Philofaxy Meet Up - London - September 2011 Part 1

So the third London meet up was on Saturday. It was a lovely September day, dry and reasonably warm, a slight breeze near the river. I started the day at my hotel near Tower Bridge and I walked along the Thames path in the direction of Tate Modern, where we meet up for our London Philofaxy get togethers.

As usual, I was a bit early so I had a bit of a wander around the area and took a few more photos, before Thomas appeared. He had travelled that morning all the way from Germany along with a very full rucksack that was piled high with Filofax organisers, that he had bought on behalf of several people attending. They that had ordered them in the recent Filofax Germany €9 sale (Great German Train Robbery!) I'm not quite sure what the x-ray scanner made of all those Filofax organisers in his bag!

Gradually our numbers grew as others arrived. At first we ordered a few drinks and sat chatting about our journeys and some of the amusing things we had seen on Twitter in the last day or two.

Before we had even ordered any food the tables started to disappear under various Filofax organisers!, unfortunately I hadn't been able to bring more and a couple with me... but I will promise to make up for that next time in November.

We tidied up and had our food and enjoyed a lot of good conversation and good humour. As you will see from the pictures people were moving around quite a bit and comparing the contents of their organisers quite a lot, which has become quite a tradition at our meet ups.

Some of us had coffee, then someone, I forget who, remembered the challenge that our friends in New York had set us with their pile of Filofax organisers last Saturday. Steve looked around the table, ok folks let's show them! At first he had his doubts about the stability of our pile. Filofax organisers aren't like Lego bricks. They tend to get a bit unstable when piled more than 10 high. So it was decided to see how much of our long table we could cover side by side. Thomas had his tape measure with him and was given the job of measuring our 'horizontal pile' once we had fully assembled it.

So under the close supervision of Jotje, who was sorting the organisers in to the right sizes and we were also trying to match colours although I don't think we were 100% successful on both counts, we didn't do too bad a job and judging by some of the odd looks we were getting from other restaurant, I think it's safe to say that we are quite unique... no one quite understood or even dared approaching us to ask us 'what are you doing' as if it wasn't obvious...

So you all want to see our 'pile' Oh all right then if you insist......

 

I think we did quite well don't you think? Click on the picture to see a bigger version of it. Yes there really were that many Crimson Malden's!!! I think I counted 42 organisers there in total running from the Mini's at the left through Pockets, Personals and a few A5's at the other end of the scale. 

Then once we had all reclaimed our respective organisers and paid the restaurant bill, we started our walk to Neal Street to see the Filofax shop there.  As usual we all chatted along the way as well with a few stops along the way to make sure we hadn't lost any of our dozen attendees.

As suggested most people had 'shopping lists' of what they really 'needed' to buy and they all dived in to the display racks picking out diary inserts and other 'essential' items. Once that was out of the way, They relaxed a bit and enjoyed looking through the whole range of organisers and inserts in the shop.

Oh and of course chatting with Dee and her team. I did try, but Dee's lips were sealed with regards to any news on new products. But I put it to her that it was normally around about October/November that we started to get snippets of news about new products... she just smiled. Oh well we can wait I'm sure!!

With trains to catch our group of happy Philofaxers had to say good bye and make their way via the tube to different stations. But everyone went away with a Filofax carrier bag and a big smile on their face.. so until next time...Thank you to everyone that came along, it was a great day.

Coming up in Part 2 the Meet Up Photos...