Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 November 2003 16:44:44
I failed to attend Friday evening's meeting, but learned this morning what is being planned. Quite exciting, in fact.
Saturday's meeting, I nearly failed to attend. There was some unhappiness, because wife and daughter had tickets for a pantomime in town, so son had to stay with me. But we did go, and met our MP, along with a handful of others. It was interesting. Perhaps the major insight gained was that the kind of mailing campaign advocated by organisations like Christian Aid can be counter-productive, deluging the MP with multiple copies of the same letter. When I think of it, I am reminded of the techniques employed by some hackers to carry out denial-of-service attacks, having compromised numbers of computers, then using them to send simultaneous packets of data at the unfortunate target.
But our MP's diligence in replying to my proforma letter, and then following it up with an invitation to this meeting, may have helped me along a path towards understanding better some of the issues, and perhaps being a more effective advocate of fair trade in future.
There was a TraidCraft stall in church this morning, staffed by a couple who also attended yesterday's meeting, so I was encouraged to spend more than I might otherwise have done. (I'm pleased with my purchases, let it be said.)