Today I gave my first woodland conservation charity talk of the autumn. I joined the charity sometime back in the 1980s, because I liked trees and it sounded like a good cause, but only started volunteering for them when I gave up commuting and City life. (Mind you, that is eleven years ago by now.) While doing my London job I couldn’t have got home in time, even assuming that I hadn’t got evening work commitments that day and that the trains hadn’t been late. Once I was free of the shackles of commuting (man is born free, and is everywhere in trains, as Tiresius says in Notes from the Overground. It is out of print but you can pick up copies second hand for peanuts.) I was able to volunteer.
I went to a slightly ambiguous session for potential speakers, which might have been either them vetting us for suitability, or else simply a training day. We were all asked why we wanted to volunteer, and everybody said that they wanted to support the charity and put something into the community, and I said that I wanted to do those things too, and also since I had had a lot of expensive presentation training and was now taking a form of early retirement, it seemed a pity to let it go to waste and I would like to keep my skills up on my CV. The other would-be volunteers all looked at me and went ooo, and I gathered that you were not supposed to admit that.
Eleven years on I have lost track of how many groups I have spoken to, and how many people. I get a fair few Women’s Institutes, plus pensioners’ friendship groups, conservation groups, universities of the third age, and some gardening clubs that like to add an environmental or conservation dimension. I don’t charge a fee, just ask for a donation to the charity, and knowing how much gardening clubs pay for horticultural talks I can tell you that it is a cheap way of getting a speaker. I keep on doing it because I still enjoy it, and while I am closer to conventional retirement age than I was eleven years ago, I should still like to keep my CV faintly polished. I don’t talk to schools. I don’t feel I know how to talk to children, having no experience, and I found the whole idea of the CRB process so offensive that I resolved never to participate.
When I started I used a slide projector, which I had to buy myself in Jessups. I began to sense that this was getting out of date when friends who came to stay were practically laughing at the quaintness of the idea that they knew anybody who still used one (indeed, it was parked in the spare bedroom at the time). A few years ago the charity lent me a digital projector, which runs off a memory stick plugged into the back. I found my first few outings with the digital projector faintly terrifying, since I am not technologically savvy, and was painfully aware that if the machine played up or I pressed the wrong button and got lost in its internal programmes, I would be on my own with no technician or the Systems Administrator on hand to save me. At least with the slide projector, even if the automatic carriage stuck I could drop slides in manually, though it never came to that. I have had some alarming moments with the digital machine, but by now am reasonably confident.
It’s a funny business, talking to a roomful of pensioners with no real downside. The worst that could happen is that I might bore them to idiocy (or to sleep), causing damage to my own pride and very mild reputational damage to the charity. It keeps me on my toes anyway, as I hate making a fool of myself in public. In my days of doing City presentations I was a cosseted performer in comparison, with a minder from client relations or marketing to make sure I got to the right place, and prepare the presentation. Now it’s just me, and after eleven years I have got wise to some of the oddities of Essex social clubs. In rural areas I have learnt to beware the cluster of two or three villages with similar names, where the village hall is not physically in the village that is named in the letterhead of the club I’m visiting, but in one of the other villages two or three miles up the road. I’ve also learnt to fend off caretakers and club officers who are terribly keen that I should use their laptop, projector table or some other bit of kit they are proud of. I take all my own kit. I know how it fits together, and the thought of trying to plug my memory stick into a strange laptop is terrifying. It’s difficult setting up the equipment with a bevy of eager committee members looking on and wanting to help, as I become dreadfully clumsy trying to do any mechanical task when I know that people are watching me. A lot of venues now have a sound system, which organisers are keen visiting speakers use, not least because it may feed a hearing induction loop. There will be no sound-check before the talk starts, so I’ve got used to having a microphone thrust into my hands or clipped to my lapel and launching straight into my act.
Today’s talk was the first one for several months, but was fine, a church women’s guild in Romford. Their newly appointed Chair was a tiny and deeply impressive West Indian woman. I gathered that she had just taken on the role, and that the guild had slipped into the pattern of a small number of committee members doing all the work, leaving it in disarray when somebody retired. She was determined that things were going to change in future, and I wouldn’t have dared stand in her way. They said they enjoyed the talk. Most people like trees, and like to hear other people be enthusiastic about something, so it’s not a hard topic. Compared to explaining why their pension fund return in the last financial quarter was 1.5% behind the performance benchmark but they shouldn’t worry, it’s a very easy sell. They gave me a charity donation and some flowers, possibly plucked from a vase in the church, but it’s the impulse that counts.
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