And so to Edinburgh...

A few days after getting back from GB, I am on a plane to Edinburgh, with my Admin assistant, and we are off to the charity national convention. No sooner have we taken off and I have opened my sandwiches and stirred my tea, and we are our on our descent into Edinburgh. One hour and 5 minutes from Luton. Ridiculous.

It is a good convention. Never been to Edinburgh before, and I see some of it on an hour's bus tour, but it't not enough. We have done half a day's work before flying up. I discover that some of my colleagues took the whole day off and have been shopping and sight seeing. Wish I was not so conscientious.

The talks and seminars are good. At least, the bits I stayed awake for are. I slept through a lot, I have a great deal of sleep to catch up on. The best workshop is the one I did, of course, for 30 brave delegates who signed up for Managing Volunteers, the difficult bits, which involved looking at Assertiveness and How to Give Volunteers Bad News....I haven't run a workshop in ages, and dive in with great enthusiasm. I get them all into groups and we do some role play and share some discussions re managing volunteers, and what peop[le find difficult as managers. The evaluation sheets at the end of the workshop are good, and I get really good positive feedback from someone in the training department. I remember, I like training and running groups, and go on to my next lecture with a real buzz of energy...

That night sees the gala dinner, and when we arrive at the venue, pipers are there to greet us: after the meal there is both a 70s disco and a celidh...Mary Anne and I join in both, and have a laugh at the usual 400 women who attend the convention, the charity being 99.9% female staff, and the odd couple of men, who really can't dance...the celidh is particularly entertaining, when doing the Gay Gordons or some other Scottish dance, once we are all whirling on the dance floor, you can't tell who are supposed to be the men, it's all chaos..We hear for the lives, or at least the virtue of the waiters who get pounced on by some ladies and made to dance in the disco..some of them are very good..and very young... some other friends there disappear during the evening, and it turns out they left and went on a pub crawl with a load of Geordies..they say I would have had a good time. Yes, but they didn't invite me..I stuck with the girl power and the celidh...

After another day of speeches and the launch of our new, modern logo, it is time to get a taxi to the airport and fly home. I am still so tired, having not slept so well in my little single bed, and I am home in time to unpack my bag and repack it ready for an early start to Swindon next morning for Sugar Hill..another day, another festival.....