More volunteering

Pat, August 2022

Straight after the Games ended, I went north to celebrate Sister D's birthday. It was a lovely break, and we visited some National Trust gardens while I was there, as well as lots of other enjoyable activities with the family. Immediately after that I took charge for a few days of another trainee Guide Dog named Pat, who was quite early in her training but much more well behaved than many of the other dogs I've looked after. The weather was too hot to go out much during the day, but we spent some  quality time in the garden. I also arranged to visit a friend's cat while she was away in Edinburgh, and there was a walk and a meal out with the Buddhists, and the boiler got serviced, and the car needed a bit of work done, and I tidied up the garden, and altogether there was lots to do.

I also spent some time with Radio Man - remember him, from Warwick Folk Festival? We had lunch in a cafe, we went for a walk, we watched some badminton at the Games, we played with Pat in the garden, and we visited Bletchley Park. Then I put a stop to it, as kindly as I could. I found that it was very difficult spending exclusive time with someone else, which means that welcoming UJ is going to be a challenge. Yes, she's supposed to be coming over again, but without the cat which is staying with her parents. She keeps postponing her arrival date - at the moment it looks like it will be early October.

Then it was time for my next stint at volunteering, at Shrewsbury Folk Festival. This event is similar to Warwick's festival but much bigger, and I was assigned to something called the Task Force with no further information other than how to report for duty. It turns out that the Task Force's job is to do whatever is asked for by other teams - for example, to move a piano, to take up the striped plastic tape that delineates camping, parking and other designated areas, or to patrol the site making sure everyone is happy and trying to fix it when they are not.

Fourteen hours on duty divided into seven two-hour shifts is requested in exchange for the price of a weekend camping ticket, with the option to arrive before the masses so as to have the pick of the camping locations. I had a look at the programme and tentatively circled a couple of acts each day that I'd like to see, and when I got my shifts nearly all of them coincided with something I would have liked to see. I got one changed, and for one shift I patrolled the stage where the performance was happening, but I missed a few acts that I would have liked to see. And nearly all the shifts seemed to coincide with mealtimes so I ended up eating at strange times of day.

It was hard work - much harder than for Warwick, and more tiring than for volunteer stewards in other teams whose job might be sitting at the side of a marquee watching a performance for four hours. But at least it was more interesting than sitting at the top of a tower watching out for fires and more pleasant than picking up litter. After patrolling the site for four hours, or spending an hour hammering in pegs to secure metal barriers, I wasn't fit for as much dancing as in previous years. On one shift I had to deal with unhappy campers who had been directed to places where there didn't seem to be any space and so had been driving round for quite a long time. They all appreciated that I was trying to help them but it didn't make the job any easier.

I met quite a few of the volunteers who had been at Warwick, and some new volunteers who were unexpectedly connected to my family - two musicians who live round the corner from H+B, and a shop manager who knows Cousin Y as they work for the same organisation. But missing acts that I wanted to see because of shifts or fatigue probably outweighs the benefit of the free ticket, so I may not volunteer for this one next year. And the event itself isn't as good as it used to be pre-Covid, so there's even a chance I'll try a different festival next year - I've got my eye on a couple of them.