The roll (l to r): Ivor (present) Sandra (present) Mark (awol) Andrea (present)
It was Natalie’s idea and rather a good one. Or maybe it was Andrea’s idea. Anyway, point is, our plans for a spring gathering of the old youth club clan are in tatters this year, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Only one thing for it: gather virtually, e.g. on Zoom (other video conferencing tools are available).
Natalie set it up and a good few of us joined in. Andrea, David, Ivor, Linda, Liza, Martin, Me, Natalie, Sandra, Wendy…
…I think that’s everyone from the old clan who came along on Sunday – apologies if I have missed anyone out. One or two wives/partners/children popped in for a while (Janie for example) or added colour to the proceedings through noises off or other such distractions.
Janie had never witnessed a video conference before and suggested that video-conferencing seemed a chaotic medium to her. I had to point out that video conferences can be highly disciplined and decorous. Had she ever experienced one of our youth club meetings, she’d realise that the chaotic nature of the gathering has little or nothing to do with the medium.
The conversation covered many topics, not just “what were you up to before the pandemic?” and “how are you coping with the pandemic?”
The Chatham House rule should apply to such gatherings, I feel, so I won’t attribute specific tales to specific people. But we are a communitarian lot, still, so we heard word from near the front line of health care, social services provision and education. Unprecedented times (as everyone seems to be saying right now) presenting immediate and urgent challenges to everyone, especially those working in civil society.
The most fascinating yarn, though, was a true story about rabbits. Apparently, if you put a male rabbit and a female rabbit into a household with children, you generate a myriad of soap-opera-like scenarios within just a few weeks, even if the children are given strict instructions to enforce social distancing between the rabbits. Children, it seems, struggle to obey such simple instructions with predictably hilarious and tragic results in equal measure.Throw Covid-19 lockdown into the scenario and you have a strange brew for story-telling – Beatrix Potter’s Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Word on the street is that our gathering went so well that we shall be gathering again very soon – i.e. same time, same day, the next week.
This really IS becoming a virtual youth club, even down to the weekly meetings. Soon we’ll need to reform a committee, start scheduling programmes and sending delegates to virtual regional, national and international shindigs…