It was with great regret, tinged with a certain amount of relief, that we recently gave members of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship the news that we could not hold an AGM and conference this year. Many societies like ours have been faced with the dilemma of what to do about their commitment to an Annual General Meeting. Some have gone with the dreaded Zoom option - with varying success, whilst others have found alternative methods of dealing with members remotely.
In our case, we pondered for some months before coming to the conclusion that it was not going to be easy to find a way to deal with the problem and it might be better to admit defeat. Having taken advice from the Charities Commission, we announced the decision on our website and in Siegfried's Journal and we continue to hope and pray that it will not be long before members can meet in person once again.
Conferences, we've found, are not just about listening to interesting talks, or even about the opportunity to discuss them afterwards. After all, our Journal, with its variety of content, is the envy of many societies and keeps members informed as effectively, albeit not as quickly, as social media can do. However, those who attend our events invariably contact us afterwards to say how much they have enjoyed meeting fellow members and how much they are looking forward to doing so again. Although the numbers attending have dropped off in the past couple of years, there is still a core of members who feel absolutely distraught if they find, for whatever reason, that they cannot attend in person.
This being the case, it's hard to offer an alternative that is likely to satisfy our membership in these times when fellowship and personal contact are most needed and most highly valued. On the other hand...
I learned a lesson in July, when helping to judge a local poetry competition that normally takes place during the week of the village fete, in our local pub. So popular has the contest been in the past that, when we were selected for the semi-finals of Channel 4's "Village of the Year" in 2018, the presenter Patrick Grant came along to the pub to talk to some of the competitors, and even wrote his own original humorous verse in honour of the village. This year, things were different. Competitors had to make recordings of themselves reading their poems, and these were broadcast by our temporary local radio station on the day we would have held the fete.
The outcome was that we had about twice as many poems submitted as usual, and of a generally much higher standard. Admittedly, many of them concentrated on experiences of lockdown, but there was enough variety to enable us to pick out a few really original, accomplished pieces of work. As I came to realise, people who would not normally have participated in the competition when it was held in the pub - like the 89-year-old local farmer who won the "Poet Laureate" title - were only too ready to join in if they did not have to stand up in front of a room full of people to read their poem. Moreover, with time on their hands, many of them had been inspired by the current crisis to put pen to paper, and had found an outlet for feelings they might otherwise have found hard to express.
The result of the competition was encouraging, but perhaps it was rash of me to agree to the idea of my "other" literary society, the Barbara Pym Society (about which I have previously written in this blog), putting on a one-hour Zoom "mini-conference" for the benefit of members around the world. There was little technical support available to us, and even the running order was not finally confirmed until after we had begun the meeting (owing to a live participant who was holidaying in Italy suddenly informing us that she had to go out to dinner instead!) Somehow we stumbled through the programme of talks and chat, and the many technical problems we experienced led me to assume that members were sitting at home thinking what a useless Chair I was and perhaps wishing they had not wasted an hour when they could have been watching TV.
Not a bit of it. I'm sure there was some discontent on the part of a few individuals, but in general those watching expressed considerable appreciation for our efforts, one going so far as to say that it was "just what one would expect from a Pym event". Indeed, there is an episode in one of her novels where an incompetent bishop attempts to give a magic lantern show to a local audience and gets his slides upside-down. At times I felt very like that! What I realised, however, was that members wanted contact with other members, something to laugh about, something to replace the in-person meeting that they would otherwise have had, something to remind them of good times past and better things to come. And I think we managed to achieve that. I am sure we will be able to do better next time.
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