The trouble with me is that I can never say 'no'.
If somebody asks me to help them out or do them a favour, I always seem to end up doing it!
It happened again this week, when the secretary of my cricket club announced that he would miss the annual meeting, because he was on a business trip.
'Ah Mike's the sort of chap, who would fill in for me,' he must have thought as sought somebody to take the minutes at the meeting.
Sure enough an email arrived, asking me whether I could take over his duties.
I prevaricated, explaining that in my role as bar chairman, it was really my duty to serve the drinks to thirsty members.
I said that I would have to find someone to run the bar, if I was going to do his job.
But both he and I really knew that I would end up helping him out – because 'I can never say 'no'.'
Before fixing up someone to take over the bar duties, I had already let the secretary know that I would do the business, he having already s emailed me the minutes of last year's meeting.
It was only an hour before the meeting that I learned I'd got a volunteer to help out with the drinks.
So having opened up the bar half an hour early, I served the early customers for sitting down with scribble pad in hand.
As it turned out, only 14 members turned up for the meeting, and my deputy served just three drinks in that time – one of them for himself, which I had bought him for helping me out!
Journalists often get asked to take minutes, assuming that they must be experts at shorthand. Now that is not my strong point, but I think I got most of the main points down.
Another problem was that chairman kept looking at the club clock which was 20 minutes fast. He wanted to start the meeting early and got the time wrong at the end.
In the end, I reckon I got more minutes right than he did!