Six weeks after our Autumn 2019 crawl of Shrewsbury and no one has started to talk about next year's venues and dates. Is this a record?
I know there was some talk about having a 10th Anniversary crawl of Birmingham later next year (though I hope we'll have it a little earlier in the autumn than the first one, which took place on the 12th of November).
That still leaves a spring crawl and a summer one; a southern one and a northern one - with venues and dates to be discussed and agreed. I think I've heard it said that we shouldn't repeat previous venues until we've done Birmingham again, so this would mean finding two new venues.
Looking at previous years, we did the south in the spring in 2017, 2018 and 2019, but this doesn't mean a southern spring crawl is set in stone. Similarly, we've always done the spring crawl towards the end of March but in 2020 Easter is on April 12th, which potentially frees up Friday, 3rd April as a date for our crawl. So, how about a northern crawl on the first Friday in April? This has the advantage of an extra week or two of discussion before train tickets go on sale.
Last year there wasn't a poll for the northern crawl, as Sheffield was widely agreed to have been a glaring ommission in previous years. In 2018 everyone got a bit carried away with the idea of the Manchester tram system - it was all ROB Camra's fault for being away on holiday at the time, and we quickly came to our senses when he returned - and in 2017 we agreed on my suggestion for Stockport without a poll. So the last time we had a good debate about a northern venue seems to have been four years ago, when it was determined that Lincoln was on the same latitude as Sheffield, and we ended up going to Hull.
So, just to get things started and despite the danger of kicking off a new round of #geographygalore, I hereby propose Lincoln for the spring crawl venue. Any comments? (Ducks hastily behind pile of sand bags left over from the recent River Don floods.)