Busy week ahead

Monday night is the only evening this week when I haven’t got something in the diary. As well as a full time day job, I have 3 #bellringing meetings on Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday, one presentation to deliver on Wednesday and 2 RingingRoom sessions on Thursday and Friday. Everything has come at once. Thankfully its not like that every week otherwise my head would explode.

Considering that there’s very little actual ringing being done, there’s still a lot of work to do.

In order to be able to get to a point when ringing can return to anything like it was previously an awful lot of things are bring planned and delivered behind the scenes. Some people are saying “what’s the point if we can’t actually ring?” To me, the point is that if we don’t do all of these things now, there may not be ringing to go back to.

I fear that we will have lost an awful lot of ringers during this hiatus. Some due to age or infirmity but others who were only just setting out on their learning may find other things have tempted them away.

Within our own Association I see that some districts have been really good at getting people together virtually having district quiz nights, even having their scheduled meeting by video conference. Some have even managed to meet up where social distancing can be maintained and before the Rule of Six came in. Others have barely tried. It demonstrates the variety of leadership styles and levels of expectation rather starkly. I’ve done my bit in our district by holding a virtual district practice on the evenings when we would have been holding a proper district practice but attendance hasn’t been overwhelming, but then it never was at the real thing anyway. The district meeting and training day that we should have had didn’t place. There has been no discussion about plans for next year yet.

One of the meetings, on Saturday, is the Association management committee meeting. All districts are required to report on activities since the last meeting and I am looking forward to hearing about what’s been going on in other districts. I’m hoping that there will be some direction on how we should approach next year, particularly with the Annual District Meetings that take place in January and how they can successfully be conducted.

I will keep doing my little bit to keep things going as long as I am able.