Claire was cranky and needed her nap.

I spent Five hours(10:00 - 4:00) in a City sponsored cultural planning workshop with earnest culture vultures (arts and heritage mainly) hammering out a cultural policy for the city of Peterborough. We were in eight break-out groups of about eight per group and moved around the room to different topic tables with facilitators to guide the discussion and record the comments. A typical workshop - think tank format like ones I used to organize for the Ministry when I was working.

It sometimes is fun being old because the bright young things on the rise assume I don't know much or have forgotten what I did know. Case in point - my extensive background in marketing and communications. I usually bide my time before showing my hand. I finally exposed myself when we got to developing a *vision statement*. Many a marketing meeting founders on the dreaded vision statement. While the people in my group nit-picked their way through a morass of verbiage, I quietly pulled the key words together and wrote a draft vision statement, which I handed to the frustrated facilitator. She read it out loud and there was a collective sigh of relief because I'd nailed it. Another younger woman in my group had compiled the list of key words for me. We looked at each other, smiled and knew immediately we both had marketing backgrounds. A nice moment, I confess. Earlier in the day, after three facilitators had tried to maneuver our group discussion onto their agenda, I asked innocently, I was under the impression that this is a free flow of ideas, am I wrong?" The response was, of course it's an open discussion, so I asked why are you editing our comments? The facilitator looked like a deer in the headlights but the preempting of the process stopped. All in all it was a day of hard work by good people who really care about the cultural future of Peterborough.

There was a half hour lunch break and we were hard at it again in the afternoon. I ended the afternoon mentally exhausted and physically drained from bad air, poor acoustics, too many voices talking at once and lack of exercise. We broke for supper and were asked to return at seven p.m. for another two hours of public meeting input and discussion of our ideas. OMG, are they mad? I'm an old person. I declined the two more hours of reinventing the wheel and went home for supper and a nap. Like I said, sometimes being old has its own rewards - naps.