Birthday Dinner Surprise At Simpsons

Birthday Meal Choice

I wanted a birthday dinner at a place which makes a big fuss and effort for birthdays, photos of the birthday group, the words happy birthday in chocolate around the dessert plate, a candle on the dessert and the Happy Birthday music or a fanfare as the spluttering candle comes in through a darkened room and everybody goes quiet looking at it. But my family said the quality fo the food comes first, rather than an American cheer leaders atmosphere, and we'd tried Indian last year, so this year our birthday boy, who likes steak (to make a change from the lunchtime pizzas, afternoon dimsun,and evening Indian meals delivered while working.late. .When I phoned the restaurant I found out that the booking was listed in the father's name, but thinking that they might write the name on a plate or cake, or sing happy birthday to you to the wrong person, I made sure to tell them the first name of the birthday boy, In the event there was no writing of a name, and you could not hear the name during the singing. I'd thought of asking if they could address the birthday boy by name, and wish himhappy birthday on arrival. No need. But that would have meant another phone call and we were rushing out. However I was very pleased the wine waiter or amitre d greeted the birthday boy by name soon after we were seated - (ensuring that later the dessert with candle was placed in front of the right person). Our birthday boy was quite impressed and astonished and pleased to be addressed by name by a complete stranger.

Booking
We booked through Top Table. Most of the lastminute.com deals were for early or late evening and this place was what we chose instead. The advantage was that you do everything on line . The disadvantage is you don't get given a phone number and can't ask about parking or say that it's a birthday. I phoned them up and said it was a birthday and they promised to put a candle on the dessert.
The venue is one large room. The ceilings are magnificent. The tables were rather plain, white cloths with silver cutlery, plain glasses, and a pink rose head in a small goldfish bowl.

Greeting

No chance of you walking in unnoticed. The reception is in the hallway or foyer in front of the dining room. A chair and newspapers in the hall occupy you if you wait for your driver to find a parking place..
Starters and bread. The toilets are immediately outside on the ground floor - no danger of losing people or sending the elderly up or down flights of steep stairs. this must be a blessing for ladies in tight skirts and heels as well as portly gentlemen with a huge paunch but a tiny bladder.

Dress Code

Knowing it was a traditional and formal atmosphere I'd tried to persuade my menfolk to wear ties. Several men were wearing ties, one in a dark shirt and white tie - I'm not sure what kind of style this is, 1940s and before my time, Mafia from a village I haven't visited, or some art school idea of contrasting plain colours making a statement about one's colour co-ordinationg, the drama of contrast, or simply a deliberate or unconscious use of the tie as a male sexual advertisement.But the other men were smart casual in black jeans or trousers with dark shirts without ties..the ladies were mostly understated, though one was dressed up in a fetching diagonal top off one shoulder iridescent purple satin cocktail dress.

Room and table layout and seating

the room is large and square, reminiscent of a school or university dining hall with square or oblong tables in rows. tables for two are along one side, beyond the piano along the left as you walk into the room, talbes for two, four or more in lines in the middle, more private pew seating along the right hand wall for three or more. On a Saturday night the place was full. I imagine that all the table were booked and they had either filled all the tables or arranged things so that the right number of tables and chairs were set out.. Our table for three had two on one side and one chair on the other with the place setting in the middle so our birthday boy could face both his parents equally. Better than the usual system which has the third person taking one chair, blocked by an empty chair - although an empty chair can hold a handbag.,

Wines

For the heavy alcohol drinkers lots of interesting choice all the way up to famous wines from specific years costing three figure sums. If you of you is driving or on medication which doesn't mix with drinking, they have a non alcoholic drink. If a couple drink a mixture of reds and whites you can get a house red by the glass and a rose wine. BUT nothing sparkling or sweet. I was disappointed to get only a pleasant looking rose wine. I would have liked a pink sparkling wine or a prosecco for a celebration. Maybe they think you'll order champagne for celebrations. Not necessarily at their prices. Not necessarily if only one person will be drinking it. Although it was wine by the glass they showed us the bottles before pouring it, which ensured we got red or white and neither we nor they had made a mistake, and that we were happy with the colour and label. .

Bread and butter

Bread, white or brown, and butter appeared immediately. We went without a starter to leave room for the main course and dessert and the chef sent tiny cups of soup as an amuse guele.

Starters

We passed on these. If you have them of course that pumps up the price. We wanted to leave room for desserts. for some reason restaurants don't serve cake but put a candle on a dessert. One could equally well put a candle on a piece of bread roll at the start and enjoy having a birthday all evening not just at the end.. People at the next table had smoked salmon. The plate had lemon wrapped in white muslin so that the pips don't fall on your food.

Main Courses
The signature dish is the beef on the trolley, dome removed, meat carved off the bone by a chef in a tall white hat. We did not have an alcove because they were all taken reserved. But it was very jolly being in the middle of the room and seeing everything all around you.

The main courses were great with interesting vegetables. The purple sweet and sour savoy cabbage was unusual, colourful and so tasty and more-ish. My chicken dish sounded unexciting but I Was glad to have proper pieces of chicken, not the fashionable whole baby chicken so you have to distractingly drag slivers off the poor baby chick's tiny bones. the chicken was accompanied by tiny round onions and the most delicious rillete, a circular slice of what seemed to be solid potted meat mixed with walnuts. Everybody wanted more of that. Exquisite taste and texture.

I had found the menu on the Simpson's website and was able to decide what I wanted in advance. I had also printed out the dessert menu with the words Happy Birthday at the top.

Desserts

The dessert menu on line was slightly different. Presumably desserts up are updated seasonally. But the website is not updated to match.

We chose the sharing dessert menu which was good. You could choose for two or four and as we were three we opted for the two persons which had four desserts.The treacle pudding went down a treat.. The four sugary desserts were balanced by a few pieces of fruit, one strawberry, .

Coffee
Their coffee machine was broken so they only had filter coffee. You'd think that a major organization would have a backup, but at least they had the filter coffee maker which puts them ahead of many restaurants which have broken coffee machines and don't offer any kind of coffee.
Service good - always somebody walking past and lookng about so you can catch their eye.
They sang happy birthday in tune.An unusual feat. They must have at least eight people running around serving. Maybe they selected the four with the best voices. The piano was played by a youngster..

He later played Mozart's Rondo a la Turque, a very jolly tune, most suitable to liven a birthday. Obviously not for a funeral tea - one does get the impression that most restaurants think their diners are funeral parties, which applies at the Barn hotel in Ruislip near the crematorium, where funeral teas are boooked in a private room away from weddings, but I do feel that most couples in restaurants in evenings are out ofr a jolly relief from work, or romance, or anniversaries, or birthdays, so funeral music is better replaced by jolly music, but not so often nor so loud that you can't talk. Since the restaurant began as a venue for chess players constant msuic was obviously not part of their tradition. I think Simplsons got music and most things just right.

Price

The meal for three, only two courses, no coffees, no bottles of wine, just a glass of alcohol or non-alchol each, was just under £100 and with the 12 and a half %

service charge just over £110. You could easily spend double if your budget and belly and diet allows starters,you opt for the dearer main courses at around £30-36 pounds per person - chicken was about £20, I generally like a bit more colour (yes, literally colour - giant flower displays, coloured lighting, coloured napkins) No children nor shouting drunks. An elegant evening. A friend says Simpsons has two more places in the same building, much livelier if that's what you want. On your way out and in notice the chess board and chess pieces framed on the hall wall reminding you that the restaurant was originally a place where chess players met and the food was brought up on a trolley so they could eat quickly and quietly without interrupting their quiet tete a tete.

Speakers and audiences will be interested in the website scientific-presentations.com

I found it through a speakers' group on the business networking site LinkedIn.

The writer gives excellent analysis of presentations, the slides and the speaker.

One of the posts mentioned questioned the popular recommendation that a speaker start by asking the aidience what they know about a subject. He cites a speaker giving a paper on cancer. The speaker started by asking at the start or early in the talk who had lost a relative to cancer. The audience froze, with no hands up and unease.

My reply:

Angela LansburyMarch 19th, 2010 at 8:49 pm

Yes, asking who has experience of cancer is an obvious question to start with. But anybody can see that it begins the evening on a negative note. It’s a constant problem with any speech. To engage the audience you must pose a problem – and then a solution. You always have keep looking for the positives. A positive message. A positive word. A positive question.

Speakers focus on highly emotional subjects, such as what your parents and grandparents died of, when they want to stir the audience into taking action. If you want to ask a member of the audience for a million pounds, or you want to offer him free pills, you might make such an appeal. But if you merely want to show a slide and get kudos, it's a bit unfair to ruin somebody's day but evoking sad memories.

Another mantra or saying is make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait. You do not want the audience crying all the way through. Although I have seen that done at fundraising events, I don't like it.

It’s much easier to deal with the distant past. For example, We all had eight grandparents and we don't always know for certain their health history and diet. How many of you know one of more of those eight grandparents … Survival rates are much higher today. How many people remember that cancer was more of a taboo (twenty) years ago? (Depending on age of audience.)

We come back to the speech title. What is the message? Possible cures for cancer? Conquering Cancer?

I won a ribbon at Toastmasters for a talk on cancer and started with just such a question. I think I asked how many people knew somebody who had had treatment for cancer and survived five years or more. I then went on to talk about the most survivable forms of cancer and where you can get more statistical information. To my amazement afterwards close friends and acquaintances afterwards came up and confided, ‘I had cancer ….’
But my relative was still alive at the begining of treatment. You have to make a question which does not focus on the words death and family member. Perhaps ask about acquaintances or focus on larger groups.

Even with a small group and a happy topic and a young audience you run this risk that somebody in the audience has a recent bad experience. I was a young student teacher and asked my class of schoolgirls to write about their mother. One girl’s mother had been murdered by the stepfather the previous week. So what is the solution? Look for a positive words? Happy memories of my mother?

Financial Mistakes in Marriage - & Webinar Mysteries Solved

The irresistible question 'Are you making one of these financial mistakes in your marriage?' made me open the LinkedIn email from subgroup Career and Lifecoach Network. Coach Leslie Cunningham was inviting fellow members to a webinar. My comment is: Thank you for sending that. For years I've received invitations from USA sources and not known how to link up with webinars, thinking that being on a UK timezone it would be the wrong time (I'm asleep, eating or on public transport or in a meeting - or on stage at Toastmasters). It would also be an expensive phone call. Would it be pointless for the speaker who was seeking local people to attend paid seminars? From the point of view of me listening in the UK, anything aural is a nuisance to others in a public place - even at home. Dozens of reasons prevented me from replying. However, I just discovered from asking what's a webinar, that I can use the microphone on my Mac, maybe make a Skype call. Some of you readers will know how to translate outgoing or incoming sounds into text. Some organizers offer to send a text version to people who can't attend. Any other advice would be welcome. I'm putting this on my blog AngelaLansburyAuthorDiary.

Logic and ethics

Logic - it's cultural. People believe what those in charge tell them. Until somebody dares challenge. Emperor's new clothes - so cleverly put into the form of a fairy tale.

What's scary for those of us who went to UC is the way the world is full of religious nutters, all of whom have a different infallible book. Not to mention religion. I just read Christopher Hitchens' book.

I remember my first lecture at UC, after which nothing of equal importance was said. I heard was Bentham's idea that people jump from something is the case to something ought to be the case. (In those days a popular view was that women don't drive cars therefore they shouldn't.)

Otherwise clever people often suddenly reveal they believe in odd things, ranging from cats being unlucky, to number 13. The whole of Asia is obsessed wtih the numbers 4 and 8 and more bothered about your car numberplate being lucky than about road safety.

A woman at the local fitness centre nearly became my friend. After 30 minutes of general jolly chit chat she revealed her nearest and dearest was in poor health. The GP could not find the cause.

She had a husband who claimed to have given up drinking. But he was still having problems (blackouts) previously related to drinking. Finally, she said her church would say it was probably witchcraft. I made my excuses and left.

Surely science is observation which can predict. I admit that people looking for witchcraft make self-fulfilling prophecies. And self-fulfilling predictions. Heads you win and tails you lose. A woman sinks so she must be a witch.

Some of the world's troubles are being proved to be purely caused by something physical. Too much sugar in food or drink leads to hyperactivity and bad behaviour in schoolchildren.

Singapore laws are based on the empirical. They try rewards and punishments until they get the desired result.

Is ethics still relevant? John Stuart Mill in ethics said that even if 100 people got pleasure from torturing one to death, that did not make it right. Greatest good of the greatest number.

Let's move from the abstract to the practical. A subject such as the death penalty.

A similar debate on numbers of people being punished is whether it is better for one man to be wrongly imprisoned or hanged, or for 99 murderers to go free.

Somebody just wrote a newspaper comment piece (Today's Mail?) saying that to protect children we had to be tougher on crime and criminals and take the risk of making a mistake about one adult man rather than risk having ten or a hundred children suffer.

Often human relations fail because we believe what we want to believe. Pupils fall in love with teachers, patients with doctors, audiences with speakers, voters with leaders, gurus, kings, identity, praise. I have now ended where I started.

Philosophy looks at ethics and psychology looks at morality and crime and punishment. Our notion of fairness is often a question of balance. Children don't need to believe in God to know that if my big brother hit me and I hit him back and Mum or Dad turns round and punishes me, 'It's not fair!'

But leaders find that they get better obedience if they say God says do this than if they merely say that Bob says do this. Especially as some people have the defy Dad syndrome. When told not to do something they want to do it. (Or do they have a death wish?)

We like the idea that what goes around comes around. Good people think that if we are all nice to everybody, no matter whom, everybody will eventually be nice to us. It's a popular subject for morality songs. It's the same idea of time being a circle and ending up in the same place as the comic song, There's a hole in my bucket.

Yet immorality often takes the same idea of passing on good and bad to the next person you meet, except that it's passing on bad instead of good. It can't be right for you to kick or kill somebody with red hair or black skin just because your hated stepfather who beat you looked like that. Nor attack girls with black or brown or blonde or grey or white hair who remind you of your mother.

Most people accept that neither an aggrieved individual nor a court of law can condemn a group for what others did.

Yet we are trying to make people today apologise for what their ancestors did. We assume that people have the same attitudes because of what they have been taught unless they prove otherwise.

A court will try each person and never punish a family or tribe or race collectively.

Let me finish on a jolly note.

I write therefore I am.

Cheers Angela

Freelancer of the Year Marketing Winner

Blog on Anthony Sharot Freelancer of the Year 2009 Marketing Category Winner

by Angela

Anthony Sharot won Freelancer of the Year award Marketing Category Winner for SEO and PPC work for Wellcome Trust. What did he do to deserve it?

Anthony won his award for the audit of four Wellcome Trust websites, and presenting a report on each covering Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click and web analytics - basically analysing which key words attracted people to read the websites and on each page find it easy to take action to contact the company.

Anthony’s company, Market Appeal, works to help both new and established companies improve websites to reach their target market and connect potential buyers with the services they are seeking. He also does in-house training so that staff in different branches of a big company can set up and monitor the effectiveness of their websites.

Whilst still at Merchant Taylors School, Anthony won an award for Young Enterprise. Anthony’s background includes a degree and postgraduate studies from Brunel university. His early sales experience included working in retail shops, telephone sales and in-home sales visits. His skills and work experience are varied, ranging from the practical, engineering - to people-orientated - cv writing. His Master of Arts was in a branch of psychology, Psychoanalytic Studies. His qualifications include one from The Society of Medical NLP, earned studying NLP with doctors - involving analysis of language, positive thinking, motivation and personality types.

He worked in recruitment. Then he set up his own cv-writing company. You can read an extensive list of his clients on business networking site LinkedIn. Or read about him on Facebook.

And the future? He is helping companies expand globally. He and his family have lived in England, the USA (where he was at school), and Singapore. By the age of 13 he had travelled to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, ski-ing on the demanding black slopes in all those countries. Now he can offer help setting up effective websites in European languages, French, German and more, as well as others such as Mandarin, Hebrew and Hindi.

What does he need? More work? A steady girlfriend? As Anthony says on LinkedIn, ‘I'm always on the look out for a new challenge.’

The award was sponsored by Haymarket, who run http://www.BrandRepublic.com/, http://www.Campaignlive.co.uk/ and http://www.Marketingmagazine.co.uk/. Their Online Marketing Manager Stephen Dodds presented the award to Anthony, and Neil Hamilton, a headhunter at Xchangeteam who first nominated Anthony.

PS Kind comment from friend and journalist Yvonne Plaut:

What a fabulous achievement but then with parents like you I am not in the least surprised.

A very hearty congratulations to both of you, and above all Anthony

Yvonne

Humorous comment from ‘Shan-Shan’ - Huang Shanshan, Regional Business Director

Peach Interactive, also Red Research, in Singapore:
Wow! He's so bright and capable. How come his folks genes are different...

Companies needing help or journalists seeking interviews please contact:

Anthony Sharot

Search Director

Market Appeal

Tel: 07956 990 216

anthony@marketappeal.co.uk

http://www.marketappeal.co.uk/

http://www.linkedin.com/in/londonppcseo

Winner of Marketing Freelancer of the Year 2009: http://www.freelanceroftheyear.co.uk/

Market Appeal Ltd. Atlantic House, 351 Oxford Street, London W1C 2JF

Important Videos - provide texts

I just answered a query on Linked-In's section Speakers - the questioner asking for advice on how to cope with possible technical failures.

1 Advance and afterwards, email giving your phone and email plus a one liner with tick boxes, so the viewer can contact you if they can't see the video. 2 Some feedback clicks to get replies eg 1 to 5 on how much they liked it. Plus comment box for if anything was missing (eg poor sound). Then you'll know if anybody/nobody saw it. And at what time the fault started. 3 Provide a text alternative to the video. Text version is helpful if sound fails. Some people speed-read and will turn off videos after a minute and never reach your punchline with your message, sales pitch and contact details. 4 Text alternative is useful anyway. I'm often in an open plan office and can't listen to videos which will disturb others. I try to avoid opening videos in case they turn into hectoring advertising messages. Especially if the video is obviously not related to my work which might annoy my co-workers, my boss - my employees - even the cleaner(s). In a public place, even an internet cafe, a no sound or no vision is often better than a video because when I'm in public places I'm wary of videos that embarrassingly suddenly promise loudly to improve my faults!

***

I also watched a video in which the speaker was constantly interrupted. Again the solution is to supply the text.

Improving Toastmasters Meetings

The first essential is to be heard.

If you wish to make a career and speak to a hall full of people, you need to use a microphone and check that the people at the back can hear.

At Toastmasters clubs I rarely notice a speaker asking if the people at the back can hear. Yet most speakers at major meetings will start by checking sound levels. Nobody wants to spend an hour listening to a speaker whose meaning is lost.

You should also check that everybody can see the speaker. Ideally have a central aisle.