“We’ve gotta have a great show.”  Thats what Judy Garland told Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms, a 1939 movie. And this past week I got a chance to work on another great show – the Planet under Pressure conference in London.

The show has been in the works now for over a year, keeping a number of my co-workers at IGBP pretty occupied for a long time. But I only really got involved with it after returning from my mom’s funeral in January. Together with my boss, Owen, IGBP’s Comms director, I designed all the exhibition displays and standing banners seen around the venue. I also helped organize and design the booth that we shared with our fellow Global Change organizations – IHDP, WCRP, DIVERSITAS and the ESSP. I know its a bit of an alphabet soup but look them up if you don’t know who they are. Together with my co-worker Charlotte, I designed the layout of the 6 meter by 6 meter booth that all 5 organizations shared at the conference. Getting everyone to agree on what the booth should look like was quite a task, stretching my diplomacy skills, which everyone who knows me, knows that they are not very well developed. I was aided by the fact that time was running out and a decision had to be made so the booth could be built. I also designed the 4 posters to have on the outside of the booth following the same branding used throughout the conference and identifying who the booth belonged to and an additional poster for the inside of the booth. Finally, right up to the day before I left for England, I was working on the Powerpoint slides that were to be used in all the plenary sessions in the auditorium.

Then, on Saturday morning, March 24th, Håkan drove me to the airport, picking up Charlotte on the way. There we met our co-worker Wendy and the 3 of us headed for London’s Heathrow airport.

For almost 2 hours we schlepped ourselves and our luggage through the London Underground from Heathrow to the ExCeL Center at the other end of the city. This was pretty much all I got to see of London in my week there. We arrived at our hotel just in time to check in, meet up with a group of others involved with the show and join them for dinner.  The dinner was Indian food at a place just a stone’s throw from the hotel. I’m not a big fan of Indian food – would have preferred Chinese of course. But it was close and quick. And here started what for me was one of the best parts of coming along on this trip. I got to meet and talk with people I never have a chance to meet in my real life. At dinner I sat next to my boss Owen and across from Lidia Brito, one of the co-chairs of the conference. Like me, she had very curly hair so I felt we had something in common right from the start. She comes from Mozambique and is the Director of Science Policy and Capacity Building at UNESCO. Listening to her discuss ideas over dinner was the best part of dinner and she and I got a chance to talk about the UN and what she feels its purpose and its successes are as we walked back to our hotel. Truly an inspiring woman.

A breakfast meeting at 7am on Sunday morning in the hotel restaurant and all the madness started. By the way, the breakfast at the hotel was great! Every morning I had scrambled eggs, fried ham, delicious cumberland sausages and potato patties and sweet, fresh orange wedges on the side. And, of course, lots of much needed coffee. The sausages were great and in true Seinfield/New York diner fashion, I wish I could have eaten that breakfast at other times of the day too.

At this point, my prime duty was with the set-up and organization of the booth.  The construction guys were putting up the booths and we wouldn’t have access to them till 2pm. But Charlotte and I checked out our delivery of stuff and discovered that our roll-ups and the posters I had made specially for the booth didn’t arrive with the rest of the stuff. Major depression on my part. Charlotte, using her logistics skills, set to work trying to track them down. Meanwhile I sat in on discussions regarding the plenary sessions.

Two pm arrives and together with staff from the other partner organizations we start moving furniture around in the booth, putting out brochures and setting up the computer and monitor that will show samples of  Powerpoint slides from all 5 organizations. Still no posters or roll-ups. By 7:30 we had to vacate the premises and go back to the hotel. Dinner was eaten in the hotel restaurant this time since no one felt like going any further away. After dinner I was asked by Wendy if I could take on the job of being in charge of running the PowerPoint slides during the Plenary sessions in the Auditorium. Of course I said yes. This was the type of stuff I had been doing for over 30 years. Maybe not necessarily on-site but doing AV. And because Håkan had worked so many conferences over the years, I knew in theory what needed to be done. Also, I always have liked working and hanging around backstage with the tech guys. So then Wendy and I proceeded to work through the slides needed for the first Plenary session – staying up to 1:30 in the morning to get it done. The hotel staff very graciously helped me to print out the running orders so I could give them to the tech guys in the morning.

Monday morning arrived too early and after the hotel breakfast, I dashed over to the ExCeL center to meet up with the AV techies and deliver the slides for the day.  Rushing over is a bit of a misnomer. The ExCeL center was huge!! It took at least 10 or 15 minutes to walk from one end to the other. And we had to walk through the entire place to get to the area our conferences was held in. I got a lot of excercise last week. After last minute discussions, I took up my place in the front row of the huge auditorium, put on my headset and listened to tech chatter. Nisha Pillai, the moderator, went up on the stage and the show began.