In the book there is a strategy meeting in Room 2.14, which smells of whiteboard marker and somebody’s lunch from three hours ago.
I made the number up. I did not make up the room. Every council building in the country has one.
How to find it
You cannot.
It is on the second floor, except that the second floor is reached from the third, by a staircase behind a door marked PLANT. The map in reception is from before the refurbishment. The sign fell off in 2014 and was put back on the wrong door.
Somebody will pass you in the corridor holding a laptop open like a tray. They are also looking for it. Follow them. They are usually wrong as well, but you will have company.
What is in it
A table that is two tables. They are not the same height.
Nine chairs for eleven people.
A screen on the wall, and a cable that fits no device made this century, and a remote control with the batteries taken out.
A window that does not open, or a window that does not close.
A flipchart from a team away day. It says WHAT DOES GOOD LOOK LIKE? and underneath, in a different pen, “biscuits”.
Who is in it
Whoever booked it for the hour before, and they have not finished.
You stand in the corridor with a police officer, a school nurse and a head of year who has driven forty minutes, and you all look through the glass panel at four people from Highways who are looking at a map.
At three minutes past, somebody has to knock. It is always the social worker.
How the meeting goes
The person dialling in cannot hear. Then they can hear and cannot be heard. Then there is a noise like a lorry reversing, and they have gone, and ten minutes later an email arrives that begins “Apologies, I was on mute”.
Somebody has printed the papers. Somebody else has printed a different version of the papers.
And then, about twenty minutes in, it turns into a good meeting. I have no idea how. The nurse says what she has seen. The officer says what he is worried about. The teacher says the thing the child said on Tuesday, in the words the child used. People who have never met put what they know on the uneven table, and for half an hour a child who is not in the room is the only thing anybody is thinking about.
I have been in a great many bad rooms. I have been in very few bad meetings, once they got going.
Afterwards
Nobody can remember who is sending the minutes.
You go back for your pen, and through the glass the next lot are already in. One of them is holding the remote control. She is turning it over to look for the batteries.
A proposal
Every new council building should have one room that is easy to find, with enough chairs, a window that opens and a cable that fits.
It should be kept for the meetings that are about children. Highways can have 2.14.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: On being shouted at