Any resemblance to an event the writer attended recently is entirely coincidental. I’ll delete any speculative remarks which try to relate this account of someone else’s real experience to anything I’ve done in the last week or two. This has nothing to do with me.
Someone I met in a pub last week was telling me about his friend who recently rolled up to an organising meeting for a conference that is happening later this year. It is shaping up to be an impressive event with a good range of enthusiastic figures from the world of ferret breeding keen to be there. Some of the well disposed leading ferret breeders are asking to be on the platform for the plenary sessions. There are workshops in abundance too. Fringe meetings were suggested but some people think they are too much of a palaver and you can never be quite sure what turn the conversation might take. Others quite like them but they lost the vote. Quite a ramshackle bunch of people of people who have never worked together before are working hard to make sure the conference, which is the first of its type, is a great success.
As with religion and football passions can run high in this world which so much of the rest of humanity finds odd. This means that most ferret breeders find themselves in pretty small organisations because they can’t agree on the proper exercise regime or diet for the animals. Just the sort of thing ordinary people can’t be bothered trying to understand. Nonetheless they are all pleasantly surprised to find out just how well they can get on together.
But one of the organisations is much bigger than all the others. We were onto the fourth pint and I’ve forgotten the name but it was something like United Ferrets (UF). Many of its members are considered sensible, constructive people with a real passion for ferrets and their welfare. UF has lots of fulltime officials who advise members on what’s best for them and keep them up to date with a weekly newsletter and phone calls. They are never too happy when other people have ideas which are different from theirs and they know that they are right because they are big. That means they like to make certain that when they do get involved in things that they stay in control. Making sure that lots of their important, and not so important people get to speak at public events is one of their obsessions. Sometimes this means that they don’t tell people in the other pro-ferret organisations that they are members of United Ferrets and are representing another group. It’s not exactly dishonest but it’s not completely honest either.
Winning votes is very important for United Ferrets and never more so than when they are working with the other groups. This seemed to be the point of the guy’s story. Apparently at an earlier meeting somebody had rumbled their cunning plan and had suggested to them that it didn’t look too inclusive or a bit of a stitchup. He’d suggested that maybe one or two of the United Ferrets people stand down and let someone else take their place. For a UF full time worker there is no more deadly provocation. They’ll harumph and they’ll bluster but mostly they’ll get their mates to come along to the next meeting. So four or five poor sods had to give up their Saturday afternoon, uttering barely a word, in order that UF’s master plan for dominating the world of ferret fanciers could be carried out.
Ferret breeders! What a bunch of nutters!
Liam redux 
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