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.