It’s nearly the end of June. I don’t have enough work.Also, I suspect that I haven’t done enough work over the last 10 years or so. I can just about stretch my freelance CV wide enough to cover the years, but face it - I don’t have the consistent, regular experience in events than so many of my peers. Although I do have a good variety of work, managing, facilitating, directing, teaching… It looks OK.
I hate it though. It doesn’t energise me. Putting shows on and off corporate stages, scene changing stools for panel Q&As with lecturns for these tremendously dull key note speeches. Watching illuminated logos flick around auditoriums of disengaged sales folk. ” We need to do more of A and B to achieve C. More and more. Now and in the future.”
I wonder, will I carry on like this, eking out my years until retirement.
Last week was particularly bad, admittedly. A week in Madrid! Except I barely left the conference centre all week. We worked from 07:00 am until midnight, shunting flip charts around 4 acres of conference centre. Smart business shoes, hard marble floors, 10 miles of day back and forth from our office to the auditorium and circulating around 40 breakout rooms. Post-it noes, flip chart markers and pencils. We bought 250 flip chart pads, calculating on 10,000 sheets (each pad has 40 sheets) to allow for 900 candidates to use 10 sheets each, approximately.
They got into groups of 10, and each group used 3 sheets each. What I’m saying is, we used 250 sheets (maximum) out of 10,000. On the final day, Rach and I made a final pass around the 45 rooms with a trolley, loading up the unused pads, to be left at the hotel. It would more to ship them back to the client than to buy them again. That image actually sums up that conference for me. A hotel trolley, piled with unused flip charts, probably to be thrown away, or stored in the deepest recess that Europe’s largest conference centre has to offer, until flip charts are completely redundant. And may this time come soon.

So, what can I do then? Sit around in my half acre of rural Warwickshire, playing the piano, walking the dogs and watching movies?
Actually, why not? I can’t quite afford it, not easily. I need to keep work coming in from time to time. This morning I thought, as I continued wading through a slightly ‘worthy’ novel, set in New Zealand in 1886, that I should write something.
I used to be good at that, no? Also, I used to enjoy it. I had a desire to that very thing. I kept an online diary for 12 years of so, writing a thousand words or so most days, often more. And the writing… it had its moments. The more I did it, the better I got.
I should do that again, so as not to waste the time that my life currently affords me. So as not to end up like that dusty hotel trolley, groaning with the wait of a couple of hundred unused flichart pads.

That… that would be silly.