Peter Mandelson was confronted by an inebriated audience member as he sped away from the platform after delivering his speech at last night's Chemical Industries Association (CIA) dinner at London's Grosvenor House hotel, according to our own Will Beacham, deputy bureau chief of ICB.

Mandelson's speechwriters had been keen to stress reliance the chemical industry has on the automotive sector, and perhaps laboured the point, he remembers.

A furious chemical salesman contact told him afterwards that Mandelson was a fool for neglecting all the other key industry sectors, especially the product he works in. It showed his ignorance of how the industry functioned.

He told Will: "I happened to be coming back from the gents when I saw Mandelson was leaving the event and walking towards me. I went up to him and told him he knew nothing about the chemical industry and was an idiot to be coming here spouting all this nonsense."

Needless to say Mandelson's minder whisked him swiftly away from the ranting man.

The ICIS contingent at last night's Chemical Industries Association (CIA) dinner has now recovered sufficiently to be able to string a few words together about the event...

A great time was had by all in the Great Room at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on Thursday evening at the CIA's annual dinner. The CIA had made something of a coup in attracting UK Business Secretary Lord Mandelson to speak. He was a little late and it was generally assumed that he had been involved in the horse trading which saw Baroness Ashton of Upholland (what a great title) become the EU's first High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy and Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy EU President. Mandelson had also been a potential UK candidate for the High Representative post.

He gave a good speech vowing support for the industry in innovation and skills while warning of the "huge challenge of decarbonising industrial chemistry." (Says chemical engineer Simon: "Just how we're going to do that in an industry based on organic chemistry is beyond me, but where there's a will and unlimited science budget there could be a way.")

Numbers were down, but that had to be expected given the dire year we've had. What was noticeable was that a lot of diners stayed in the Great Room to chat after the meal rather than dash off to company hospitality suites (of which there were pitifully few), and it only thinned out at close to 1.00 am.

The CIA used its most important gathering of the year to launch a new "blueprint" for UK chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing. The £60 billion industry helps support 600,000 jobs and makes a big positive contribution to the UK balance of trade and, the CIA feels, deserves wider recognition.

(Event coverage by Nigel Davis, Will Beacham, Simon Robinson, Franco Capaldo.)

Click here for ICIS news articles:

UK chemicals face total re-invention

UK chemical industry at risk - CIA

Cinemas in the Houston area are a thing of wonder, according to my ICIS colleagues there. For years I have been hearing of a cinema complex in Katy, Texas, just outside Houston, which not only has wide reclining seats, but also tables in front of the seats where waitresses bring you a meal while you're watching the film. Fantastic.

Cinemas everywhere have become vastly more comfortable, but theatres and opera houses, not to mention economy (coach) airline seats, have been slow to keep up. The hard narrow seats in the upper wings of London theatres, where you fight your neighbour for the armrest, are agony even for this snake-hipped Blog.

For those broader of beam, the new recently opened Dallas opera house has been designed by the Norman Foster architectural practice with maximum comfort in mind. During the design process, the architects reduced the number of seats from 3,300 to 2,200.

The architects said that they had found that, like many things in Texas, "the opera-going bottoms that would fill them are broader than they used to be," according to an article in Private Eye.

 (photo: dallasopera.org)

A rugby fan won himself £250,000 by kicking a ball from 30 metres directly onto the crossbar at the Saracens vs South Africa match on Tuesday.

Saracens fan Stuart Tinner won the giant cheque in the half-time kicking competition, and the video link has been circulating around the chemical publishing industry today, bringing joy and laughter into a grey afternoon. Thanks to Nigel for sending it my way.

Swine flu may have been halted in its tracks by the rise of a common cold virus, according to an article in this week's New Scientist.

Research in the US, France and Sweden has shown that rhinovirus, which causes colds, was on the rise just as the number of swine flu cases began to plateau in October.

Experts suspect rhinovirus may have blocked the spread of swine flu via a process called viral interference, which is thought to occur when one virus blocks another.

The Blog is still relying on the idea that swine flu only affects people of a different, younger age range, and has blithely booked a business trip to an east European city which is currently listed as "high risk."

Since London is also considered high risk, and the Blog is confident of being in the wrong age range, it seems a manageable risk, but we shall see.

 A weekly LinkedIn Network Update has just landed in the Blog inbox, showing how industrious all my contacts have been in joining groups, connecting with each other, updating their profiles, linking to news articles, reading books, updating their status, and planning their trips via TripIt.

The TripIt application has testimonials or "Raves" from users who can hardly contain themselves in their admiration:

• "A terrific site that has changed my travel life..." - WNBC New York TV
• "It's kind of magical..." - Joel on Software

It's just a bunch of boxes which you fill in with details of your business or holiday travel plans, so that all your contacts are emailed with updates stating that: AN Other is returning from a trip to Dubai via TripIt, or Joe Bloggs is planning a trip to New York, NY in November via TripIt.

The ostensible purpose is to alert your many contacts in Dubai or New York - so many that you couldn't possibly contact them all yourself - so that they can bombard you with requests for mutually beneficial business meetings. The real point is of course to show off to all your friends, contacts, previous and prospective employers about your globe-trotting activities. Fair enough, but "magical" or life-changing? I don't think so.

For more in a similar vein:

Persecution via LinkedIn

Best Chemicals Mag on LinkedIn poll

I've been enjoying the third book of Stieg Larssen's Millenium trilogy. My friend Philippa at Tecnon recommended the first one to me because we both enjoy Henning Mankell's Wallander series, and I was in such a hurry to buy the second book in the trilogy that I ended up buying it in hardback rather than waiting for the paperback to come out in the UK in July 2009. It's a perfect book to read on trains or flights, but it's crazy to go on a shorthaul trip with a book that weighs as much as the rest of your luggage put together.

The third book went on sale on 1 October 2009. It was in every bookshop window in its shiny dark green cover, but only in hardback until the paperback comes out in the UK next year. The list price was a staggering £18.99, although Amazon was offering it for £8 plus postage, and at 600 pages the hardback was prohibitively heavy for carry-on luggage.

I resisted, because I hate to reward this kind of manipulative marketing, but then on the way to Amsterdam for the ICIS Training Seminar in October, I weakened and went in to the WH Smiths bookshop in Heathrow's Terminal 4 to look for it.

As if the whole hardback/paperback scam wasn't annoying enough, the book was sold out and not even coming in to the WH Smith warehouse system, the assistant told me.

I took the Amsterdam flight with just a newspaper for company, but on the way back, on a table outside the Schipol florist next to racks of bulbs, the book was on sale and in paperback. It was still a weighty tome, and not exactly a bargain in euros, but it was one small short-lived consumerist triumph ...

Because last week, while I was in a discount bookshop picking up the new Terry Pratchett to give as a present, I saw that all three Millenium books were packaged together with a ribbon and a large bar of Galaxy chocolate for £21 the lot.

Along with all the other early adopters, I'd been taken to the cleaners, and the ribbon and the chocolate were just the final insult.

A big hearty round of congratulations goes out to Heinz Inhester of Ruhrpetrol who tells us that yesterday he became the grandfather of triplets.

"It's been an interesting week. And it's certainly more interesting than propylene," he told our Nel Weddle when she called to talk to him about the olefins market.

More Chemical Babies

Chemicals II: The Next Generation

Alert: Kids in the Office

Truong Mellor, editor of the ICIS butanediol (BDO) report writes ...

In a petrochemical story unlikely to make the ICIS news website, the Australian media has reported that a high-ranking member of a Hells Angels motorcycle gang is facing serious drug charges.

It is alleged the gang has been involved in trafficking large amounts of 1,4-Butanediol between Sydney and Melbourne, which when ingested turns into liquid Ecstasy, also known as GHB.