking about the balance between writing for yourself and writing for an audience. To be honest, I've always been somewhere in between - I blog stuff that I enjoy writing, but also in the hope that others will get something from it too.

I've had varying degrees of success, and it's often been driven by circumstance. While things were all going wrong at zavvi, I found a ready source of blogging topics and an audience that could relate to what I was writing. Bad times but good raw material.

When my good friend Stewart, a proper writer, told me it was time to get over the zavvi stuff and move on, I looked for new inspiration and found it in friends, sport, work and good fortune. There was some good stuff there, though I say so myself. But I assumed that the only people reading were those that had followed me from the early days.

How wrong I was.

Over a number of months the balance shifted too much in the direction of personal - to the point that I was sharing my innermost fears and problems not just with a few old friends but with new followers including some of my colleagues from work - who probably didn't particularly enjoy reading about how difficult I was finding it to settle at Ministry.

Thankfully, being the brilliant colleagues that they are, a quiet word alerted me to the situation and no harm was done. One day I might publish the posts that were rapidly removed from melvtopia...

But it's harder to write without a target. Dan, another friend who really does know how to write, sent me a quote from Samuel Pepys, along the lines of "a happy man does not keep a diary".

On balance though, I think it's better to be happy than miserable, even if the blogging might suffer as a result. If I want anyone to read melvtopia it's up to me to find sources of inspiration.

So to readers old and new, I'll give it my best shot, and if all else fails I can just keep writing about writing...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Class will out

Forget all the talk about Ronaldo, Rooney, Kaka, Messi and the like. Does any of them have a Player of the Decade award?
I thought not.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone