Advanced Dinners and Drinks (AD&D)

I haven’t been out much for the past 4 years. The long tail of COVID-facilitated behaviour has stuck around longer than expected and I need to get out more. In fact, if I can combine two of my 2024 goals — to get out more and to carry out more productive work — then even better.

Since Imperica folded a few years ago, I have been reflecting on it in past blog posts. Thankfully (for you), I won’t reflect any further in this post but do miss something about being an editor/publisher/journo: the opportunity to meet and stay in touch with lots of really lovely people. Some of my fondest memories of running Imperica are to do with bringing people together and seeing them chatting at our events, or as part of our In Conversation With… series.

I genuinely love hosting things, being around people, and not being the controller but the conduit. As such, I have been thinking about doing something, once a month, to bring people together.

The idea has the working title of AD&D: Advanced Dinners and Drinks. It is, in essence, what it says. It’s not a networking event, and is not designed to be an “industry thing”. It is, no more and no less, an event that gets really nice, intelligent people around a table talking to each other over a nice sit-down dinner and a few bottles something. There might be a closed discussion group to further such discussions, but I haven’t thought that far ahead yet: such extensions sometimes end up going cold, but as long as the attendees make new contacts at the event, then my work is done.

It might work out, or it might be absolutely terrible. I’ll probably get nervous and down several glasses of wine before anyone turns up, so at least you have the opportunity of witnessing some sort of spectacle.

I’m just floating this idea for now — thoughts are, of course, always welcome, and I’ll post an update in the next few weeks.