We Need To Talk!

I seem to have been going through a phase in which I've been giving up quite a few things that used to occupy my time and now I'm left with quite a bit of spare capacity and no real idea of how I might usefully use it.  After quite a bit of mental arm-wrestling, I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the things that I could do, I don't actually want to do, if I'm being honest with myself, so there seems little point in setting myself up to fail (yet again).

I've tried to analyse what I've enjoyed about the various things I've done in my life, and what I haven't and I've come to the conclusion that what I've really enjoyed (and what I miss the most) is the performance aspect.  When I was a lecturer, I got a real kick out of talking to the class and trying to come up with entertaining ways of conveying information about a subject (HR) which can be quite tedious at times.  I may not have always succeeded, but I did enjoy trying!

I had a sort of 'Damascene' moment regarding this at a 'Poetry and Puddings' evening the other week.  Each member of the audience was encouraged to read a poem of some sort before and after the main event of descending on the huge range of delicious puddings on offer.  I was chuffed to bits that my choice of 'The Lion and Albert' went down really well and caused quite a few chuckles.  I realised that this is what I had missed.

When my first book ('Steady Past Your Granny's' - available as a Kindle edition and soon to be available again in print) came out, I was pleased to be invited to give a talk or two based on the content.  The problem was that I hadn't really done any research into what people expected from a 'talk' of this nature and so I just winged it.  As such, I must offer my profound apologies to the massed ranks of the Burton Civic Society who were the first to suffer.

It was a very well-attended talk and the front row was largely comprised of my friends and family who had dutifully turned out.  I didn't have a script for my contribution, just a list of topics I wanted to cover.  This would be fine except for the fact that, when I'm thinking furiously about what I'm trying to say, I have a tendency to pace and I spent the whole session striding up and down the front row so that they began to resemble the crowd at Centre Court during a particularly energetic rally.  I had no visual aids, so the audience were reduced to watching my stroboscopic image darting madly from side to side as I droned on.  It would be fair to say that I was received politely, if not enthusiastically and I was disappointed to note that one or two of those present had actually dropped off.

After that debut, it was somewhat of a surprise to be invited to do the whole thing again but this time as an after-lunch talk to the Rotary Society in Burton.  You would think that I would have learned my lesson from the previous performance but...I still had no visual aids and no script.  The only saving grace was that, pinned in by my fellow diners on the top table, I couldn't stride about like a mad thing.

The third and final time I was asked to give a talk was to Burton's Probus Society.  This time I decided I would try to learn from my mistakes.  Winging it was clearly not my forte.  I prepared my talk in advance and rehearsed it night and day.  I also took the precaution of preparing a PowerPoint presentation of some appropriate pictures which acted as an aide-memoir to me and gave the audience something else to look at, other than me.  This time I managed to resist the temptation to stride about manically, I stuck to the 'script' and managed to get some laughs.  Admittedly one person was sound asleep by the end of it but, given my previous record, I deemed that a success.

That marked the end of my appearances on the 'talks' circuit.  Pressure of work and other commitments meant that I couldn't really devote any time to it and, to be fair, I wasn't exactly besieged by invitations.  I put my PowerPoint projector to one side and that was the end of that.  Except that now, five books later, I'm hear with quite a few stories to tell and I think I've got some better ideas about how I might tell them.  Obviously, I've still got a lot to learn but the only way to do that is to practice, so I'm putting myself back on the market, as it were. 

If you're in Staffordshire or Derbyshire and you think that you might be interested in hearing what I've got to say, perhaps we could give it a go?  You may have to nail my feet to the floor, of course ;-)