talk the talk

This afternoon I gave a woodland charity talk in Romford.  The meeting started at two, which meant that I had to aim to be there by half past one, to give time to unload the car and get set up, and allow extra for delays on the A12.  There were no hold-ups, so I spent ten minutes sitting quietly in my car in a church car park, and another fifteen waiting for proceedings to start once I’d got the projector lined up and ready to go.  Better that way than staggering in five minutes after the chairman has called the meeting to order, sweating and apologetic, or five minutes before kick-off and having to get the projector set up with hands made clumsy with haste and embarrassment while everyone looks at me.

This was a return visit.  It is flattering to be asked back, and I was glad to be able to practice the new presentation on a group that I knew were friendly.  I recognised the church, once I got there, and the chairwoman, a tiny, charismatic and extremely self-possessed West Indian.  Actually, I’ve only ever met really nice audiences in south Essex, but that may reflect the fact that I do talks about nature conservation, and not stand-up comedy.  When we last saw Mitch Benn he had some rather harsh words to say on the subject of Romford.

The trouble with learning a new presentation on a familiar topic is that you have to simultaneously unlearn the old one.  The new one has some words on the slides, and not just pictures of trees, making it more obvious that now I’m meant to be talking about Ancient Woodland, or Native Trees, but that still means remembering how many slides the spiel on ancient woodland is supposed to spread over.  In my introductory remarks today I told them as much about the origins and current size of the charity as I was planning to, and then found there was another slide to go, a picture of a giant root buttress captioned Growing Strong, before I got to the three aims of the charity, Create, Protect, Restore, which threw me so that I forgot to tell them some of the specific aims, which are left over from the previous aims of Create, Protect, Inspire.  In an ideal world I’d write my own presentation and have the story in the order I’d have chosen to put it, and then it would be easy to remember, but I can’t face doing the artwork.  I did go through this one at home several times, but that’s no substitute for doing it for real with a live audience.  I could have printed off the notes that go with the slides, but believe that talking from notes is communication death.

I listened to a Radio 4 discussion on volunteering as I drove to Romford.  I missed the start of it, and never gathered quite which forms of volunteering were included.  The examples given seemed to be mainly instances of the charitable sector being expected to take over activities like running daycare centres and providing meals for older people, which were previously done by the local authority.  One disgruntled caller lamented that he had lost his paid position as a youth worker, and that volunteers should remember that they might be taking somebody’s job from them.  Another, who sounded as though they might have worked for local government, queried the expertise of volunteers, however well-meaning, but other contributors pointed out that retired volunteers might have been highly skilled and qualified in their working lives.

It’s a nice question, which tasks society pays to have done, and what it is happy to see done by the voluntary sector.  Organisations like the National Trust say that their garden volunteers don’t take jobs from paid gardeners, but make it possible to maintain their properties to a standard that would otherwise be impossible.  Nonetheless, I have noticed that industries where people will do it anyway for love tend to be badly paid.  Nearly all of my colleagues in the plant centre spend a great deal of their spare time gardening, or visiting gardens, and lots of people are happy to volunteer to do unpaid gardening for their local National Trust house or park.  I have yet to hear of bankers who spend their leisure time visiting other banks or doing pro-bono banking.

When I was a teenager I belonged to a drama group, which was run by a local drama enthusiast who liked young people.  No local authority assistance was received or expected.  I don’t know how we met the costs, since I don’t remember handing over a weekly fifty pence.  We met in the back of the church, so perhaps we had that for free, but there must have been some expenses.  The point was made by one of today’s callers that even if people are happy to give their time, there are always some costs.  Posters, stamps, booking a room, a bare minimum of equipment, insurance.  Which makes volunteering easier for affluent, middling types than the very poor.

My motives for volunteering are cheerfully and candidly mixed.  I love trees, and believe that the woodland charity does good work.  I like meeting people, and am willing to give up some of my spare time to entertain groups of strangers.  So far, so altruistic, but I also consider it prudent to keep up public speaking as a live skill on my CV, in case future economic circumstances dictate that I can’t afford to spend my life as a part time plant centre assistant.  And I think it’s good for me to have to navigate to strange venues, operate my own digital equipment without technical backup, and take on roomfuls of strangers who are not always as kindly as today’s Romford ladies of the church.  As for my presentation skills, they received some very expensive training from my City employers, and were deployed upon the UK’s top pensions consultants and several main board directors of FTSE 100 companies.