Ian McMillan: Hands up anyone who fancies a meeting?

That's why you see wide-eyed and terrified cardigan-wearing chaps abseiling when they'd rather be doing the cryptic crossword, or women who look like your auntie, sporting mauve baseball caps back to front while wobbling down the only street of a small Dales village on customised skateboards.

An extreme version of this is the Mid Life Crisis, known in Yorkshire as Acting Daft. This often takes the form of men, who should know better, wearing t-shirts and tight jeans that are several sizes too small, as well as sporting inappropriate tattoos and making weekly

visits to the hair gel stall on the market for a giant jar.

Well, I'm pleased to say that I did something new the other day which was, in its way, as palpitation-inducing as abseiling, and which could be interpreted in certain quarters as a kind of Mid Life Crisis of sorts: I went to a meeting. I don't mean I met somebody; I didn't walk down the street and bump into a pal I'd not seen for ages and spend half-an-hour chatting about other folks we'd not seen for ages. No: I went to a meeting.

At this point, people will be shaking their heads in disbelief, as opposed to shaking somebody else's head in disbelief, a custom which used to be common in the wilder parts of Harrogate but which has, I believe, almost died out.

You went to a meeting? What's unusual about that? Everybody goes

to meetings!

Let me correct you there, reader. Not everybody goes to meetings. I, for one, don't. I realise this is a strange admission, particularly for people whose life is built around meetings, around appointments in a diary or on an iPhone, people who use odd Time Lord language like "If I move my 10 o'clock to four o'clock, then I can fit you in for a face-to-face around the coffee window". I'm lucky in that a lot of my work is done by email or by somebody phoning me or knocking on the door and having a quick word on the step. The land of Meetings is for me as far away and exotic as Marrakesh.

But there I was, the other day, in a meeting. We were sitting round a table and there was a Chair. There was somebody taking minutes. There was an agenda which began with Apologies for Absence and ended with Any Other Business. There was tea and coffee and biscuits under tight clingfilm that, just before the meeting started, somebody ripped away like a TV detective tearing a sheet from a body.

I clutched my agenda as though I was a child on his first day at school clutching a line card. Somebody declared the meeting open and I tried to crunch my biscuit quietly and not make too many crumbs.

After a while, I began to enjoy it. I made a few contributions. At one point, people raised their hands to vote and I began to understand the mysterious and almost mystical power of the meeting, something I'd been missing out on for all those years of chatting to people on the step.

The people in the meeting didn't fight, they didn't chuck biscuits or

try to smother each other with clingfilm or inflict paper cuts with agendas. They voted, quietly, with hands in the air.

I realise I'm talking about a special kind of meeting here: I'm talking about the meeting that gets things done, that leads to decisions and actions and the world changing, even in a very small way. Some meetings are just talking shops, gossip festivals, flirtathons, ego-massage parlours and time-fillers. They're the kinds of meetings that give meetings a bad name.

As I sat in my meeting and we approached the appointed hour of Any Other Business, I began to realise that meetings are, in fact, the cornerstones of civilised behaviour.

You're right: there must have been something in the biscuits that made me thinking something so highfalutin', but I reckon that many of the great decisions of our time have been made in meetings, often towards the end of long, long meetings when people are a bit tired and they're trying to concentrate and they've eaten too many digestives and the coffee is giving them a thundering headache.

National and international and local decisions, like where to send that army or where to put that road or how to solve the problem of those

kids around that bus stop, are all taken in meetings.

There may have been raised voices, there may have been fists bashing tables, there may have been the scraping of chairs as people almost walked out, but, in the end, the hands are raised and the vote is taken.

How's this for a proposition: The Meeting is a Higher Form of

Existence. Marvellous! I declare this column closed.