At the end of July we had the great honor to be the guests of a member of the court of the Worshipful Company of Marketors at a dinner at The Mansion House by the kind permission of The Rt. Hon. Lord Mayor of the City of London.
Slight step back...contained within what most people know of as London are several communities - think the five boroughs of New York City. One of them is The City as also known as "the square mile." It is the "Wall Street" of the United Kingdom. What makes this part of London particularly special is that its various Liveries (historically representatives of the business community) of the city hold elective power and elect the Lord Mayor who serves as a combination head of state/chairmen of an über Chamber of Commerce.
The Mansion House is the Lord Mayor's official residence and is described as a grand Georgian town palace. An accurate description.
One of those Liveries, which I think can also be referred to as Guilds - at least they'd be closely related - is the Worshipful Company of Marketors and each year, each Livery or Guild hosts a dinner.
The Egyptian Room at The Mansion House, where dinner was held brought the dining hall at Hogwarts to life. It looked just like it did in the movie, but with much fancier, or should I say posher, place settings, but I'm ahead of the story.
We arrived at The Mansion House and after clearing security (no cameras allowed) we were invited upstairs to observe the admission of new Freeman to the Company. Afterwards we queued for the receiving line. The trumpeter read our names from our invitations and we were presented to the Master and his wife and then through the rest of the receiving line. Did I mention that there was in the neighborhood of 300 guests these people had to greet?
There was a brief champagne reception with wonderful music provided by the Redbridge Brass Band Quintet, who also did the fanfares, yes, real fanfares. After the reception we were called into the Egyptian Room. In true formal dinner fashion we were seated not as a couple but split up so that we could meet new people.
No sitting yet though. Fanfare and then the entrance of the head table - which consisted of 32 people - during which we clapped throughout the procession. The food was excellent and the service was fun to watch. They would stage at the back of the hall and then somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 servers would march and clear. They would then gather plates and stage to serve an entire leg at a time, knowing precisely who had the fish, the meat or the veggie plate. As you can tell my the menu, the wines, port and Armagnac were very nice.
After dinner we participated, along with everyone else, in The Ceremony of the Loving Cup. I also had my first official toast "to the Royals". After the Lord Mayor spoke, we had a great presentation by the Country Manager for Tata Consultancy Services in the UK.
We met all kinds of lovely as well as great and important people. It was an awesome opportunity to do some business networking while enjoying interesting and entertaining people all in what I think was an incredibly proper British way.
