Friday, May 18, 2007

Busy, busy, busy...

No sooner did I get back to London than I was deep in the heady social whirl that is the life of a Regional Secretary.

Having spent the day in the office, Friday evening was spent in a rather odd bar/performance art venue under the arches at London Bridge station, celebrating the last day of Steven Gauge's thirties. Considering I had flown in from Melbourne in the morning, I was still remarkably sentient, at least until about 10.30, when the batteries finally ran out. In mid-conversation, my brain seized up and I lost the ability to communicate - it was clearly time to go home.

Having spent Saturday shopping and catching up on three weeks of post, I took the opportunity to attend Sunday's lunchtime event in Haringey. It was somewhat fortunate that I did, as I discovered a slightly confused guest speaker at Archway station, and was thus able to escort Nick Clegg safely to Lynne Featherstone's rather gorgeous home so that he could talk about 'narrative'.

I admit that I had turned up more to watch potential GLA candidates rather than listen to Nick, but he was fascinating to listen to. If he isn't positioning himself for a future run at the leadership (and I am willing to accept his assertion that he is not), then he is certainly jump-starting a debate on how best we should convey our core philosophical message. Plenty of those present, including Duncan Borrowman, have already discussed this, and I don't have a lot to add, so I won't...

Monday evening saw me at consecutive Regional sub-committee meetings, Conference followed by Campaigns. We now have a pretty good idea as to what we're going to do for the Regional Conference in November. More interesting was the Campaigns meeting that followed. I'm not a member of the committee - campaigns? Me? - unlikely, n'est-ce pas? And yet I emerge with a whole bunch of things to do.

So, in the next fortnight, I need to come up with a skeleton Regional Plan, develop some sort of induction pack for new members, and reintroduce a regional communications strategy. Easy, really...

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