Empty diary tomorrow. Oh joy. I’ve been leading towards that.
I tell you what, oh constant reader, it’s exhausting doing literally all the things. I made the mistake of not really budgeting very much energy for the dayjob today and good Christ they took it out of me. Absolutely atrocious room not even that full but just disengaged as you like. The workshop I was running today is very familiar to me and it is very much not the worst one I’ve had to do over the years. I’ve done it in so many places and contexts I thought I wouldn’t be surprised by it anymore. Maybe I’ve become complacent… Maybe I was budgeting energy for this evening and didn’t use enough to win them back.
My employer always asks way too much of the people I’m meeting though, and it sometimes makes them behave oddly towards me. No matter how often I feed it back, I always end up smuggling loads of stacks of unnecessary colour photocopies away in my bag so I can be the one to dispose of them and not the people who blew the budget on producing them. But if the person who stood by the copier is in the room, they see that I’m not using lots of the stuff they spent time copying or gathering. Apart from the papers they’ve been asked to get sand, mud, rocks, sticks, glitter, copper, zinc, leaves, empty plastic bottles, oranges, foil, a magnet, a knife, volt meters, wires, bulldog clips, an LED… If I’ve got enough oranges and the zinc and copper, the wires and clips and the meter then the rest can be largely improvised and it would be much less time consuming for the poor people preparing for me to be there.
The handouts don’t even need to be in colour to be honest. But feedback on this one takes a long time to convert to action. There are some simple errors on the sheets they send. And perhaps most noticeably, the whole thing starts off with an extremely cheaply made video where some poor young woman who clearly isn’t an actor speaks in an idiom that is anachronistic and unfamiliar to her and to the young people it’s targeted at. I always have to win back the room. “She’s got bits and bobs?!”
So yeah, I was wrung out when I got home. Looked at the clock and realised I only had about half an hour to turn around and go back out in a suit to entertain a room full of lawyers. I sat in my car and had a little cry of exhaustion before putting a different suit of armour on and getting an Uber to The Globe and what was thankfully a delightful if long evening of being charming with Ffion. The two of us click well together. We were both worried about the crap poem so we stood next to each other and techniqued it and it went down well, and the surge of adrenaline we got from getting through it carried us the rest of the way in style. A good end to a hard day and now I’m getting in the bath. Don’t call me before noon.
AlBarclay 