IoD

Many times I've travelled past on the bus, looking into the tall dark rooms covered in enormous paintings of minor royalty and admirals and filled with leather chairs containing stiff businessmen in pin stripes. Some kind of exclusive gentlemen's club I always thought.

I spent the day there today at a conference. The Institute of Directors has a strict dress code of no trainers or jeans because it is a place of business. And no mobile phones were to be used at the reception. Never been to a conference with a dress code before.

Its rooms were grand, detail picked out in gold leaf, pictures bigger than most of the rooms in my house. Chandeliers.



I thought the one in the Nash room was rather gaudy with its glass that split light into rainbows (not dissimilar to those that can be purchased from a delightfully tacky light shop on the end of turnpike lane) and therefore assumed to be modern(ish) in comparison to the one in the Trafalgar room and the hallway, neither of which did the rainbow thing and had more beautifully cut glass in a wider variety of forms.