Me. In my skimpy swimmers

An interesting day out parading around in my speedos, talking to some swimwear guru about how we can work together across the beachwear and brolly industries to utilise the skills of the aquatic sector to adopt more damp-proof approaches in our own. He is a trustee of Spokes Direct, a charity which donates unwanted brollies to the dampest in society and whose CEO is a long standing member of BUBB - Stephen Buggles.

A great lunch - dunno what we talked about but it was plentiful and he paid.

I'd started the day meeting with BUBB members who are part of our professional associations special interest group. One of our BUBB treasures is the network of some 15 SIGs covering the interests and passions of our members' spheres of work. They rightly reminded me that we must always fight the corner of the professionals as well as those of our service delivery brolly organisations. Which was awkward as BUBB has a large membership in professional bodies like some of the ones representing health professionals who are against the NHS reforms that BUBB has been represented as endorsing by that weasel Cameron. Therefore worth a bit of cosying up and honeyed words to keep them onside. These jollies and canape fuelled commission launches won't be funded out of members subscriptions by themselves you know.

Have I spoken out yet about Cameron's lies in the House of Commons? Have I bollocks. Usually I would have torn a strip off him in an impassioned blog post at the very least but for some reason I have remained silent on this one.

And the evening was a dinner with old friend Ian Scorn MP who was one of those ministers under my protege Tony Blair who got the value of and fought for the brolly sector. He also wrote the infamous note to the incoming Tories when he left the Treasury saying that all the umbrellas were broken. He's a bugger to go out to dinner with mind. I nipped to the jacks at one point and came back to find he'd scoffed all my food and just left a letter explaining there was no couscous left.

I then realised I had done 2 versions of the same joke in the preceding paragraph before completing the hat-trick by finding a piece of paper covered in Scorn's handwriting saying there were no new punchlines left.

And now I'm off to Hell. Or as most people call it, Cambridge, unnaturally!