Lunch is most certainly not for wimps

I was intrigued reading the Acknowledgements at the start of Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn, with the following

. . . Thank you also to David Lindgren for trying, and usually failing to explain corporate law to me and, more importantly, for being a lawyer who lunches.

It wasn’t the opening bit, about explaining corporate law: I know only too well that explaining the finer points of our specialisation is all but impossible. After years spent trying to tell my children what I do, they are no wiser. Perhaps it is the way I tell it. Rather, it was the lunch bit! I am known in my partnership as the partner who lunches (and also for complaining once that the dry cleaners had shrunk my suit) and I have always spent most of my business development budget taking clients, referrers, introducers and providers to lunch. Not for nothing does my Outlook Contacts have a Restaurants category.

It was therefore gratifying to read John Studzinski in the FT’s September 2008 How to Spend It last week,

In most of the world today lunch – or any meal, for that matter – is used as a basis for determining whether people trust and like each other. . . The importance of one-on-one conversation over food is still something that I do not believe has reached its pinnacle. It’s where people learn the most about each other and I don’t think we’ve found anything else as effective at this point in time. Some day maybe, but not yet.

although I was not a little disturbed by his assertion that

In the US and the UK, breakfast is the new lunch.

Not in Plymouth it isn’t!