A snapshot of life.....exposed

Who knows where Wennington is without checking Google Earth? Not me. But as it happens it is a small and idyllic looking village somewhere a bit beyond Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire. I left my house on Saturday morning a smidge after 8.30am and headed towards the A14 which involved going through Corby so as a precaution I locked all my doors and double-checked the locking wheelnuts on my alloys. To be fair, Corby has brushed up its image alot in the last few years with the help of funding following the government's Urban Regeneration White Paper and it now boasts a Costa Coffee, a TK Maxx and a Dotty P’s along with, and this is the most important thing in my book, a new 50m Olympic-standard swimming pool which is due to open sometime in 2009. In fact the design of this pool is really quite beautiful – a somehow merging of 1950’s and space age architecture and design, if that can be at all possible. Anyway, having a 50m pool on my doorstep gets my vote any day and I am sure the rumour that it has been built too short is just, well, a rumour.

I made it safely through Corby and enjoyed the sensation of being out in my car on a beautifully sunny day driving - once I got off the A14 - through picturesque and archetypal English countryside, the kind which you’d want to show off to your American cousins when they came to stay. Some of the crops had been harvested already and old fashioned bales of straw were artistically scattered and stacked in the fields. Following the directions quite carefully as the roads got narrower and the junctions more easily missed, I arrived on time in Wennington at the location of the seminar which was taking place in what looked like one of a number of business units converted from old farm buildings. The car park was almost full which surprised me as for some reason I hadn’t expected the seminar to be that well attended but locking up the car I picked up my camera and went in to meet the other participants. The course which had the snappy title of Understanding your digital EOS Part 1 – basic overrides, is the starter for ten of the range and array of seminars and courses run by Experience Seminars and is dedicated to Canon EOS cameras. The coffee area which was bright and modern with a kind of urban café feel held a bunch of Canon newbies of both sexes and of various ages, sizes and shapes. The walls of the café were a well presented gallery of A3 prints of photographs of big cats, birds and other things that I can’t quite remember because what was really interesting me is that nobody was talking to each other and everybody more or less stood or sat in clearly demarcated territories of almost equal space like little human batteries of opposing polar fields. I queued up for a free-vend coffee and as I did so I observed this strange phenomena. Having recently come back from a volunteering project abroad (see posts in pages 1 – 5) which attracted mainly gap year students the difference between how young people handle unfamiliar social situations and new people is quite different from how older adults behave. You would think that our maturer years and life experience would equip us with skills to handle these kind of situations in a much more relaxed and easy going manner but does it heck. Stick 20 youngsters maybe in their late teens or early twenties together in a non-familiar environment and within 15 minutes it’s like they’ve met up by surprise with a bunch of long lost acquaintances from their home town and they are ready to party. I saw this time and time again as people left the Namibia project and new people arrived and I really envied them this easy familiarity and, I think, lack of criticality and judgment about their peers. I wonder why adults don't seem to be able to do the same.