Just a Minute

Yesterday, I took the minutes for a meeting of my Doctor's General Practice Patients Group. There were about a dozen people there. Now, I live in a community that is highly articulate, educated and political. The latter not necessarily in the sense of allegiance, more in the sense of involvement in what's going on in our community and in the country. Proudly, I drew a little map of the table so I could note not only the names of those who attended, (absolutely not: I refuse point blank to call them attendees, so there), but also where they were seated, to make it easier to ascribe comments. This is an occupation in which I have indulged before, however, not for more decades than it would be decent to remember. I tell you this because I was under the impression, when I offered to stand in as a one-off for the appointed Secretary, that my earlier experience of committee note-taking and my ordinary student experience, when the notes of the Professor became the notes of the student without passing through the head of either, as the old saw goes, would be all I needed to keep the pen on the paper. I suppose I was also thinking of my later professional need for note-taking. Crazy: the making of headline notes in a 50 minute consultation when 45 of those minutes consisted of a profoundly constructive silence has nothing in common with a room full of jabbering interested parties falling over one another in their eagerness to be heard. No, I don't do shorthand. I did attend a Secretarial School for Young Ladies sixty years ago when it was the thing for well-brought-up young Welsh girls to do if they wished to leave the Principality (Wales, if you are over the Pond)and set themselves up in the Smoke (London, ditto). I left on the third day and managed to resucitate my offer of a University place and embark on quite a different path. All this would be of little interest if I were as young as last I was in this situation. I am not. I don't hear as well, I don't write as fast and I don't, after all, remember those things that seem so obvious they don't need writing down. To cap it all, when I made my egregious offer, I was unaware that there was to be a guest speaker.
Thereby lies the rub. A youngish, prettyish woman, a highly qualified medic, buzzing with enthusiasm, energy and evangelism arrived to address us on the part she, the practice Doctors and we were to play in the re-organisation of our National Health Service. Dear Reader, she dived from a height straight in. I was utterly drowned in her words. I have hung on to a few of the Pitman shorthand symbols, learnt in those three days, (Does Pitmans even exist now, I ask myself; I ask you?) and the improvised shorthand I used for lecture note-taking - no vowels, for instance - but none of my resources was equal to the flow of fact-packed, urgent and essential information emanating from this gifted and unstoppable person. What to do? I put down my pen, wiped my fevered brow and decided to fall back on my facility for recall to fill in the gaps at home. But I couldn't. My mind is/was a blank. I have suffered the guilt, the shame and the inevitable. I could tell you what she was wearing to the last button but what she said is mush in my ears. It is Phillip Glass where it should be Mozart. I ask you to pray with me, that the Practice Manager is in a good mood, on good form and with a good memory when I report back to her on Monday. Otherwise the minutes will simply have to read: "there was a guest speaker." Nos da