Some people!

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I joined the local ‘toad patrol’ (helping to save migrating toads from getting squashed on the road when they migrate to their breeding ponds in spring) seven years ago, and for the past six years I have organised a yearly social gathering. Basically since we are all patrolling in the dark and usually in the rain on chilly evenings, and only a few of the team come out each night, we never get a chance to meet everyone and don’t get time to socialise during the patrolling season, so I thought it would be nice to have a get-together when the weather is warm and dry, we have time to meet properly and don’t have to dash off mid sentence to grab a toad from in front of a bus! The first year there were only a few of us and we went out for a pub meal. For the next three years we picnicked near the river, but as more people joined that was getting more difficult because of the limited car parking space nearby, especially on a summer evening when a lot of other river users might turn up for various activities, so for the last two years we have held the event in one of our gardens (ours last year). And for each of the picnics I have shopped and prepared food for everyone, even including a selection of vegan and gluten-free food, for close to 40 people. This is obviously quite a lot of work/hassle, especially trying to organise a suitable date. And I was quite p**ed off when someone posted about it on their local facebook group and one member complained they didn’t know about the event – that was a complete lie as I had gone to a lot of trouble to contact everyone more than once! So this year I thought I would step back and let someone else do the organising, and maybe we could hire the local cricket pavilion since we have a lot of new members this year and many of the ‘old hands’ haven’t met most of them. Of course no-one was wildly keen to do it. Eventually one person has stepped forward but he is making such a meal of it it’s unbelievable! He emailed me asking my advice on how to choose a date, then he contacted a large portion of the membership to see what they thought about whether he should contact the whole group to see what dates they could make. Since he specifically said he wasn’t yet asking whether they could make any of the dates listed, no-one replied to that, so eventually I told him to just go for it. So he sent round a poll of potential dates. Now he has sent me the poll results with a long message saying it wouldn’t be possible to please everyone so if we went with the majority one date seems to be the best and could I possibly ask if we could book the pavilion on that date because he was going away for a few days and didn’t have time. Why he didn’t just save the time he spent emailing me a long-winded message and instead just ask about the pavilion himself I can’t understand. It was literally the work of a few seconds to dash off an email asking if the pavilion as available for us to book on xx date. I wonder if he’s going to prepare an elaborate menu and run that by me next? All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2024.