Page 7 - PBCOctober2019

Pickwick Bicycle Club Magazine Volume 16 No.2 October 2019 !7

President’s Spring Luncheon

May 2019
For those of you observing your President arriving at the
Connaught Rooms by taxi, please don’t think the high position in
the club has gone to my head – I do usually walk. My excuse was
that I was delivering the newly made box for the protection of
the Joseph Atto Bowl, which has been leading a somewhat
vicarious life since being consigned to a plastic carrier bag in the
cellar of the Connaught Rooms following the disappearance of its
proper box.

Numbers for the luncheon were slow to reach the minimum level of 300, and required
urgent appeals by Buzfuz to reach at least a reasonable attendance of around 350 members
& guests, once those last minute applications were received. For yours truly it was a quite
different event, finding myself ‘behind the scenes’ at the President’s pre-lunch gathering in
a private room and missing the hubbub of the bar and rush of members & guests from the
Hercules Pillars when the Household Cavalry trumpeters sounded the final call to lunch. I was
even given a copy of the scheduled timings and told to ‘be brief if I spoke’. And then I was
kept outside the main hall with the guest speaker, and Sgt Buzfuz (in the role of the Black
Rod) before making our way to the top table.

In the meantime it had been possible to
hear the stringent voice of Captain Payne
exalting those present to sing the
Pickwickian refrains with more vigour if not
more tunefully. It all worked though as
always with the Pickwick Bicycle Club. A
short introduction thanking the Club for
electing me as President, followed by grace
and we were ready to start proceedings.
Control of the room was then handed over
to the Captain –as if it was ever in the
control of anybody else! The pianist chipped in to support the singing and then a trumpeter
sounded the Post Horn, which heralded the arrival of the Original Member with his Ordinary.
This time it was Mr Gunter(a relatively newcomer to our ranks-Michael Gruetzner) arriving
to take wine with the President.