Shag with breeding crest and emerald eye When a talk is going well you feel something convivial in the atmosphere. You ease into it, confident to explore the more challenging reaches of your subject. That happened earlier this month at my first Farne Islands talk. And afterwards my audience gathered about me to share their experience of seabirds and to buy my cards and books. And these Farne Islands images are knock-out quality, especially the one I captioned ‘razorbill and sea-pinks, an aesthetic.’ How could anyone snore on contemplating that! Well, the room is hot and some are accustomed to a nap after lunch. I know a way to keep an audience on its toes, uncertain what I’ll do next.
Imagine yourself at the court of Henry V111 with a joust about to take place. In Bring up the Bodies, the writer Hilary Mantel considers every eventuality that could bring horse and rider crashing down. Setting up a power-point presentation in a crowded hall, I’m wary of the elderly and unsteady nudging a table laden with projector and laptop, back and forth over cable and leads when you really wish they’d find a comfortable seat and keep clear. In the peace and quiet of home the technical run-through was fine. My images were carefully sequenced to give the story structure and flow. I’d spent hours refining it, adding notes crammed with data below each slide. They disappear once the presentation is underway, but I read them that morning so everything was fresh in my mind. Lucky I did because on the afternoon of the talk the projector failed. What now? Head for the door and slink off home? Everyone was wide awake. There was a delightful little girl on the front row so I gathered up a handful of greetings cards and gave her puffin and guillemot to look at. She’d have loved my pictures and I felt sorry for her because the talk would be more challenging. I’d have to make word-pictures.
In a power-point presentation you’re in the dark and you have to focus on the images you want to interpret for your audience. So you feel them breathing, laughing at your jokes, but you don’t see them. Now the lights were on and I took care to include the wide-eyed little girl and my good friends Pauline and Kent who I knew would be with me in spirit. When electrical kit fails the secret is to make a quick decision: abandon it and launch into the talk. I’m used to public speaking and I enjoy it, having been Head of an English Department for years. I had in my hand a print-out of the blog I’d written for this talk The Farne Islands: seabirds, geology and Celtic Christianity. But I didn’t intend to read it. No notes, no script. But having written them gave them existence and I only had to conjure them into the air. I reckon I was fine. The intellectual process interested me. As I was speaking I was aware of the direction in which thought was taking me: Kittiwake at Cullernose point, geology and a collapsing needle of dolerite, seabirds surface-feeding on the waves, Climate Change morphing the food web with sand eels further out to sea, the Dogger Bank fishery depleting stocks, kittiwake on the ambler list. What next? There’s an adrenalin rush when you can hear yourself speaking but you can’t see the transition to the next subject and you try to conjure it into being. I could hear in my voice a new rhythm and a careful pace as I balanced what I was saying with where I was about to go. You have to see the story-line that lies ahead.
Images serve as a prompt. They remind you exactly why you chose them and how they’ll take the narrative forward. I think I kept to theme, but inevitably structure slipped somewhat. We never made it to Dunstanburgh with my thoughts on what is subsumed within natural history, a concept we often speak of without considering quite what it means. The history of nature, the spectrum of time through which we contemplate seabirds – even when the species pre-dates mankind by millions of years, like the shag whose earliest fossil is 60 million years old.
The talk should have been strong on beauty, those images are lovely. And I didn’t go for the homophone of an aesthetic. I’d have had to labour it, I think. An aesthetic, anaesthetic. No one fell asleep, no one snored. And the delightful little girl was with me every moment of the way.
I marvel at politicians who give lengthy, unscripted speeches, note-free to a sometimes hostile audience. How do they do it? It's also a question of tone. The actor Tom Hiddleston lost it at The Golden Globes and conveyed an arrogance born of nerves.
Please respect copyright on all images and text
In a power-point presentation you’re in the dark and you have to focus on the images you want to interpret for your audience. So you feel them breathing, laughing at your jokes, but you don’t see them. Now the lights were on and I took care to include the wide-eyed little girl and my good friends Pauline and Kent who I knew would be with me in spirit. When electrical kit fails the secret is to make a quick decision: abandon it and launch into the talk. I’m used to public speaking and I enjoy it, having been Head of an English Department for years. I had in my hand a print-out of the blog I’d written for this talk The Farne Islands: seabirds, geology and Celtic Christianity. But I didn’t intend to read it. No notes, no script. But having written them gave them existence and I only had to conjure them into the air. I reckon I was fine. The intellectual process interested me. As I was speaking I was aware of the direction in which thought was taking me: Kittiwake at Cullernose point, geology and a collapsing needle of dolerite, seabirds surface-feeding on the waves, Climate Change morphing the food web with sand eels further out to sea, the Dogger Bank fishery depleting stocks, kittiwake on the ambler list. What next? There’s an adrenalin rush when you can hear yourself speaking but you can’t see the transition to the next subject and you try to conjure it into being. I could hear in my voice a new rhythm and a careful pace as I balanced what I was saying with where I was about to go. You have to see the story-line that lies ahead.
Images serve as a prompt. They remind you exactly why you chose them and how they’ll take the narrative forward. I think I kept to theme, but inevitably structure slipped somewhat. We never made it to Dunstanburgh with my thoughts on what is subsumed within natural history, a concept we often speak of without considering quite what it means. The history of nature, the spectrum of time through which we contemplate seabirds – even when the species pre-dates mankind by millions of years, like the shag whose earliest fossil is 60 million years old.
The talk should have been strong on beauty, those images are lovely. And I didn’t go for the homophone of an aesthetic. I’d have had to labour it, I think. An aesthetic, anaesthetic. No one fell asleep, no one snored. And the delightful little girl was with me every moment of the way.
I marvel at politicians who give lengthy, unscripted speeches, note-free to a sometimes hostile audience. How do they do it? It's also a question of tone. The actor Tom Hiddleston lost it at The Golden Globes and conveyed an arrogance born of nerves.
Please respect copyright on all images and text
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