scriptwriting

The programme organiser from the garden club I'm due to talk to next Wednesday about bulbs rang last night to check that I was still on for it.  I assured her in my best reassuring tones that it was safely in my diary, and confirmed we were still meeting in the same hall I went to last time, and not the one round the corner that the WI uses.  I forbore to mention that at the moment she rang I had finished exactly one slide of the presentation, and that the Systems Administrator and I were struggling to find the Drawing toolbar on my version of Powerpoint, which seemed to be missing.

I had made a little more progress than that, as I'd  hunted down and saved quite a few pictures of the flowers I wanted to talk about, but getting them into Powerpoint and centred in the middle of the screen was proving unexpectedly difficult.  It worked fine when I did it this time last year, but perhaps then I was happy to roughly centre the pictures by eye.  The SA, after comparing my version of Powerpoint with the one on his laptop, announced that mine was about six versions out of date, and that if I gave him the rough presentation he could line everything up neatly, and swap the white background for something less glaring, which sounded good to me.  Even so, my slides are not going to be nearly as slick as last Thursday's bumble bee man's were.

I thought I'd better go on with the slides this morning, until I had reached the point of having a workable presentation that I wouldn't be embarrassed to use on the night, loaded on to a memory stick and tested with the actual projector and not just on the laptop, to prove that it ran OK.  I could then add any last things that occurred to me over the weekend, and the SA could jazz it up cosmetically, but at least I'd be ready to do the talk as booked.  It took until eleven, with a hiatus to take the SA's car to the garage, which was a waste of half a dry morning in the garden, but couldn't be helped.  I meant to do more of it before going on holiday, but there seemed to be too many other things to do then.

By a quarter to two the first drops of rain were falling, which was pretty much bang on the timetable indicated by the rain radar, so after lunch I thought I'd better write the wildlife gardening presentation I'd agreed to do for work.  I'd already thought of most of what I wanted to say, but it needed a running order.  It will be harder to do than the bulb talk, which is conceptually very simple, as I shall set out my brief, and tell them that I'm going to tell them about reliable bulbs that are good garden doers, and not the subtle differences between 83 different sorts of snowdrop.  Then there's a picture of every bulb I intend to talk about, in the right order (the last bulb talk I went to myself was by Lady Skelmersdale, proprietor of the excellent Broadleigh Bulbs, back in the days of physical slides.  Due to technical problems with her host's projection equipment, she had had to move all the slides into a different carousel at the last moment.  They were not all in the right order.  Some were not even the right way up).  I know what I want to say about each variety, so finding my way from one end of the presentation to the other should be straightforward.

The wildlife talk is anything but.  I won't have slides, just a collection of props, bird feeding kit, and some plants and bits of plants.  I need to remember to cover food, shelter and breeding sites, across birds, bees, butterflies, and beetles, amphibians, and hedgehogs, and try and remember to cover ponds and long grass.  I think my employer is hoping to hear a commercial plug for bird food and berrying shrubs, which is what they'll get at the beginning.  However, the talk will go on to suggest that wildlife gardening entails a shift in attitude.  The gardener needs to accept that they live with their garden rather than being in dominion over it, which means relying on natural predators for aphid control instead of reaching for the insecticide, timing their heavy pruning to fit in with the bird nesting season, turning any pointless large areas of mown grass into something more productive and less polluting, and learning to find winter seed heads and leaf litter beautiful rather than messy.  I've got two pages of notes, and if I manage to remember to get half of it in that will be a small miracle.  There won't be a rehearsal.  The talk will be done twice, in front of a live audience both times.  Provided that anybody comes.