More Crocodiles…

Students of cognitive science among you will understand the concept of ‘heuristics’ with no further explanation but, for the benefit of the rest, a heuristic is the mental shortcut that your brain takes when it needs to get something done quickly, an automatic override that sacrifices perfection on the altar of speed.

In other words, you get out of the way of a charging bull without giving the finer points much thought and then, hours later, you wonder at what the thought process might have been. You wonder in vain, because there wasn’t one.

It was this lack of process that saved my skin yesterday.

I was at the Global Bird Fair on Rutland Water, a 3 day gathering of 12,000 bird nuts like me, and had agreed to take over the two talks that my friend-in-curlews Mary Colwell was supposed to be doing, but couldn’t, because she had Covid. It was no accident that they had booked her and not me- (she is a consummate communicator and campaigner, and knows her stuff backwards)- but they hid their disappointment well.

The potentially more challenging of the two sessions was to be part of a four person panel that looked at what part nature played in the recent election (none), and what campaigners could do to hold the new government to account (lots). It was in the main tent (capacity 500), the session’s chair was Dominic Dyer, a well-known campaigner himself and my three fellow panelists had impeccable credentials in the world we were discussing.

I had 24 hours to think about it (and, to be fair, have spent seven years thinking about little else), so I just browsed each main party’s manifesto and set off at 04.30 the next morning to get the job done. A panel is a panel, after all, and the process is nicely reactive.

Relative newbies to major public speaking like me, especially show-offs who quite enjoy the greasepaint, like these big events. We like the build up. We like the hum of the crowd taking their seats. We like the green room and, particularly, we like the little finger sandwiches and jaffa cakes provided for us. But above all, oddly enough, we like the scary excitement that immediately precedes walking out in front of a proper crowd.

All these things we do, but our tolerance of the basically unnatural situation is predicated on the presence of two absolute certainties: the understanding that we know our subject, and a complete lack of surprises. Which was all fine until Dom gave a sotto voce reminder to us that we each had 4 minutes to make our prepared statements as we were being miked up a couple of minutes before going.

No one had told me this. I had nothing prepared, not even random thoughts. All I knew was that, in 30 second’s time, I was going to stand up in front of 500 knowledgeable people and have 4 minutes utterly dedicated to my best goldfish impressions. Like you, I enjoy a challenge, but there are limits. I could have done with Prince Andrew’s non-functioning sweat glands.

If, indeed, I was saved, 2 things saved me.

The first was that I was the last to go, and therefore had more time to think than I had expected. The second was that I remembered in the nick of time my old adage of shooting the crocodile nearest the boat, which meant that I did no more with those extra minutes than simply to remember the power of story telling over lecturing, and of humour over outrage. There was absolutely no point in preparing anything more than remembering which story to tell. Opportunities like this are vanishingly rare, and the important thing wasn’t what people thought of me, but whether or not I let down the overall campaign.

So I duly told my little story which, in the telling, reminded me of a thread of logic that led to an explanation of how I try in my small way to change the world. We then had 30 minutes of questions and discussions and off we went. Whilst there hasn’t been a flurry of further bookings in the last 24 hours, I feel that I came out of the battlefield on my own two feet, and not in the metaphorical casualty wagon.

If there is a moral to this story, it is nothing to do with me, but instead to do with the privilege of having a walk on part in such an existential battle. 50% of the oxygen on earth comes from phytoplankton in the ocean; every third mouthful you eat is pollinated for free for you by insects and birds; every third pill you take is plant-based. Just check out the story of Chairman Mao’s destruction of the sparrows in the late 1950s if you really believe that we yet understand what ecosystem collapse will do to us if we let it come to that.

That marquee, that talk, that temporary discomfort: I’d do it all over again, any place, any time and anyhow.

Just ask.