This is the first weekend for eight weeks that I haven't had something on during the day. Concerts, beekeeping events, a family get-together, I counted the weeks in my diary. It brings it home how much you miss out on, working at weekends. It becomes second nature for your first response to any invitation to be that you'll have to check if you're working, and to give the prospect of any entertainment like a concert or exhibition only a guarded welcome until you have looked at whether you can actually go. Then there are the things you aren't invited to in the first place because your prospective host assumes you'll be at work. We should all be more grateful, and more humble, to the army of staff who keep shops, cafes, filling stations, public transport, galleries and museums, not to mention plant centres, up and running on Saturdays and Sundays for our amusement and profit.
I could have been at an event this weekend, because I'm pretty sure it's the woodland charity's volunteers conference, unless that's next Saturday. I know it's soon, because my volunteer supervisor at the charity (they haven't adopted spy thriller terminology, otherwise I could refer to her as my handler) had lost her voice last week and was hoping it would come back in time. I ducked out of this conference, having been to the last one a couple of years ago, because it was in Leeds, which is a very long way from here, and because you had to choose in advance which group forums you wanted to attend for a large part of the day, and last time I didn't get into any of my chosen groups. I wasn't keen on driving all the way to Leeds and back, or wrestling with the uncertainties of a cheap advance ticket which would leave me having to buy a full price pay on the day fare if for any reason I missed my one allotted train, and paying for two nights in a hotel, even a budget one, in order to spend most of the day in activities I hadn't chosen and didn't particularly want to do.
There is a moral there for anybody organising any kind of conference, be it for charity supporters or workers in the commercial sector. Choice is one of the great fetishes of our time. Consumer choice is good. However, offering choice but then giving people one hundred per cent of what they didn't ask for is bad. Choice where everybody can have the same thing if that's what they all decide they want is fine. It can work for mass catering backed up by freezers full of food, or digital content where the supply can be expanded indefinitely. It does not work where the supply of each option is smaller than the number of people choosing, and there is a risk that they will all want the same thing, or that almost nobody will want some of the options. I was willing to travel to Grantham two years ago partly in the hope when I booked of attending a session with a famous, not to say legendary authority on trees. I wouldn't necessarily have gone all that way to hear some unknown volunteer, however nice and worthy, talking about their own personal experience of community tree planting, and I certainly wasn't going to commit myself to travelling as far as Leeds while taking pot luck on what I'd be doing when I got there. Maybe it's safer in planning these things to give the groups sessions a miss and stick to lectures and panel discussions so that the big conference draws can be shared equally among all the delegates.
FOMO is another contemporary hang-up, Fear Of Missing Out. It's a delusion, since from the dawn of time everybody has been missing out because nobody can do everything. So this year I have not been to the galleries of Florence, New York, Vienna or Berlin. But that's fine, because I have been to some very good exhibitions in London, and have saved myself the expense and aggravation of getting to New York in the first place. But FOMO is different to IAMO, I Am Missing Out. Why do I only count as a second rate volunteer, who doesn't get to spend time with the great tree guru? Should I have done more talks? Engaged in other community projects as well as doing the talks? Promised the charity I was leaving them a substantial legacy in my will? That's another reason not to offer choice and then disappoint some of your audience, they may find it hard not to take it personally, even though in reality it was probably luck, or even a compliment because you are such a nice, mature person that you'll give the unknown volunteer a fair hearing, clap enthusiastically and think of some good questions.
In the meantime I have enjoyed not spending today driving back from Leeds.
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