volunteering day

This is going to be a short blog post, because it's late.  Today was a day of volunteering.  I wasn't too impressed by a piece I heard on Radio 4 that claimed that government definitions of volunteering were now so broad that they included, for example, attending your child's sporting fixtures.  If true that sounded like a desperate attempt to puff up the numbers of people now contributing to the Big Society.  My contribution to the social good consisted of a woodland charity talk to a ladies' social club (I got the impression they might have been a renegade WI) and a beekeepers' committee meeting, so I was contributing actively and not merely supporting.

The ladies were a nice bunch, and met in Great Bardfield.  I'd never been to Great Bardfield before, and managed to get lost on the way, despite it being only two miles down the road from Finchingfield, where we had lunch just before Christmas.  Fortunately I'd left plenty of time, partly in case I got lost, and also so that I'd have time to find Edward Bawden's house.  He lived there for years, while Eric Ravilious was his lodger for a time.  Indeed, so many artists have lived there that the village lent them its name as the Great Bardfield Artists.  More recently Grayson Perry grew up there (according to Wikipedia).  It is a very pretty and prosperous looking village, and conjures up a different image of Grayson Perry's youth to when he describes himself as a Chelmsford boy.

I found Brick House easily enough, since it is slap bang in the middle of the village, a short step down from the town hall where the meeting was held.  To my disappointment there was no heritage plaque.  I wondered whether the village lacked a local society to sponsor such things, or whether the current owners of the house preferred not to invite strangers to come and gawp at their frontage. Presumably the owner of a building has to grant permission for commemorative plaques to be put up.

The talk went off OK, though I find the current script quite difficult to remember, much more so than the beekeeping and gardening talks that I wrote myself.  I guess it is always easier to go through something you have designed to express your own thoughts in the order they naturally occur to you than to have to follow somebody else's idea.  I've contemplated trying to rework it, but have so far felt defeated by the project, given that I'm limited to reordering the slides I've been given, unless I go out and start making major efforts with a camera.  Then I have to start worrying about image sizes, and how to superimpose text, and the whole thing seems too difficult.  Because I find the script confusing I spent the morning mugging up on it, hence no blog before lunch.

I shouldn't have left printing my papers for the committee meeting until I got back from doing the talk, since my laptop played up, the printer played up, and when I emailed the spreadsheet I was trying to print to the Systems Administrator, Excel crashed on the SA's laptop as well.  Hence there was no blog before supper either.  The meeting was rather jolly, with such a good attendance that we scarcely fitted into the Chairman's conservatory, especially as his dog decided to join us.  It was very well behaved, but it is a Rhodesian ridgeback and absolutely vast.  When the dog decides to stop moving all anyone can do is pick their way round it.

I trust that David Cameron himself would consider that enough community involvement for one day. And that's enough blog too.