No matter how much we plan; no matter how disciplined we try to be in terms of maintaining our focus on the work of the festival year-round rather than allowing our selves to be too seasonally driven, too dominated by the immovable nature of our August Bank Holiday weekend deadline: you still can’t avoid the fact that things are cranking up. We're entering our silly season. It will be unrelenting from here on it. Hold on tight.
With less than 70 days to go until Greenbelt, the pressure is mounting.
Ben’s day job has gone ballistic and is taking all his energy right now, so I’m back, once again, immersed in venue management issues on top of everything else.
Oh the joys of every spare waking hour being spent pouring through emails and spreadsheets, trying to resolve issues, attempting to fix Venue Managers and teams for 50 plus venues, updating guides and risk assessment compilers, worrying about secure webspace and FAQs, checking we have everything covered, reconciling competing egos, looking to give everyone the role that suits them best, trying to claw back some time…
Aaaggghhhh!!!
Just occasionally though a bit of sunshine breaks through. Like hearing from R out of the blue (R being the person who passed me his new contact details at the London 'Brainstorming' evening back in January and said "I'm up for doing something again this year").
Now I know I put his card somewhere safe, but well that 'somewhere' has since proved very elusive (and no, before you ask, it seems the office only have his old details too…). So how relieved am I that he follows up today with a text? Ringing him back, not only is he forgiving, but he also agrees to take on a really key role that I just know will come alive under his care. Fabulous!
It seems very appropriate that playing on my iPod right now is Jeff Buckley’s version of the Leonard Cohen classic Hallelujah.
(of course there's still the small matter of there having been two business cards that I put "somewhere" safe that fateful night in January...and I can't even remember whose the second one was. On the off chance you're that person and you're reading this...)
When you work for Greenbelt you can’t visit somewhere like The Eden Project without having your staff hat on. What we can learn here? What does the Eden Project do so well? What might be applicable? What is unrealistic for us to try and emulate?
One thing that is for sure: we're always open to learning from events and attractions that have that certain je ne c'est quoi. Because, if you're going to try and model something, you might as well model the best. That's what the theology of sainthood is all about, after all.