The morning after an important conference often leaves me slightly disorientated.
I was up at 5:45 a.m. yesterday, Friday, to make a round trip to London of 230 miles, which I survived and actually quite enjoyed. I would have expected in my naivety for the M4 to be fairly clear at this time, but no, it was busy, full of lorries and cars who wanted to get to their destination as quickly as possible. On the return visit I chose the A303 M3 route, which unfortunately coincided with a Friday rush hour and a very bright setting sun, both of which demanded my full attention, but I made it home by about 7:45 pm in one piece.
I have to say the atmosphere and the people were very friendly and open, and it was lovely to have Christianity in common because we were all on the same page, give or take the odd display of temperament or personal matters that will get in the way. For me it was a typical famine-to-feast occasion where you could more or less engage with everyone; everyone was nice and approachable, and what more could someone want when they are normally far away from what we would call Christian values?
The venue was the campus of the Sky organisation HQ in Osterley, West London, very Americanised in its design, full of security restrictions for visitors, numerous computer terminals, even a Waitrose store inside, and we were eventually escorted into the hallway where the event took place, and very nice it was. I had some business cards printed for the occasion and promised people a transcription; perhaps I should have said in retrospect a summary because if someone speaks, say, eight thousand words, and if you write down exactly what they said, it becomes unreadable and will be read by the very few.
So I can write about something that is clinically accurate but will bore people to death, and these days who has long attention spans? So do I write as an aide-mémoire to those who were there, or do I write for those who were not there and want to know what happened? I’m inclined to go towards the latter
Talking to an organiser when they are totally busy with responsibilities is probably a bad idea, especially as I had not previously met them. To make things more difficult, I was presenting an offer to make a summary of the meeting, and this was without having been asked, and also offering to make a book of testimonies to which I gave the working title ‘A Light in the Noise’. This whoosh of information is hard to hear material, especially coming from a stranger, and it is a big ask to be listened to, never mind being considered.
The problem is that the inspiration I get comes in packets, and it has been a feature of all the ideas I’ve ever had, including back in the day at London Village when I wanted to see London more like a village, my inspiration for a 5G site, for a COVID-19 site, for the books on villages; the formula is always the same. I go around minding my own business, and suddenly from ‘nowhere’ I get a vision, which sits in my head until I do something about it.
Back to the detail of the task.
I have to decide a balance between who said something, what they said and how they communicated. In a way some things cannot be communicated in writing, for example, the atmosphere of a meeting or the rapport a speaker has with the assembled gathering. There were about 60 delegates, by the way, which, in my view, was about right. Anything much larger would have been a football crowd, and I could not cope with that.
We did have some very distinguished media Christians as speakers, but I’m inclined, as I sit here in my dressing gown at 8 o’clock in the morning – with a clear blue sky and chirping birds – to focus on the principles raised, not so much the people.
I’m going to resist the temptation to ensure that every last factoid has been included, and instead I’m going to present the main lessons to be drawn.
Over the next hours I will be focusing on drawing out the features and abstracting as many principles of action as possible. If I categorise this properly, I think we have a halfway decent chance of producing something that people will actually derive benefit from.
On the topic of writing a book of testimonies, my message did not quite get through where it was intended, so I might put this on the back burner for the moment.
Anyway, to work, and what comes will come either soon or later depending on the inspiration of the moment. ………………..First, some break-fast.
