mission completed

I have done my woodland charity talk.  That's rather a relief.  Since the first of October I have stood up and talked six times, on five different topics.  Two of them were entirely new talks composed for the occasion, while the woodland charity presentation was updated fairly recently, so tonight was only the second time I'd talked off that version of the slides.  Keeping them all clear in my mind has felt like hard work at times.  Now I've got a month's break before doing the woodland talk again, and after that a really long break, with no talks booked until March.

This evening's talk was to a recently formed tree group.  Tonight was their first AGM.  They were not a large audience, but actually more intimidating than your average group, because I knew they would have a well above-average level of knowledge about trees and practical conservation.  I'm not sure I told them a great deal they didn't already know, but still, having an outside speaker pitch up for the annual meeting was an event.  Otherwise, since the committee were re-elected en bloc with no dissent, they'd have had to spend the whole evening chatting to each other over tea and biscuits.

Last night's garden group were lovely, and bought quite a lot of plants.  I preen myself a little for having managed to make the plants sound so nice, but I have to remember that I was in a well-heeled part of Suffolk, so I shouldn't take all the credit.  It's just as well they liked it, as they already have me booked for next year as well.  I'm not entirely sure whether that was intentional, or whether, given that a new booking secretary has recently taken over, she got in a muddle about what the previous one had already booked.

I count it as something of a miracle to have successfully traversed the region's trunk roads twice in two evenings without being caught in traffic.  To sail over the Orwell bridge and up the A12 towards Chelmsford without getting stuck in a jam at least once feels like an achievement.  I had a scare tonight, as the roadside electronic signs that were installed in a rush towards the end of the last government, and normally just say Check Your Mirrors or Don't Drink and Drive, presumably because there is no budget to pay anyone to update them with useful real-time information, actually gave some traffic data for a change.  They said that there was an accident on the A12 southbound at Eight Ash Green.  I skulked through Lexden and down to Copford and Mark's Tey without joining the A12, in the hopes that if there were delays I might get past them, or at least have the option of peeling away to the south.  It was probably a vain hope, since when the A12 is blocked, the diverted traffic stuffs up all the surrounding roads, and as I don't have a Satnav my chances of navigating cross country in the dark with one hand on the road atlas and one eye on the road were approximately nil, but fortunately I didn't have to.  Goodness knows when the accident at Eight Ash Green was.  Probably lunchtime.