Glad that day is over
I would like to think through no fault of my own yesterday I had something of a frustrating day.
Firstly, my fitness campaign has been going to pot recently. A fortnight ago I began my week weighing 12 stone 8 pounds – this down from 13 stone 12.2 pounds at the beginning of January – but over the past two weeks, through a combination of lack of opportunity to take exercise caused by my schedule of engagements and straightforward mental weakness I have gradually ballooned upwards … to my horror, last night before jumping into bed, now troubling the scales at a whopping 13 stone 4 pounds!
The mental weakness aspect of the above statement has been two-fold.
Firstly, although when at my best I am automatically moved on a daily basis to go out for a 5-mile walk and/or visit the gymnasium, recently – presumably when not at my best – I have found it quite hard to motivate myself to take exercise.
In mitigation, I’d point out that when, for example, you return home having spent a total of three hours in your car in order to spend a similar amount of time visiting an elderly relative who lives at the coast, that amounts to the best part of a waking day for any man jack, let alone an oldie like me nearing his 66th birthday.
In such circumstances I tend to find that my first thought is not to slip into my lycra all-in-one skin-tight gym kit in order to hike off to spend an overall two hours engaged upon the task of a gym visit, but rather to ‘flop’, relax, have a little something to eat … and then retire to my pit for a 45-minute snooze.
And secondly, this being something I’ve noticed increasingly about myself in recent times – whenever I turn my mind to having something to eat these days – I find that, whether commendably concentrating upon fresh, best nutritional food or rubbish such as processed cheese and Branston pickle sandwiches, I tend just to ‘go for it’ and consume say two (or even three) ‘junk’ sandwiches rather than just a solitary one, as formerly might have been the case.
The frequency with which this “Oh, what the hell?” attitude to my food intake has overtaken me recently is somewhat unsettling.
Is it just a temporary glitch, or could it possibly be my age catching up with me, a symptom of which is my willpower slipping away?
The other thing that irritated yesterday was that during it I was obliged to attempt to prepare some minutes of a recent important meeting under time pressure because I am shortly to disappear upon an overseas trip to the continent.
Thus I spent the best part of five or six hours yesterday morning – in between other commitments and domestic chores – knocking out as accurate a version of what occurred at said meeting as I possibly could.
This is no easy task because I pride myself on being able to accurately regurgitate what happened and/or was said at such a meeting and then being able to present it within a structure that gives an easily-digestible but fair summary of what occurred.
For instance, if for example the subject of ‘company cars’ came up say three separate occasions during the course of a two and a half hour meeting, I might well ‘engineer’ my minutes of the meeting so that a heading ‘company cars’ is featured, under which the contents of those three occasions this was mentioned are grouped together – simply for the benefit of later readers.
In my book, although plainly this is a case of me jiggering about with the ‘actuality’ of what happened at the meeting, I would seek to justify it on the basis that it makes my record of the meeting far simpler to understand and appreciate than (for example) something which is perhaps twice the length but literally sets down every single comment made in the order that they were uttered.
Upon completion of my task yesterday – as previously arranged – I emailed my ‘draft minutes’ to a colleague for his comment or suggested improvements and then breathed a huge sigh of relief before making myself some lunch.
Within quarter of an hour he was on the phone in an agitated frame of mind with a raft of suggested amendments laced with accusations that there were factual mistakes in the minutes and that some of his very-relevant interventions had not been reported accurately or at all.
In my view, about 85% of his issues were wide of the mark, but I had to be careful how I expressed this.
By which I mean to register that my ‘defences’ (if I had aired them) would have been that (1) as regards the supposed ‘factual mistakes’ in the minutes, these were not mine because all I had done (accurately, I might add) was record what people at the meeting had actually said – it wasn’t my fault if they had spouted complete balls; and (2) as regards his allegations that his contributions had been omitted, as the ‘taker’ of the minutes in question, I regarded myself as having the right (indeed duty) to omit waffle, gibberish and indeed irrelevant interjections on the basis that these were, or should be treated as, superfluous to my task which is to provide a succinct, accurate but also digestible record of what had occurred.
As it happens, yesterday afternoon I ended up spending a total of about 90 minutes – in three different conversations – going through my draft minutes line by line with said gentleman.
I felt this was a Grade A waste of my (and his) time. Basically, what I originally regarded – even though I say so myself – as a pretty competent set of draft minutes is now rendered infinitely more complicated and confusing. Not only that, this guy has virtually dictated ‘improved’ passages of his own contributions which now not only bear little resemblance to what he actually said at the meeting, but in fact completely skew the record away from lucidity and accuracy.
There were seven others present at the meeting. If each of them come back with similar proposed changes to my draft minutes, next time (as the supposed official generator of the minutes) I might as well not bother even to attend the meeting, but instead just ask everyone involved to each send in their versions of what happened, lump them together, and then go off down the road to the to the pub!
