I have you down for two seats, is that right?

At the moment the get-together is fully booked, but there are no other people who say they want to come. A perfect situation really! I guess if you can’t confirm by the end of August, I might like to offer your seats to someone else who says they can definitely come. At the same time, if no one else steps forward, there’s no reason to ask you to give up your seats and you can wait until the last minute to decide.

I hope you can come!

I’m going to do another post on this soon, and give everyone an update on where things stand.

I’m so sorry I’ve been rubbish about replying. Things have been quite hectic and not great (issues with sick pets, family problems, sick grandmother, money issues etc etc), and I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to make it. Finances have been ridiculously tight for the past 4 months so for me it’s a case of wait and see. I know this is no help to you at all – what’s the latest you need to know definitively by?

Lucy

This sounds terrific and you’ve worked enormously hard on it. I’ll be there, for sure!

She said they normally only do local events, and pointed out the train from Wales to Oxford is not cheap. As a group, we would need to pay for this. It would probably costs us £2-3 each more than a speaker from London for example, but I think still leave us well within the £10-15 each I was originally planning on.

What does everyone think about this?

Thanks!

I’ve sent Dr. Wiltshire an email and asked him. I’ve also got a couple of emails pending with other people, so I’ll follow up on your other suggestions once I know about the people I’m already trying to contact.

Since classes are not in session, I hope academics are answering their email now.

Maybe someone from the Soil Association’s Local Food thing might be interested: http://www.localfoodworks.org/

Of the famous worthies I’m not sure there’s many of them I’d be interested in hearing, but I have a lot of respect for Bob Flowerdew
and I’m sure he’d be challenging if we could persuade him to come.

I’ll see what other ideas occur and I encourage everyone else to make suggestions too.

Simon

VM: Sorry you can’t come. It would have been nice to meet the two of you. Maybe next year. Thanks for letting me know.

Simon: I’m planning to say something along the same lines, only a few minutes, just long enough for everyone to see I’m not really a very good public speaker but to get an idea of who I am. I’ll put you on the list of speakers as well. I hope others will step forward too.

As far as who we invite, I really would like to hear what all of you think too, but I was hoping to find some outside people. It seems to me we will be right next to a university that probably has some interesting people associated with it, if we could find them. Especially if some of you reading this could help out too, we might be able to find some other possibly non-university people too.

Some people expect to be paid to speak at an event like this, but I had in mind looking for people who would speak for free. We aren’t really a large enough group that I think wants to pay lots of money for speakers. Perhaps if we do this again next year, and have twice as many people, we could think about taking up a collection to pay for speakers if enough people were interested.

Of course we probably have to offer free entrance to our event and the Botanic Garden to any speakers, and perhaps pay some travel costs. It might be hard to find someone if we don’t at least offer to cover their expenses.

Since speakers would use a seat another blogger might want, and as a result increase everyone’s shared costs a little, whoever we invite should be worthwhile. Also, since the whole idea is to get together and meet each other, we don’t want to fill the whole day with speakers because we want some time to chat and maybe see the Botanic garden too.

I was sort of thinking along the lines of one or two speakers or perhaps 2 hours in total, but at the same time if we find a number of interesting people we may try to accommodate more. Of course we should accommodate as many bloggers that want to speak.

I was sort of thinking about this as a possible program:

9:30 – 10:30 Arrival. Coffee and tea.

10:30 – 11:30 Invited Speaker

11:30 – 12:30 Speaking bloggers and seed swap

12:30 – 14:00 Picnic

14:00 – 15:00 Invited Speaker

15:00 – 17:30 Visit gardens or chat inside if it’s raining.

If we have more speakers, we could schedule them in somewhere.

Anyway, this is all just an idea, so please speak up if you have other suggestions!

It probably goes without saying that we need to find speakers before we can invite them, so if we can’t find anyone there won’t be anyone to speak to us.

Simon