The Reed-Bed Subcommittee met on Monday afternoon and deferred four matters. One of them was the question of why it keeps deferring matters. The Clerk called the afternoon a respectable session.
The meeting followed a postponement the Clerk had been asked to characterise as procedural, and the substance of which the Clerk had been asked to characterise as in no way attributable to any one party in particular. A quorum was present, by the Clerk’s own count. Proceedings opened with the customary silence. It was broken twice. Once by an unrelated coot, whom the Clerk has since asked be struck from the minutes, and who is not, the Clerk wishes it understood, the coot whose matter was on the agenda.
Three matters were on the agenda. They were taken in the order they reached it, which is not, as regular readers know, the order they were received in. The Subcommittee has its own logic. The Clerk understands it. The Warden of the Sluice, in attendance, understands it on alternate days.
First: the heron at the west pier. The Subcommittee disposed of it fast. Too fast, the Clerk allowed afterward, calling the speed regrettable. The heron has not been seen at the pier for some days, but neither has it filed any notice of departure, and the Subcommittee was disinclined to declare a heron gone without the heron’s own confirmation. It agreed an interim designation of “resident in absentia,” pending paperwork the heron is not understood to intend to file. The heron, for its part, had not asked to be on the agenda. The matter was deferred.
Second: the coot’s protest over his classification at the Channel Sprint. The coot did not attend. He sent a strongly-worded note and the same small pebble that has now come before this body in three separate sessions, for two different grievances. The Subcommittee accepted the pebble, declined to reach a verdict, and referred the matter to the Clerk of the Race, who was not present. That, too, was deferred.
Third, and hardest of the afternoon: Drake Halford’s contested census filing. Drake Halford came in person, with what he described as his actual household, in number six. Not seven, as previously reported; the seventh had been called away on a matter of grandchildren. The Subcommittee heard him at length and noted, with some embarrassment, that the relevant filing is lost. It was lost the first time, too. The Drake took this with exemplary patience. He is patient to the point of saintliness, and the point may be near. The matter was deferred, by acclamation.
A junior member then moved that the Subcommittee consider, at its next session, how it had come to defer three matters in a row. The motion was raised after some hesitation, by a member whose name this correspondent did not, in the moment, manage to catch. It was received with a silence the Clerk afterwards called constructive. Sitting closer to it, this correspondent would call it something else. The motion was deferred to a later session, like the matters it concerned, and for much the same reasons.
The Clerk’s closing remarks noted that the afternoon had produced a quorum, an attendance, and four deferrals, which in the Clerk’s view made for a respectable session by the standards of recent weeks. Four deferrals in an afternoon. One of them the deferral of an inquiry into the other three. The Warden, asked to comment, declined.
The next session is fixed (ish) for Wednesday week. The junior member had sat down by then with the air of a bird who had said what it came to say, and watched it deferred, and would be back to say it again.