Chair, Conference Organising Group, Bristol 2009

Performing the role of conference organiser can be compared to being a swan: doing your best to look calm on the surface while underneath your feel are paddling along frantically as you try to keep afloat. For me this year’s annual conference was the end of a 3 year marathon of planning two BSG conferences in succession. To say I enjoyed it would be an exaggeration but I did get a huge amount of satisfaction from delivering a successful event. It has been a great pleasure to work with colleagues from the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol in hosting these two events. It is a tribute to our spirit of collaboration that we were able to support each other through the stresses of organising this kind of event. Even better, we had some great fun along the way and we are still talking to each other!

Feedback is of course hugely important, both to us as conference organisers to see if we got things right and to the BSG as a way of maximising the quality of future events. Many people were kind enough to tell us how much they enjoyed the conference as they left and there has been a steady stream of emails along the same lines since then. I was particularly pleased with the message from one delegate who had attended the last 15 BSG conferences and thought this was the best one yet. High praise indeed.

On a personal note, one of the highlights of the conference was the publication of my book, Community and Ageing. It was a privilege to be able to launch this at a BSG conference and particularly fitting for it to be a conference that we were hosting.

The conference organising group spent much of the build up to this year’s conference wondering if the recession would have an impact on the number of delegates, but we needn’t have worried. Two hundred and seventy one of you turned up, which is slightly more than in 2008, and we thank you for coming and making it such a success. We couldn’t have done it without you and we do hope to see you all again at Brunel University next year.