To my surprise the first impression I got from the day was how important it was to get it right in terms of who you were going into the venture with.

Maybe this came down to the contrast between the experiences of the first two speakers.

First person on was the man from Higgidy. They had started as a group of three friends – one of them doing the pie making and the other two helping out. Two out of the three had got married and they were all still working together after how many years of doing it.

There was time for questiomns and someone asked about the dynamic between the three of them and what difficulties there might have been. That was then my note-book came out for the first time ‘friendship, partnersip and tension’ I scribbled.

The next speaker was a Camilla Barnard from a company called Rude Health which had started out by making a particularly good type of muesli and then moved onto other things including porridge and cereal like snacks. The genesis of the business had come about when she and her husband and their neighbours had gathered round a kitchen table and tried to work out how to make a muesli they all liked. They came up with something and the business was up and running. She then turned the talk round the question that had been asked as to the difficulties in starting a business with friends and said that the neighbours were no longer part of the business and they were no longer friends.

Next up was the lady from Planet Organic, Renée Elliot. She talked about some of her partners and mentioned the 18 months worth of litigation that followed on her falling out with one of.

Jimmy who made and sold the chilled coffee had started in the business with his sister and it was clear that she was still very much part of it all but kept in the background.

It transpired that the two lads who had the pizza business, Pizza Pilgrims, when they were asked the question as to whether there had been any testing of their friendship working together, they were brothers.

They were on stage together but the others were there by themselves but the clear impression was given, and I think someone may even have said it, you can’t do these things on your own. It is important to have people there with you as part of the business. But you have to trust those people otherwise you run the risk of a bad falling out.

It has been a cold bleak blustery Saturday and lunch needed to be warm and comforting – so we had curried parsnip soup out of Jane Grigson’s Good Things.

Four fat parsnips peeled and chopped into chunks and cooked slowly in butter with a chopped onion and some garlic until the parsnips had started to soften and had soaked up some of the butter.

They were seasoned with salt and pepper and a generous helping of mild curry powder and then covered in some half decent vegetable stock, brought to a simmer, and left to cook for forty minutes or so.

They went through the Magimix and we ate the soup with the remains of the bread from Thursday’s bread circle.

Listening to the new album by Natalie Prass.

So even before I get to start on my list of eight top tips to come out of Sunday’s course I have had a tweet telling me about a property in Oxton that has some sort of potential as a cheese cave.

I drove past on the way back from work this evening in a heavy wind with gobs of rain blowing me along so I didn’t really have a chance to see what I was looking at but I will give it a better go tomorrow and maybe put a call through to see if I can have a look around it.

God knows what  I will do if it is anything like suitable!

Ten years ago I went so far as to start looking at properties and even found one that was halfway towards being something that could have been worked with. It was an old garage which for reasons obscure had become a ship chandler. There was space and a wide double door giving access to a covered yard to the rear. But it was a hundred yards out of the way and riddled with asbestos and expense and so it went onto the pile of things to dream and the forget about.

Now that it has been remembered the things I need to think about are:-

1. How to go about getting all the good Irish Cheese back to Birkenhead;

2. Finding somewhere to sell it from;

3. And are there enough people in Birkenhead who can be persuaded to buy the good Irish Cheese.

Those three things and the eight pointers I took down from the weekend.

So before the course on Sunday I bought myself a new notebook and pen so I wouldn’t forget any of the pearls of wisdom being handed down.

The course materials suggested that what I needed to bring was pen and paper – although it allowed for the option of some kind of electronic notebook. There was an half day when I thought I could take this as an excuse to treat myself to an iPad but I put that idea quickly to bed and kept things simple buying myself a very smart bright red Moleskine notebook.

Armed with this, a pen full of ink, wearing a good hat and carrying around with me the faint remaining whiff of fermented mackerel I signed in for the course on Sunday morning.

The attendees were ushered into a large glass atrium lined with chairs down the side and we were given tea and coffee. As the place filled up it was apparent that I would not be one of the younger members of the audience. There was a certain amount of facial hair and lots of eager faces – young people anxious to something new with coffee or about to make their first small fortune selling a particular type of Vietnamese sandwich.

At 10.00 we were called into a lecture theatre with very comfortable seats and I settled down for the day.

During the day I heard a total of about six speakers talk for 40 minutes or so on their experiences starting in the food or drink business. They included one of the people behinf Higgidy Pies, two brothers who had started making and selling pizzas from the back of a van and had just opened a pizza restaurant in Soho (and I think another in Clapham), Jimmy of Jimmy’s Chilled Coffee, a lady who had started a business selling muesli called Rude Health and another lady who opened a small chain of organic supermarkets called Planet Organic.

In the event I didn’t take many notes- perhaps a couple of dozen words. Of course there were people with their smart-phones taking photos of the powerpoint and the apposite quotes that some of the speakers saw fit to share with us. Though quite why they thought we needed reminding that life was not a dress rehearsal escaped me.

We were also told that if we started our Monday morning looking forward to Friday evening then we needed to be doing something else. Of course we did – that is why we were there – looking out for the dream of doing something else – the speakers had done it of course – stepped over the line, happy with what they had done – so if they dropped dead tomorrow there would be no regrets. Great for them but not so good for the poor squirming members of the audience whose lives would be filled with no end of regrets if the grim reaper’s scythe were to come calling tomorrow.

The speakers were all different and came at it from different experiences and although parts of the day were given over to a slightly revivalist self help tone there were elements that could perhaps be picked out that might form a basis for moving forward.

I have made a list of them in the little red book and I will try over the next few nights to set some of them out and see where I get to.