Conference speaking and carving chickens

From Wikimedia. Mine look nicer than this. And less blurry.

The first time I roasted a chicken, I was mortified when it came to the carving. Everything was rubbery and congealed and covered in unpleasant skin, fat and bone. I could barely get any meat at all from the bird despite increasingly frantic sawing. I rubbed my eyes and looked back again at the instructions… how had I gone  so wrong?

Eventually, I flipped the thing over and realised that I’d been trying to carve it upside down. I was young and not long out of home… how would I know? Epic fail.

I bring this up to make the point that whenever you do something new, there’s no magical way to know you’re doing it right. Today I roast any kind of fowl to perfection without hardly thinking about it (and know which way up it is supposed to be) merely through practice and a better understanding of which end of a chicken is its arse.

Anyway, I mentioned this a few weeks ago when I first found out I’d been accepted, but in case you don’t know I’ll be speaking at Think Visibility in Leeds in March. This is waaaaaay new territory for me! I’m used to standing on stage in front of strangers and singing, playing the guitar (not all that well) and generally making a fool of myself. But normally you can measure the audience in multiples of 3. These are people that have, at most, stumped up maybe £4 to see you. They’re most probably drunk and there are other people on the stage to distract their attention. If you’re terrible, they just won’t clap and will go buy some crisps instead.

For this gig, I’m going to be standing in front of quite a lot of people, who’ve paid good money to hopefully learn something from me. I’ll have to remember my lines… have a structure… enunciate things properly… have a point… sustain an argument… use PowerPoint on an industrial scale. All of this is entirely alien to me and I’ll have to do it all in front of total strangers, some of whom will be better informed than me no doubt.

You will, of course, forgive me for shitting myself slightly at the prospect.