Being
Mothers Day one would be forgiven for thinking we might have a
leisurely start. No such luck. Off by 9am and so to Sittingbourne.
The local geocachers had organised a day of do-gooding. Planting
trees and building hedgerows and clearing thickets on an old
land-fill site which is being reclaimed into a country park.
It
could have been such a productive day...
Over
sixty of us turned out for a 10am start. I began to suspect the worst
when the warden was like a stuck record expressing his surprise at
the turn out whilst the organising were like a stuck record with "I
told you so". Attendees had said that they were coming over
a month ago.
We
shivered through a ridiculously long winded health and safety
introduction in which (amongst other irrelevant drivel) we
were told what action was to be taken in the event that we should
fall into a pond or see a dog, and in retrospect it was at that point
that I should have given up and gone home...
Sixty-odd
of us went on to start the tree planting: a job which probably would
have been better done by ten at most. Sixty-odd of us got in each
other's way. With the job done in half an hour the warden then
expressed surprise at how well we'd done, and then he went off on the
next phase of the operation - knocking in uprights for a fence. Only
three could really help with this job, and three were chosen.
Everyone
else stood about whilst the warden set about clearing a thicket to
get the raw materials to make a dead hedge. A shame that there was no
announcement to this effect. I only found out that thicket clearing
was going on by accident. Had an announcement been made then two
thirds of the assembled throng might not have disappeared at this
point.
Within
an hour of sixty-odd willing volunteers turning up we were left with
less than twenty. Twenty who were cold and dispirited. The rain
slowly gave way to hail. And when the message came through to our
thicket that everyone else had gone caching I very nearly went home
there and then.
So
much could have been achieved. Had the warden taken two minutes to
organise the troops into teams and to assign jobs then we would have
known what we were doing, and we could have done so much. Instead we
had anarchy. I feel sorry for the organisers who had persuaded so
many people to turn out on such a cold wet day only to have their
time wasted.
Any
future events like this will have to be organised better. I came
along thinking that I could sort out such an event locally. I came
away determined I would not want anything to do with such as this.
And
to add insult to injury when we left at 1.30pm (we were the second
to last car left in the car park) we were locked in and had to
wait twenty minutes for the warden to be found to unlock the gate.
Home,
and then round to visit the first fruit of my loin. Being Mothers Day
he'd asked us round to dinner. Roast pork. Very tasty. Crackling - I
chipped a tooth... But that can be fixed. After a cold wet afternoon it was good to be in the warm with family. Must do that more often...
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