It was our Rotary meeting last night. I’ve been quite slack recently and have missed a few meetings through a combination of a car which was not in peak condition and an unwillingness to make the one-hour drive to Deloraine. Because we were expecting to be away until this week, I had applied for Leave of Absence so was under no obligation to attend. The rules of Rotary state that members should attend 50% of meetings at their own club in any 6-month period, unless they have approved Leave. Why are people so ready to accept rules which limit their freedom of movement? It’s almost as if we realise we need an imposed discipline or we’ll become lazy.
Anyway, I was Chairman last night so I had an obligation to make every effort to be there. The business of the meeting was to discuss various questions regarding the running of the Club. It’s called Club Assembly and happens every month or so. There were just two items for discussion last night: requirements of membership (attendance, etc); and views on home-hosting visitors.
Like most Rotary Clubs, we have a number of members who ignore the rule I mentioned before and just don’t turn up regularly. We should get rid of them, of course, but nobody wants to give up members if we can help it. After twenty minutes of going around in circles, we once again handed the matter off to the Membership Committee to sort out. That’s what we normally do when this concern comes up for discussion.
The second issue is an interesting one. In the next few months, we will have visitors from a Sydney club who have offered to help out at the Craft Fair, young people on an exchange from somewhere in the US, Rotarian from New Zealand, and members of our two sister-clubs in the Philippines. Each group will stay for 2 to 3 days and will require home-hosting. Unfortunately, Marilyn and I can’t take more than one small visitor at a time; our little one-bedroom cottage isn’t set up for that. When sister-in-law Janet comes down in November, she will stay in our little visitor’s nook, but it’s too cosy for sharing and Rotary visitors usually come in pairs.
On the way home in the car, I listened to the local ABC station. Annie Warburton has a quiz each night from about 8 oçlock. The questions aren’t particularly hard but I find it so frustrating to hear some of the people who ring in. They seem to be immune to embarrassment and are quite prepared to show their ignorance to everyone who is listening. I would have thought that the best thing to do when you don’t know the answer is to hang up and let someone else have a go. But no, callers beg for a clue, ask anyone who is in the same room as they are and generally parade their lack of knowledge. Nobody can know everything and it is better to admit it and not draw attention to it.
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