No Wind in the Willows

This was a looong day. The temperature has been in the mid thirties for a few days and the aircon in many places doesn’t quite cope. We started off our morning with a presentation on strategy, by some McKinsey guys, who instantly irritated me by assuming success is measured solely by profit. Open to the lesson, I generously spent the second half of the session making other businesses successful by doing some online shopping. To make matters worse, in a session about strategy, they presented no strategy, just a lot of graphs and data. To add insult to injury, they went fifteen minutes into our half-hour break. Then, the rest of our break was used up by taking the obligatory group photo. We wandered out in the courtyard which was by mid morning a still, oven-like area, deserted by all but our gently sweating cohort. You can see most of us look dressed for climate optimism rather than a heatwave. The lecture room is very very is cold, so the jacket-on-jacket-off dance is constant. 

Following our non existent break, we had a session on bank regulation and supervision, which sounds dull but was interesting, due to the lecturer. This was followed by a session on financial crime, which sounds interesting but was dull, due to the lecturer. Both sessions went overtime and stole our lunch and afternoon tea break time. It’s not that we are missing out on food - there’s a lot of it and it’s good (and beautifully presented, check out the juice bar) I resent this, because the cohort is fascinating. The chats in the breaks are fantastic and worth every bit of effort to get here to Oxford. 

Our evening activity was canapés, Pimm’s and punting at the Cherwell Boat house. It was still incredibly hot, without a breath of wind, and the humidity near the river was nasty. No mosquitoes though! There was some reluctance by the group to punt, but I worked the room and our eventual group of six splashed and laughed and managed to have a ball. It was a shared experiment in incompetence, but we were clearly having enough visible fun that another six joined us, although they were smarter. Correctly assessing that the pole work is harder than it looks, they conscripted a boathouse employee to handle the pole while they relaxed in the punt. 

We walked back to Oxford (about a 40 minute walk) through green lanes and past beautiful buildings, chatting and enjoying the views, stopping for a pizza dinner on the way. It was 9.30 by the time we ate so it was a quick dinner, before the older and wiser of us went back to the hotel to sleep and a hardy few went to a pub to watch the England/Ghana soccer match.