Just like the olden days

I'm not the organiser, I'm a facilitator. What we are looking for is your ideas. At this stage we won't be judgemental about those ideas. Those were the sort of phrases that Carolina, the woman who was looking after the session used as she set things going. It was like a time warp. I have been involved in stuff like that for more than half of my life.

I'd gone back, with Maggie this time, to the next meeting about implementing Local Agenda 21. We were asked to wear stickers with our names on. We had an agenda and a time-scale. We were asked to write our ideas on bits of paper and as we read them out they were stuck onto the wall beneath an appropriate heading like Education, Environment etc.

To be fair it was a good do. There were another couple of Brits there and though our Spanish had it's dodgy moments we all contributed something. Maggie mentioned drains and street lights and educational opportunity, Laurie did abandoned animals and institutional racism whilst Manolo wanted a museum and Jesús wanted to introduce a community bank and workshops in traditional local crafts. And Carolina kept the whole thing in order and to time.

We felt we'd earned the drinks and tapas we went for afterwards.