Thursday, May 31, 2007

Kettering Hotel Randesvous

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending a talk on 'Reducing multiple cardiovascular risk through obesity management' at the Kettering Hotel. The talk was organised by Orlistat, and was attended by hospital doctors, medical students, GPs, dieticians and various members of the multi-disciplinary team that make up the hospital staff. The talk was presented by my current endocrinology consultant, Dr K. Rizvi. Like me, he also did his medical degree at the University Hospital of Cardiff, Wales.

Overall, the evening was excellent. Dr Rizvi's talk was pitched just right and was interesting throughout. I'm sure all the attendees felt the same.

The highlight of the evening however, was the dinner. It was a full three course meal - the starter was a salad with grilled cheese, pasta as the main course and the dessert was raspberry cheesecake with clotted cream. The coffee afterwards was just heavenly.






Dr Rizvi delivering his talk




After the talk we were exploring the hotel and taking pictures at opportune moments.


Dinner




The starter was grilled cheese salad




Anand and our organiser


Suboohi and Hanna

The other side of the story...

I had been looking forward to the talk last night for days before - the talk was scheduled at 7pm, and I was planning to stay at the hospital accommodation overnight. That meant after work I would have a full 2 hours to spend with my friends before the actual talk, and if the talk finished early - maybe, just maybe we could all go somewhere e.g. for a meal or the cinema I was hoping.

To my utmost disappointment when I arrived at work yesterday morning, everyone's mood was just "bleah" (translation: cannot be bothered) about the talk. In fact, by 5pm they even managed to drown my enthusiasm in their moat of indifference. One or two of us even decided not to go.

Suboohi was kind enough, and invited the team to her flat for tea and a light meal before we actually head for the Hotel. Tea at Suboohi's house was wonderful, but what I enjoyed most was the conversations I had with her husband Bilal.

My friends dragged themselves to the talk with heavy hearts - and I bet they didn't regret it as the evening was beyond legendary.

The talk and food was superb - but the best thing to me, was the time we spent laughing and making jokes at the dinner table - and that was *only* with three members of our team. Imagine if we had full attendance - the evening would have been phenomenal.

The icing on the cake was, literally and metaphorically, free.

PS
I've also updated my Fotopages.

6 comments:

dith said...

Mynn,

That's the spirit! May the enthusiasm persist ever as medicine is always changing.

So have the Orlistat people found a way to reduce its famous undesirable side effect of 'fat incontinence"? hehe

Anonymous said...

dith
i hope my enthusiasm for medicine will remain even though working at a different place - we'll see.

the fat has to go somewhere DITH, if not "down there", where else? vomiting the fat would be worse!

Jamil said...

This reminds me of a health seminar organised by the faculty a few months back. The theme was something along the lines of "A healthy life through healthy eating".

Well guess what. As soon as lunch came, everybody ate 'heartily' rather than 'healthy'. How ironic.

mynn said...

hiyoshi
ah, i should have mentioned in the post how ironic it was that after the talk on the adverse effects of obesity and the importance of loosing weight we were served with generous portions of chicken, cheese, wine, cake, cream and coffee!

Anonymous said...

Seeing these kind of posts reminds me of just how technology truly is ever-present in this day and age, and I can say with 99% certainty that we have passed the point of no return in our relationship with technology.


I don't mean this in a bad way, of course! Ethical concerns aside... I just hope that as memory becomes less expensive, the possibility of downloading our memories onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It's a fantasy that I daydream about all the time.


(Posted on Nintendo DS running [url=http://cryst4lxbands.sosblog.com/-b/Will-the-R4-or-R4i-work-b1-p2.htm]R4 SDHC[/url] DS SysBro)

Unknown said...

I was in search of the information that can win my heart and then I found your blog and got everything from here. Thanks http://ketteringhotelsi.co.uk/