Eating with a conscience

Back to Stationers Hall less than two weeks after my Installation. This was the Stationers' annual
Master and Clerks' Dinner and was held in the Court room rather than the hall since it is a far more intimate gathering. I'm beginning to meet more Masters from other Companies whom I know, so I feel I'm getting into the job, as it were.

Adele who would normally accompany me at such a Masters and Clerks' event was, the same evening, elsewhere being installed as the new President of the Aldgate Ward club. Many congratulations to her.

Whilst it's always a pleasure to enjoy another Company's hospitality there was, I thought, a certain irony in feasting on good food and wine whilst the enormous oil painting dominating the room is of King Alfred Sharing His Cakes With A Begger, by the late eighteenth century/early ninteenth century Anglo-American artist Benjamin West.