Meals on wheels for the Baron's Bash?

The Reuter Society has taken to Zoom. With London on its third lockdown it may be time for the Baron’s Bash, the annual pensioners’ lunch, to do the same.

Bashers could either cook their meal or have it delivered between 1-3 pm on a set day. Lunch could be an expensive lobster with ginger noodles from a Chinese restaurant or an inexpensive Big Mac from McDonald’s.

The menu will be more extensive than anything the Dulwich and Sydenham Hill Golf Club or even the old venue, Grosvenor House on Park Lane, can offer. The Baron, awash with cash after going public in 1984, footed the bill during the opulent Park Lane days.

Retired colleagues around the world can join the Bash without spending a fortune on air tickets. It may be breakfast time in New York and dinner time in Hong Kong but that’s all right. It’s the conversation that matters. It will help local restaurants struggling during lockdown and contribute in a small way to economic recovery.

Just be careful not to let gravy or ketchup drip on your keyboard, iPad or smartphone. And watch what you say especially when the discussion drifts to the Circus, the CIA or the KGB. The Chinese Army may be listening.

Incidentally,  the speaker at the Reuter Society’s first Zoom briefing this year will be former CEO Tom Glocer who stopped the company-funded pensioners’ lunch 11 years ago, saying Thomson Reuters could no longer afford it. He left Thomson Reuters at the end of 2011 and is no longer in a position to say if there is enough money now for a pensioners’ lunch. After the redundancies of recent years there will certainly be more pensioners at the table. ■