Everything Except Work: 3

Things that I make instead of making the things that I should make.

"The West has a duty to depose Robert Mugabe"; "saving the planet is more important than evangelism". Agree? Disagree? Somewhere in the middle?

The Sheep Game: it's a gentle way of stimulating debate. It's used at a society that I go to at Southampton University, and which needed a stall at the jamboree for the recent visit of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Sometimes the leader of a session (well, occasionally) will designate each end of the room to be "agree" or "disagree"; make controversial, debatable or divisive statements and ask everyone to stand in that part of the room which corresponds with their position on the scale of opinion.

We thought thought this would engage people passing the stall and show how SCM works. Thus the president asked me to make three A2 boards with a fence down the middle, and with the top and bottom labelled "agree" and "disagree", so that people visiting the stand could stick a note on wherever they "stood" and make a comment.

I got a marker pen and had fun drawing country fields, trees, tumbledown stiles and different objects to bear the text. They're barren of animals because I can't draw them. To me the scenes recall the 1930s but I don't know why (it's something about clean, pastoral scenes with new methods coming in) and they call out to be populated with little people, including just one in a red-and-white-striped jumper.

We used those two questions and more and the boards ended up arustle with fluorescent post-its. We've kept them for future use.