going out

I went to my AGM this morning.  It was the first time I'd been out socially for a month.  In fact, I could pretty much list every face to face conversation I've had with anybody in the past month, apart from the Systems Administrator.  I had that unpleasant conversation with the neighbours between Christmas and the New Year about their dogs coming into our garden.  I went to the Highwoods Tesco on New Years Day and had a chat with the young lad on the till about cats, and called at the filling station where I spoke to confirm which pump I was at and that £45.88 sounded right.  I called in at Beth Chatto's shop where the assistant and I agreed that it was jolly chilly, and at Budgens where I said that yes, that that was all that I wanted, that being a loaf of bread and a couple of pints of milk.  I went to Waitrose, although I can't remember what we talked about at the till.  Maybe by then the novelty of talking to people was wearing off.  And took in a parcel for the Systems Administrator delivered by an Eastern European who did not want a signature, and spoke to the postman a few times, and the dustman who called a day early.  And I exchanged emails and texts with a few people (well, six) and rang up the waste recycling firm to report that my brown garden bin had not been emptied.  And that was it, the sum total of my human contacts in four weeks.  It would be pitiful, like one of those newspaper stories about isolated old people, if it were not that it was quite as many people as I could cope with.

The AGM was very properly conducted.  Turnout was over ninety per cent.  I had been warned that attendance was expected unless you had a very good excuse indeed, and took heed, making it the only AGM of any club I have ever belonged to which I have ever been to unless I was actually on the committee.  The constitution was read out in full, because that is one of the requirements of the constitution.  It ran to three pages, so the Chairman, the Treasurer and the Membership Secretary took one each.  I was pretty much with the Chairman for the first page, but by the time we got to the rules governing whether a national meeting was quorate they were beginning to lose me.  The Picts, by now Scots (living in brackets).  I am all in favour of clubs having proper constitutions and sticking to them, though, especially when they say that all committee posts must be rotated after a sensible period, having seen at first hand what can happen when one or two people become entrenched.

The outline programme of entertainments for the following year sounded interesting, and we had a very nice lunch, so it was a morning well spent.  I was exhausted by the end of it, which I hadn't expected.  How tiring can it be to sit in a room with some friendly people and then eat lunch?  As the NHS website says about flu, you'll usually start feeling better after about a week although you may feel tired for much longer.