23 May 2015
Another thing that happens when you are President is that someone sends you an agenda for the Special Occasion you’ve agreed to go to, and you discover that part of the Special Occasion is in fact a speech you are going to make. And this leaves you with a rather uncomfortable feeling, because you can hardly write back and say No, really, I think you misunderstood; I only intended to turn up and stand around a bit. So today I find myself writing a speech about diversity, and all the fabulous things we are doing to improve it, because the breakfast meeting that starts at a time no one should have invented contains an address by the CIPA President. And the CIPA President is me. I am a bit short of metaphors, which is unlike me. So I end up with gardening, because the Chelsea Flower Show is on. Improving diversity is like growing plants, I write, despite the fact that I have never been able to grow plants without them stopping growing and starting dying, or occasionally coming up as something different altogether. I say you have to prepare the ground for the plants, and then you have to nurture them as they grow. I think this is quite a good metaphor for a profession where some people think that women should stop crying and kids in inner city schools should work harder. Nurturing things is surely a laudable activity (apparently it even works with children) and I am happy to tell other people to do more of it.
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