Meeting Up

The other week I found myself in Portugal. In a room with six hundred people. Yesterday it was Waterloo, just one person across a table. Both were meetings, and both worked. It’s strange how different these feel compared to Zoom or Teams. Those little squares on a screen always remind me of Celebrity Squares — for those of us old enough to remember it — only with less glamour and more broadband problems. Neat, tidy, very modern, but relating to people like that is a bit like looking through a stamp collection. Ordered, but no sense of life. In a room you feel things. You notice the air shift when people laugh, the little glance that says “yes, I’m with you,” or the silence that says “no, you’ve lost me.” It’s messy, it’s unpredictable, it’s human. And it’s where work actually gets done. I’ve been watching the COVID inquiry — the Boris Comedy Act, as it’s become — with its endless admissions of what went wrong. We talk about ruined education for thousands of children, but I can’t help thinking something else was ruined too: the simple art of communicating in person. We tell ourselves that online meetings are more efficient. They are. They save time, save journeys, and certainly save shoe leather. But perhaps we’ve confused easy with effective. Sometimes the very best things only happen because you take the trouble. Travelling to Hemel Hempstead for a fifteen-minute conversation. Getting actors in a room together to interview them. Standing at a railway platform with a coffee and a dog-eared paperback, heading somewhere to actually sit across from another human being. And then, of course, there are the biscuits. I used to judge the quality of law firms by what biscuits they put on the table. Anybody offering the contents of a Sainsbury’s bumper pack was unlikely to get a return visit. Anything wrapped in foil? They had my attention. Biscuits are a small thing, but they say: “You’re worth the effort.” Which is what meetings are, really. Effort. The effort of turning up, of being present, of looking someone in the eye instead of at a thumbnail on a laptop. So as you look at your diary for next week, just ask: how many excuses have I got to get out and about? Could that half hour on a train become half an hour to read, to think? Could that walk through a park after a meeting be the time to make sense of what was just agreed? Because people meeting people — face to face, with laughter, biscuits, and sometimes even six hundred in a room in Portugal — is still how the best work gets done.