talk the talk

I did a woodland charity talk in Romford this afternoon.  It always feels daft to be clocking up virtually a hundred miles in a round trip to the other end of the county and back to preach the virtues of environmental stewardship, but no volunteer speakers ever seem to come forward from the eastern London fringes.  I sometimes have to share my patch with one or two others along the Suffolk border, but they won't go as far as Romford.

I left plenty of time, since you never know how the A12 is going to be.  In fact, the traffic was flowing very freely and I arrived early, leaving me with plenty of time to listen to the World at One and stare at the chain link fence around the Methodist Church car park, trying to work out if I'd seen it before.  I thought I probably had, but after a dozen years of doing talks one car park ends up looking much like another.

The audience was small but welcoming, the barrel-ceilinged hall large and echoing, and the extraneous noises kept on coming.  Somewhere in the building a telephone rang with a proper old fashioned ring tone, the voices of people came and went in the lobby outside, and the hall door rattled ferociously.  It was pretty windy.  My car had been shaking in the car park as I looked at the fence.  I kept on talking, watching the lady in blue in the back row fiddling repeatedly with her hearing aid and thinking it was no good, I couldn't talk any louder or more clearly than I already was.  Juliet Stevenson could have, but I couldn't.

There was no vote of thanks afterwards because the friendly organiser disappeared to make the tea, and her friend who was supposed to be bringing the formal proceedings to a close went to help her.  As I chatted to one of the audience she confirmed my feeling that I had been there before, saying she had heard me before.  I thought I recognised her.  I'd like to say piously that human faces are more memorable than chain link fences, but the truth is that I'm not awfully good at faces, and quite observant of building details, and the main reason I'd remembered her was that she was blind.