a charity talk

I did a woodland charity talk yesterday evening.  It was booked months ago, via a friend who belongs to a small conservation group.  They are struggling slightly to keep the whole thing going, as the members get older and new younger people don't seem to want to join, and once I knew it was safely after the funeral there didn't seem any point in messing them about by insisting they find another speaker at less than three weeks' notice.  I did have my friend on standby beforehand, just in case the dates clashed, to give her a little more time to think of an alternative evening's entertainment.  If I ran a group like that I think I'd have a quiz tucked away in case of emergencies.

It was not quite the talk it should have been, since the charity recently issued a new one, or rather images and scripts for a suite of talks we are at liberty to customize depending on our audience.  An email arrived with a link and password to access a restricted area of the charity's site, where full details were available to download.  There was never really a good moment to look at it all, and I decided that the old talk would have to do for one more outing.  The fundamentals can't have changed that much.

Finding village halls up single track turnings off B roads is a skill that improves with practice, and so when confirming the arrangements with the club secretary I asked her if there was anything at all that I might be able to see in the dark along the B road that would tell me when I had reached my turning. There was no convenient pub or garage to help me on my way, but thank goodness for bus shelters, even unilluminated ones.  Unfortunately the village hall car park was equally unlit, and so I now have a new scrape on my front bumper where I failed to spot a small and evil retaining wall as I was turning round.  Ah well.  The damage is superficial and purely cosmetic, and it's not as though I was hoping to sell the Skoda.

It was an extraordinarily solidly built hall.  My friend, when she called to check that I knew how to find it, and possibly to check in the most tactful way possible that I had remembered I was going, described it as being built of cob.  In my mind's eye I'd had a vision of a wooden chalet style affair, so I must have been thinking of the hall of some other village in that neck of the woods.  When first opened up it felt rather damp and chilly and I worried that my sweater was not going to be warm enough, but once the overhead infrared heaters had been running for an hour it became quite toasty.  In fact, for the last ten minutes of talking I was distinctly hot, and as soon as I'd got to the end I tried to peel the sweater off, only to discover that I'd put the pin of my volunteer speaker name badge through my t-shirt as well as the sweater, so it's just as well I didn't attempt that manoeuvre between slides.

They were a nice group, who made a very generous donation given their modest numbers, and this morning sent me a friendly email saying a couple of people intended to sign up to the charity.  And the biscuits with the tea after the talk were proper McVities chocolate digestives.  You can tell a lot about a group by the quality of its biscuits.