Sharing the stage with a distractingly massive pack of multi-coloured plasticine, Gallbreath was in no mood for compromise, declaring war on mediocrity, denouncing all those who trade in half measures, and calling down a fatwa on the scourge of partial satisfaction.

Gallbreath, it seems, has had enough of seeing satisfied members lolling around the BIBA member pool. “My real challenge, my real challenge, however,” he said, “is to move the 42% of satisfied members to join those 54% who are very or extremely satisfied.” EG must surely be applauded for his ardent will to strive for extreme satisfaction with real urgency and vigour.

To help him get a firmer grasp on the whole satisfied member thing, Gallbreath has called in “consultants Deloitte” to do some very cool consulty type things that are sure to provide excellent value for BIBA members.

On the thorny question of the FSA’s unfair FSCS funding model, Gallbreath said firmly that “all options need to be considered.”

Next year’s BIBA conference is in London (or perhaps slightly to the right of it), which is good because it allows delegates to disperse quickly into the sprawling polycentric metropolis to the west rather than hanging around to bump into one another with frustrating regularity as one inevitably does in a place like 2012 host city Manchester City city.

Hay fever people may think they can make themselves safe by dosing up on tablets. But - warns Mo^e Th<n - that’s nonsense because the pills will probably make you drowsy or something, so don’t even think about doing that. Obvs.

In fact, according to The Sun’s report “a huge 63 per cent admitted having had a small accident or a near miss as a result of taking hayfever medication.”

Now Mor< Th1n are warning that grass has been growing dangerously well this year and a spell of hot weather could unleash the mother of all pollen emissions, swamping the land with potentially lethal sneezing agents. Hay fever victims are being urged to surrender their driving licences and stay indoors indefinitely.

Tysoe and Panda

There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is the pair had to endure the vilest of all lunchtime vileness having been reduced by desperate hunger to having recourse to fare variously described as Gammon Egg and Chips and a Cheese and Pickle Sandwich (how could that go wrong?! *) at the Downe Arms on the A170 between Pickering and Scarborough.

More importantly, the good news is that this year’s route (which now detours through the scenic Dalby Forest to avoid the aforementioned Downe Arms) is the BEST EVER MM ROUTE, consisting entirely of outrageously scenic scenicity and roads that might have been custom built for the all-round touring satisfaction of middle-aged men riding tiny motorbikes whilst decked out in medieval garb.

Which medievally relevant locations does this peerless itenary encompass, you may wonder. We’re just getting to that…

It begins on the morning of Saturday 7th July amidst the faded former milltown desolation that is Brighouse, but quickly puts such unpleasantness behind it as it speeds towards first stop Skipton Castle.

Castle Gates, Skipton

Next up is new stop Barden Tower, a majestic ruined hunting lodge nestled in the delightful Wharfe Valley near Bolton Abbey.

The famous private shed at Barden Tower

From there the cavalcade rides on to Ripley Castle near Harrogate, whose name derives from its notoriously unevenly constructed walls.

A charming vista

Then it’s off east again - via a sumptuous roadside repast courtesy of the estimable Mrs Tysoe, revered purveyor of coffee and flapjacks to previous monkeybiking charity expeditions - towards the precarious ruins of Sheriff Hutton Castle - location for the famous “lady with some dogs” scene in the MM2011 video on YouTube - where the owners have kindly laid on further (tea time) refreshments and a reception party of local notables and where the monkeybikers will be joined by one of Yorkshire Air Ambulance’s distinctive Yellow Helicopters (provided it is not busy doing its day job of rushing injured persons to hospital).

The famous Lady with some Dogs scene

Replete with tea and cakes, the entourage now remounts and turns North to take in the winding sylvan delights of Dalby forest - the finest imaginable way to reach overnight stop Scarborough whilst bypassing the dread Downe Arms, an establishment whose sparse lunchtime clientele appears to consist almost exclusively of paunchily malodorous snooker-playing trolls.

The gorse is in bloom above Dalby Forest

Taking care to avoid the misleadingly named Grand Hotel, which is probably where the trolls go on holiday, the party will then retire to their various hostelries around the seaside fleshpot that is Scarborough to gird themselves afresh for the evening’s delights - last year it was watching the Haye–Klitschko ‘battle of broken toe’ fiasco in a giant circular Disco Weatherspoons, or something - so pretty much anything could happen.

The dismal Grand Hotel, Scarborough

Scraping their sore-headed selves up from whatever flat surface they’ve collapsed upon the night before, the intrepid riders will start out bright and early on Sunday 8th July with a refreshingly brisk salty-aired zip up the coast to picturesque Whitby Abbey home (briefly) to suave eastern european type Dracula.

Put me down at once!

Turning inland the party next re-enters the North Yorks Moors Nat Park, heading west towards Rosedale Abbey where the staggering spectacle of the famed spiral staircase awaits.

The "famous" spiral staircase - all that remains of Rosedale Abbey

Up on to the moors again now - via gradients of such savage ferocity that no mere monkey bike could ever hope to overcome them without its rider getting off and pushing it the remaining 800 feet up to the next downhill or level bit - then down to Helmsley Castle on the southern fringes of the NYMs.

Gandalf at the Battle of Helmsley

Then just round the corner lies next stop Rievaulx Abbey - so incompletely raised to the ground during the dissolution of the monasteries that Henry VIII should have had somebody’s head for it.

The finest view of Rievaulx Abbey (centre) available from the car park

Next up Tysoe’s planned a descent from the high moors more scenicly winding and precipitous than on any previous outing as a prelude to the long haul over to hospitable Knaresborough Castle and its surrounding pleasure grounds high above the River Nidd.

An unspoiled Knaresborough Castle and the Nidd

After that it’s all the way back to Brighouse and the final stop at BLD’s gaff by the station.

A minor obstacle (foot-deep ford)

All in all there’s barely a duff 100m on the entire route - and if that doesn’t please all concerned then there’s really no pleasing them.

You know you want this!

Feeling inspired? It’s not too late to enter your team (i.e. volunteer one or more people - yourself, perhaps - to ride a monkeybike round Yorkshire for charity - rather than anything pervy or improper). Simply contact Dickon Tysoe and he’ll sort everything out - including the bike if you haven’t already got one.

An "open road"

* Recipe for inedible cheese and pickle sandwich. Serve pre-grated week-old orange catering cheese between dry so-called brown bread, cut into triangles and serve with a ramikin of rancid pickle on the side and a handful of soggy oven chips, blackened on the outside, soggily uncooked in the middle: the perfect accompaniment to a flat acrid pint pulled from filth-clogged stinking pipes.

Stride managing director Dick Loveglove was seen roaming the so-called exhibition hall at BIBA 2012 urging brokers to try their luck. “If you play your cards right,” Loveglove suggested, “you could win an iPad.”

The Striders are regular tweeters and their final tweet of the BIBA Conference congratualated Tony Cracroft of Flint Insurance Sidcup whose “hand of four Jacks” trumped all comers to secure the coveted iPad2. A subsequent tweet announced that the latest issue of the Stride Insurance Group Daily is out. Bankstone News could not resist taking a peek at this.

Two very interesting stories in the technology section immediately jumped out at Bankstone News. The first explained that: “The TinyURL (d22bz48) you visited was used by its creator in violation of our terms of use. TinyURL has a strict no abuse policy and we apologize for the intrusion this user has caused you. If you received spam, please note that TinyURL did not send this spam and we do not operate any email lists. We can not remove you from spammer’s database as we have no association with spammers, but instead we recommend you use spam filtering software.”

A second article made equally fascinating reading revealing that The TinyURL (d22bz48) you visited was used by its creator in violation of our terms of use. TinyURL has a strict no abuse policy and we apologize for the intrusion this user has caused you. If you received spam, please note that TinyURL did not send this spam and we do not operate any email lists. We can not remove you from spammer’s database as we have no association with spammers, but instead we recommend you use spam filtering software.

Linked articles highlighted the heartwarming story of how a “UK Mum” turned “£20  into £5000” and a self-help piece outlining how you can make earn £5000 working part time from home.

Bankstone News hasn’t the faintest idea what any of this means but it’s certainly food for thought!

The theme this year is Plasticine, the world’s favourite modelling clay, as in “Shaping our Futures”. It’s genius really. Bankstone news can’t wait to get its hands on some of the brightly coloured children’s art material - superior to Play Doh in every way except, of course, it doesn’t smell as nice.

Every other email this week has included the offer of a glass of champagne/wine/beer or a nice cup of coffee “on our stand at BIBA.” Nice to see so many people ignoring the national capital-letters shortage too, by refusing to write it as Biba. What is that all about?

In his official show preview, BIBA’s Eric Gallbreath notes that everything could be about to turn to sh*t so this “could prove to be a pivotal year for the UK on both a global and a macro scale.”

“In times of dramatic change,” he warns, “it is tempting to think about burying our heads in the snow and hoping the icy winter winds blow over as quickly as possible,” and how true that is. Many’s the time Bankstone News has felt the arctic blizzards whipping about its exposed nether parts as its nose and ears start to lose feeling - only to recognise at the last minute that only frostbite that way lies. “Tempting but highly irresponsible,” EG concludes, and somehow you know he’s right.



Instead, he says, we need to “cut out the dead wood of restrictive thinking”, “recognise that the facebook generation will be tomorrow’s business leaders” (had you ever considered that? It’s logical enough, though, really when you think about it), “wake up and get connected!” Follow Eric on twitter at… oh, Bankstone News doesn’t know, he’s probably on there somewhere!

Think he’s given up on getting modelling clay in there somewhere? Oh no, he hasn’t! 
“Our aim is to mould BIBA into the most effective lobbying and member association in the UK,” he concludes ambitiously. “Meet us in Manchester and tell us what you want from us.”

We’ll be there. Will you?

As regular habitués of the video section on the Ins Age site will recall, the basic plot of the IAMBB series involves mild mannered reporter Emmanuel K Enning travelling to Britain’s notorious second city to investigate the shady goings on within the local broking scene.

In IAMBB I and II he quizzes some men in suits from Bluefin, Lorica, Mitsui Sumitomi, Perkins Slade, Stewart Miller, Southall Hairies and Willis on how they’re liking the recession, what their clients are up to, the “state of the market”, risk management etc.

Interestingly they all said that whilst some of their competitors might be suffering a bit, they’ve actually done quite well in the current challenging climate. Most felt the market/the economy might remain quite tough for a bit, but that it might get a bit better sometime quite soon.

Enning does a remarkable job of remaining calm through all this, speaking exclusively through captions and offering only the gentlest of micro-nods by way of response to his interlocutors. His unchanging deadpan demeanour makes strangely compelling viewing.

IAMBB3 is a thrilling conclusion to the series, so densely packed with standout moments it’s hard to choose between them. Let’s pick out just two. Bankstone News has long wondered where Lorica found the inspiration for their mysterious logo. Turns out it’s modelled on the flowing locks of debonaire Birmingham Brunch Manager James Cellars (see visual evidence below).

Better still is the moment where Perkins Slade MD Corporate Darren Rogue, who predicted memorably in IAMBB2 that there would probably be further pigs and troughs before we emerge from recession, let slip that his firm is actively targeting the “nouveau riche”.

Traditionally, such jumped up parvenu individuals have probably felt more comfortable with terms such as High Net Worth or Executive Lifestyle. But fair play Darren, Bankstone News says, let’s call a spade a spade.

When a person owes their wealth to vulgar commerce rather than a feudal right to prey on the rural underclass that dates back to a Norman charter, there’s really no sense in pretending otherwise. No amount of choosing Rugby over football or joining the Sunday Times wine club can ultimately atone for flawed breeding.

We do, of course, recognise that not everyone finds claims so endlessly fascinating, but it seems as if - just possibly - the “claims thing” is starting to catch on. How else can you explain the extraordinary recent popularity of events like the UK Claims Excellence Awards, which convened for a second triumphant year at some big hotel on London’s prestigious Pork Lane this week?

Insurance Times publishing director Shân Vanillie was literally not exaggerating when she argued that this year’s event was “in some ways even more special than our first.” A sea of expectant rapturous faces stretching out before her radiated silent confirmation. “Looking around this room,” she continued, caught up, no doubt, in the transcendent ‘claimsishness’ of the moment, “it’s clear that the Claims Excellence Awards have earned their place on your priority list again this year.” Cue rapturous applause and collective claimsgasm.

The more one sees of this kind of thing, the harder it is to understand how some people still don’t get it. There remain those, however, who see the accolade of Outstanding Insurer Claims Individual of the Year as somewhat akin to Accounting or Trainspotting Personality of the Year. Not us! Bankstone News salutes AXA’s Graham Plums who tasted the sweet fruits of success when he picked up this choice accolade on Wednesday - along with Lockyer’s Jon Narwhal and Hastings’ Spike Lee who bagged the corresponding awards in the broking section, in the commercial and personal lines areas respectively.

There were other winners aplenty, but Bankstone News is beginning to find this all just slightly too arousing and really needs to calm down a bit. It’s probably best if we refer you to Insurance Times if you want to find out more and just lie down somewhere quiet for a while.

In a dramatic populace-pleasing move, the exalted Lee has announced his intention of descending briefly from the lofty realms of corporate strategy (and/or wondering whether and how he can get his hands on Uvavu’s GI bits) and pass amongst the crowds at BIBA.

Where many CEOs would surely turn their noses up at the prospect of close contact with regional brokers and other such unsavoury types, Lee told Insurance Times this week that he feels “he can justify the time he spends shaking hands because of its importance to the business.”

“Has he not got better things to do?” you may ask, quite literally askance. Well, of course he has! “There is no shortage of things coming across my desk,” he concedes, going on to insist, however, that “meeting customers and brokers is one of my priorities.”

“This is a relationship business,” he concludes, suggesting he may well have read the fascinating yellow advertorial stapled round last week’s Insurance Times by current takeover targets Uvavu. There’s an idea that’s catching on!

Our newly impoverished politicians have started gingerly down the potentially fateful path of courting popular approval with born again denunciations of the obscene salaries paid to the so-called fat cats whose collective willingness to remain based somewhere vaguely taxable they dare not test too far.

Nor, shockingly, is the otherwise respectable world of insurance entirely immune to this newly discovered epidemic of obscene remuneration. Uvavu moss Andrew Boss this week moved to mitigate mutterings over his package by turning down a £46,000 pay rise. Coincidentally Bankstone News also turned down a £46,000 pay rise this year - by declining the option of taking up two full-time positions in nursing.

Moss’s selfless act of financial self-denial, eloquently supportive as it may be of the Cameron-Osborne ‘all in this together’ message, seems not to have fully quashed the carping of just-jealous side-line name-callers like the ‘institutional investor’ who, according to the excellent news report in Insurance Times of which the words you now read are merely a mangled misinterpretation, told the FT this week that (as with Bolton or Aston Villa) “no one supports Moss”.

Shareholders are apparently questioning the probity of Uvavu’s remuneration committee for handing Moss an 8.5% increase in total pay (excluding three million or so in share options) despite Uvavu having lost a quarter of its share value last year. According to Insurance Times, one such shareholder told the FT “In the context of concerns about the performance of the group and the executive team, why an earth did the remuneration committee propose such a rise for the CEO?” 

Why an earth? Bankstone News can think of no possible reason. Unless, of course, some of those on the remuneration committee are, in some capacity or other, in the business of getting remunerated themselves. Perhaps a committee made up of shareholders, random people off the street or - probably best - leading politicians could step in to take a fresh look at top exec’s pay.

The dry run of the 15th will provide an opportunity to scout monkeybike parking availability/photo opportunity spots etc and unsettle various respectable matrons partaking in an otherwise perfectly civilized light lunch at some charming market-town tearoom or other. It will also enable Mr T to identify replacement locations for the handful dropped from last year’s itinerary due to being too dull, inaccessible or arsey.

One castle that’s sure to stay on the list - unless it doesn’t - is the delightfully dilapidated Knaresborough Castle, a scenic gem set high on a cliff above the River Nidd. Picking up where we left off last year (about half way through), Bankstone News now attempts to bulk out a notably light story with some fascinating facts about this historic landmark.

Originally built by Norman Baron around the year 1100, KC infamously provided refuge to Becket assassin Sir Hugh de Moreville in 1170. Then in 1130 it caught the eye of Baaad King John who lavished a princely £1,290 on improvements. So shoddy was the work, however that the whole thing had to be rebuilt by Eds I and II in the fourteenth century.

Parliamentary forces dismantled the castle in 1648, with the consequence that much of the town centre is built of ‘castle stone.’ By the same token, following the notorious Northern Rock Riot of 2007, some of the less salubrious parts of Weasley Street are now constructed from ‘bank stone’.

The grassy gaps within and around what remains of the crumbling pile are now devoted to the pursuit of public leisure, with bowling and putting greens open in summer and brass (and/or silver) bands playing most afternoons. Entrance fee applies.

Knaresborough Mayor Disguised as Bear