No rubber chicken, thank God

We were invited by Diana Palmer of IDEAS to join her at tonight's 2009 Fellows Dinner of the NSW Association of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. I was a referee for Diana who has succeeded in her application to visit the USA, the UK and Hong Kong to research tourism and people with disability. I'm a little surprised that it turned out to be an enjoyable evening (which tells us more about me than the evening).

The food, surprisingly, was quite decent really, given the nature of the event. Giant wedges of beef for most diners; mushroom risotto for those of us who have renounced raw flesh. The chocolate desert was good enough to have the less cultured among our number ... that'll be himself ... lifting its dregs from the plate with sticky, licked fingers. Spike tells me that the Shiraz was better than decent enough.

Our companions at the table (a vast rectangular affair in the middle a small sea of otherwise round tables) were genuinely pleasant and interesting folk from Tumut (where Diana's office is based) and Gundagai. Chris and Janelle Becker engaged enthusiastically about glass art with Spike. Narelle and Robert Mac??? who talked of their busy lives in the town of the dog on the tucker box. Narelle struck me as something of a force of nature ... leading the development of supported accommodation in a region of rural NSW for people like her adult son Christian; experimenting with sculpture built out of eld machinery parts; painting and poetry. Someone who lacked imagination might describe them all as 'the salt of the Earth'. I may lack that imagination. I'm glad to say, however, that I overcame my characteristic taciturn nature and may even have come close to being personable and chatty.

The short speeches given by each of the 2009 Fellows were at least genuinely interesting and sometimes quite moving. Each of the speakers seemed truly humbled by the experience and the very idea of having been awarded a grant to travel the world to purse their, at times highly idiosyncratic, dreams. There was a young man who spoke lovingly of an 18th Century instrument I'd never heard of before - the viola d'amore; a special school principal off to sub-Saharan Africa to follow the refugee trail taken by the likes of one of his pupils whom he described as the most traumatised child he'd ever met; a hip young City of Sydney official off to London, New York and Paris to look at different ways vibrant city night-life can be made less prone to street crime; a man who rescues large animals trapped in unlikely places ... a horse beneath a house, a horse stuck up tree?

Diana was obviously enjoying a good night out, as were we. She deserves it.
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