Firetop

Sunday was a glorious sunny day and my wife had some free tickets to the London Baby Show taking place at Docklands’ ExCel exhibition centre. If I’m totally honest I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about driving all the way to Docklands and back, as far as I know you can buy most baby things online anyway with a lot less grief. However, Suzie_Q was seeking ideas not only for the July arrival of Junior, but also exhibition stands in general (as she designs them) so off we went via the M25 and Dartford river crossing. My favourite moment of the day turned out not to be baby related at all, as we stepped outside of the show to get some lunch, a rather attractive woman caught my eye at the entrance. It took a few seconds to sink in at first but it was Britain’s best loved glamour model Katie Price ’Jordan’ I found myself staring at.

As Jordan strolled past us with friends Suzie_Q turned to me and said quietly “Isn’t that…”, “Yes” I replied quickly. So we went and sat down to eat some jacket potatoes and discussed this surprise brush with celebrity. I’ve personally never thought Jordan was all that stunning, but there’s no doubt that she was looking good today - no sign of Peter Andre for Suzie_Q though. We tried to remember the last famous person we’d seen - it was Rob Brydon at Wimbledon last year, that’s probably it for this year then!

Take one thousand women with buggies and screaming babies, stick them all in a large carpeted warehouse full of baby suppliers, and it’s not difficult to imagine the baby show being a little on the stressful side. It wasn’t really a case of navigating around the exhibition stands, more taking any available path not blocked by a buggy or a large backside. All in all the London baby show didn’t blow us away. We had an interesting chat with a couple of stem cell storage companies (including Virgin’s new Health Bank) - I’m all in favour of storing umbilical blood for future scientific use by Junior but it seems midwives and hospitals can be difficult about it. We found a couple of small items for Junior, but since my office is yet to be converted into a nursery there’s little point stocking up on major furnishings.

I was amazed by the sheer number of people sitting around a stage listening to a mother talk about how to bring up children - it was an excercise in pointlessness from our perspective - but good brand awareness for the stage sponsor. We had a good laugh at a few exhibition stands which seemed ridiculously ill planned - such as ‘The baby website.com’ - which didn’t say what it did anywhere, presumably not a website for babies to use.

By 4:30pm we drove back home through hideously ugly Docklands and Dagenham whilst listening to a few pirate radio stations playing UK Garage and Drum n Bass. I suddenly remembered a sixth form economics trip to Ford’s manufacturing plant in Dagenham where we got given free tea and cakes - that’s about all remember from that day. All I’ll probably remember from today is how ugly Docklands is and how attractive Jordan is in person.

Technorati Tags: jordan, baby show, docklands, excel centre, exhibition stands, dagenham, richard branson

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