# The Fallow meets

Annual, from some point in the early eighties. Numbered ordinally — the Ninth,
the Fourteenth — and never given a year in speech, a habit so consistent that
converting meet numbers to dates is a live problem rather than an arithmetic
one.

## The form

Somewhere between nine and twenty people. One room. No agenda, no minutes, no
chair, and a stated convention that nothing said at a meet is quotable
afterwards.

That convention is why this page is short.

The one structural element is that somebody read out the tone-table instalment
for the year — see [[lore/tone-tables]] — which sounds like a joke and was not.
The reading took upwards of an hour and people sat through it. The best
available explanation is the honest one: it was the only thing everyone in the
room had definitely done, and reading it aloud was a way of being a group
without having to agree about anything.

## The numbering problem

Nobody wrote down which meet was which year.

The ordinals are used constantly in later accounts and pinning them to dates
requires triangulating from incidental references — someone mentioning a piece
of equipment, a Ledger issue that appeared shortly after, the weather. The
current reconstruction has two candidate offsets that differ by one, and the
disagreement propagates: every event dated *at the Eleventh* is uncertain by a
year depending on which reconstruction you accept.

This affects [[lore/sisken]] directly. The 1994 absence is *the meet Sisken did
not arrive at*, and whether that is 1994 or 1995 depends on the offset. The
folder uses 1994 throughout because [[lore/index]] does, and that is a
convention rather than a finding.

## Not arriving

The tradition has no word for attending a meet and a very well developed one for
failing to. *Not arriving* is a fixed phrase and it is not neutral: it carries
the sense of an absence that was noticed and not explained.

There is no attendance list, by construction, so the only way anyone knows a
person did not arrive is that people expected them. That makes the category
inherently about prominence — an absence is only recorded for someone whose
presence was assumed — and it is why the tradition remembers exactly one
non-arrival and cannot name a single person who quietly stopped coming.

Almost certainly most of them did. See [[lore/the-unnamed]].

## The last one

Generally placed shortly after 1997. There is no record of a final meet and no
announcement, which is consistent with everything else about this group and
consistent with the meets having simply not been convened one year and then not
being convened again.

[[lore/after]] covers the attempts to restart them in the mid-2000s, which
failed for a reason worth reading: the people who came were interested in the
Loop, and the meets had never been about the Loop. They had been an hour of
frequency readings in a room, attended by people with a job in common.