Philofaxy London Meet Up - March 2011

So Saturday 26th March the day of the Philofaxy London meet-up. I had been looking forward to this for several weeks. But someone was conspiring against me to try and not make the day happen.

It started off with delays on the trains to London so instead of going to my local station I drove up to Sevenoaks to catch the train from there instead. No sooner had I got on to the platform after battling with the ticket machine, I realised I had left my mobile phone back at the house... hmm not a good start,  Normally I just grab my 'man bag' and everything is in it.. I wasn't taking that bag today though... I shouldn't have rushed out of the house.

This Saturday was also the day of the Oxford Cambridge annual boat race and also a large protest march in London to protest against the cuts in public sector services and pay by the UK government. But I did a bit of research and looked at the route of the march and thought we could skirt around the route with a bit of planning for our walk from Tate Modern to Neal Street.

In the end I think most of us were delayed for one reason or another and we did manage to meet up at Waterloo and we then walked to Tate Modern to meet up with the rest of the group, in fact we arrived to find everyone outside the building which had been evacuated for some reason! But after just a five minute wait we were able to re-enter the building and get seated in the restaurant for our meal.

Food was ordered but rather than just sitting there chatting whilst waiting, out came the Filofax organisers and they started to circulate around the table!!!  Last time we had at least got the main course out of the way... not that it mattered. We had more time today so people really were relaxed and we all changed seats every so often so everyone got to talk with everyone, which was great.

As you will see from the photos we had a lot of fun, chatting, showing each other our Filofax organisers, I passed around the Filofax Facts book. I also showed some people the Filofax Address Book software on my netbook. We also made our own attempt at a Filofax tower record!!

We left Tate Modern for our walk to Neal Street, the streets were very busy, but no sign of any trouble thank goodness. By the time we were crossing the route of the march they were all in Hyde Park.
 
We were once again made very welcome by the staff at the Filofax store in Neal Street.  We all enjoyed looking through the new stock and items not yet on the website. A few purchases were made. I had made a list of inserts I wanted to get for my various organisers and it was a wise thing to do, I got those out of the way first and then got down to the serious business of looking at the new organisers on offer as well as the existing stock. Yes I made a purchase... but you will have to wait to find out what I bought!!!

We even managed to get a group photo taken outside of the shop and then before we started our journeys home we started to exchange thanks and ideas for the next meet up... May be a picnic for all our families or a two day meet up.. Lots of great ideas to discuss in the next few months. Certainly we will be having another meet up.

I've learnt a few things for improving on this and the last meet up as well to make the next one even better.

So thank you to: Thomas (who travelled from Bonn), Jane, Lucy, Sharon, Kyla, Jess and Adam for making it a successful day.

Looking forward to the next one.... if you want to organise a meet up in your area or in your country contact us and we will give you some publicity to help you get things to happen.

Here is a preview of most of the pictures from today... Click on it to see it full size.. a more detailed set will be added to the blog soon...