March 15th: the United Reform Church North West Synod in Bury, where I had been asked to address 180 delegates on tackling Climate Change. Although I was born 7 miles away or less in Salford, it's my first visit to Bury in 25 years: weird!
Big day: the first outing for the new PowerPoint, 35 slide display which we put together at ON earlier in the week. Being a natural technophobe, I'm wary of the whole business. I have seen too many people falling flat on their faces as the projector fails to work or the slides all come up in the wrong order! But no! One press of my remote button and we're off and running.
Many of you have sat through text file after text file as people bore you stiff on such occasions. So I try and capture attention by concentrating on images. The moment when it all comes together, is when we move from an image of a shipping tanker to a shoal of fish. I can't claim originality for this: I heard it from David Wasdell from the Meridan programme at a London event recently. His point is that people say trying to get people to change their lifestyles and priorities is like turning round the proverbial tanker: slow, time consuming and taking an age. But no, says Wasdell, we're capable of more than that. One human cannot relate to a tanker, but if we assume we are all small components of a shoal of fish, it all looks very different. A shoal can change direction, (180 degree turns are their speciality) in a second. There are times in human history, says Wasdell, when man has been capable of such behaviour: most notably in times of war and conflict. This optimism is why Wasdell and others reject the pessimism of James Lovelock (who recently said in a Guardian interview that he expected 80% of humanity to perish by 2100).
So the shoal of fish stays on in the Power Point and comes with me to Halifax on Wednesday 26th March. Let's hope the technology does not thwart us!
