Bankstone representatives had the unalloyed, untarnished, and otherwise metallically uncorrupted pleasure this week of attending the 10th birthday celebrations of insurance software firm Transactor Global Solutions Limited (TGSL) in charming Hampshire cathedral city and former capital of Anglo Saxon Wessex, Winchester.
Never before has Bankstone honcho Dickon “Victor” Tysoe returned from a corporate shindig quite so overbrimming with superlatives. Everyone, he reports, had the best possible time, even the one unfortunate individual who arrived bearing an alarming resemblance to a soberly dressed circus clown in a pair of vastly oversized rental tux trousers.
The champagne and caviar was “excellent” from the outset, Dickon affirms with pleasure. All the food, in fact was “excellent” and there were also some excellent “traffic lights”, he claims, although Bankstone News suspects he may have made that bit up. Or perhaps that was later, after he staggered out onto the unsuspecting streets of sleepy downtown Winchester and lay down meekly in the road.
Far from being standard-issue ‘caterers chicken’, the main course, Dickon avers, was nothing short of fillet steak. The booze was plentiful and free well into the early hours, doubtless helping to fuel many of the kind of conversations in which ‘global solutions’ are indeed thrashed out, shortly prior to mutual expressions of passionately warm regard are exchanged, and two-person alliances versus the remainder of humanity proposed.
Three-foot tall sculptures in the form of the numerals 1 and 0, hewn from solid ice, served as some form of spirit luge, our man relates, whilst, at a suitably climactic moment in the proceedings, two energetic gentlemen raced up and down balconies at either end of the room unleashing a veritable water feature of balloons, to create an effect not wholly un-reminiscent of the British Insurance Awards.
Guest speaker on the night was none other than Strictly Cum Dancing reject Tony “the Jackal” Jacklin, Scunthorpe’s most illustrious son and former titan of the Titleist set. When, following a highly entertaining and informative talk, Tony took questions from the floor, one wag claimed to have drawn the Jackal in an office Strictly sweepstake and requested a refund of the £1 he had promptly forfeited upon TJ’s first round exit.
Alongside an impressive cross section of the insurance industry’s great and good, hordes of TGSL staff from four sites (including one in Poland) thronged convivially and cavorted after dinner to the most excellent sounds of live band the DeLoreans, an ensemble named after the thrusting entrepreneur upon whom the Thatcher government lavished public subsidy to such acclaimed effect, or possibly his eponymous creation the gull-winged DMC-12, star of Back to the Future, and the automotive pride of Dunmurray.
Transistor chief Vince Raymond made an excellent speech, speaking entirely without the benefit of some kind of clicky thing for moving from one slide to the next. Inspiringly, he related the story of how entrepreneurial inspiration had struck one fateful day a decade past when, sitting at a red light, Vince had suddenly known with total clarity that he must quit his job with Policymistress and strike out on his own.
Sadly Bankstone’s Vic Tyson is unlikely to be relating any such inspiring anecdote when Bankstone celebrates its own ten year anniversary, given that his corresponding moment of inspiration is widely believed to have occurred whilst reading Tubas and Tuba Men on the loo at home.
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