So I did, and I was one of the precious few people there actually from Parliament. Almost all the other people attending the presentations and wandering around the stalls were from the other stalls, waiting to do their presentations. The presentations consisted mainly of people showing you how to work a search engine. I swiftly learned to avoid these, which left nothing but wandering from stall to stall, trying to look interested enough to be polite but no so interested that one of the over-eager demonstrators would catch my eye and offer me a personal demonstration of, inevitably, how to work their search engine.
The highlight of the giveaways was undoubtedly the 1GB Commons-Library-branded memory sticks, which rapidly disappeared in large numbers. Some stalls hadn’t tried too hard with their freebies. There were the obligatory bookmarks and pencils. BBC Monitoring had just brought along some Quality Street. But look! LexisNexis mints!*
And, my favourite, a Jane’s Defence Weekly boiled sweet.
“It’s fruit flavour,” said the man from Jane’s, as he was showing me how to access information on terrorist groups in Algeria. “Last year we had mints, but they were rank. Seriously, they were hangin’.”
* Apparently all the mints are in there, but the packet’s insanely complicated to open and then when you finally get to them they’re not the flavour you wanted, etc etc [Winner, Ben Elton Award for Coruscating Satire, Online Category, June 2007]
Comments
They encourage teeth to fall out, and those teeth can subsequently be used as bullets.
How, exactly?
I'm holding out for Westlaw Muffins.