Thursday, 21 August 2008

This morning I dispatched personal e-mails to each of our registered mywatford.net users. Numbers are building but we still need many more users before the site can become firmly established.

Farce

In the afternoon, I journeyed into London for a meeting at the Disability Law Service. It has become a tradition that I always arrive about 20 minutes late for these meetings, and to sustain this tradition I am having to contrive ever more elaborate difficulties. Today’s journey included missing a train because my car-parking ticket blew from my hand as I was trying to affix it to my windscreen. After unsuccessfully scrambling about on my hands and knees searching under parked vans and cars I finally had to find a cash point to get some more money and then get some change to buy another parking ticket. I kept expecting to bump into Laurel and Hardy or perhaps Brian Rix.

The DLS meeting included some very interesting discussions on the charity’s future accommodation, direction and purpose. On the journey back through Kings Cross I met with my son Bobby who is coming to stay for the weekend.

Conspiracy theory

But Jackie and I had plans for the evening. Undaunted by Sir Thomas Beecham's sneering words, we intended to join in the Folk Dancing at the Welwyn Free Church. But the church was all dark inside and there was no sign of the Welwyn Garden City Folk Dance Club. At first, I simply thought that we had mis-read the time, or that the club had closed down for the summer. But then darker thoughts jostled their way to my mind.

Jackie remembered that last autumn we had gone to attend a leeting of the local Archaeological Society, and this meeting also seemed not to exist. I recalled that earlier in the Spring I had gone to play at the local Chess Club and this journey was also fruitless.

The awful thought struck me: what if none of these clubs and societies actually exist? What if someone somewhere is simply inventing these activities and banking on the likelihood that everyone is too busy (or too seduced by television) to ever actually turn up for the events - or that if they do, they wont try a second time.

It is a disturbing thought. The mastermind might be a senior council bureaucrat who has worked out that people like to live in a town with a strong sense of community, but who also knows that actually everyone is too busy to actually do anything. Rather than having a town that is simply a social wasteland, what could be easier or more public spirited (reasoned our bureaucrat) than to invent a thriving social network? Everyone will be much happier living in a healthy community, and there will be no real victims - just a few sad old sods trying to play chess or go folk dancing, and who would listen to them?

Just a few key people could get away with this for years. How long has this conspiracy been going on? I think we should be told.