The question the morning posed was a simple one, and nobody on either notice board would touch it: which pad. The Cultural Subcommittee, which keeps a certain latitude in the year’s longer programme, posted a notice on Saturday naming three pads of the southern waters as “provisional candidates” for the Midsummer Gathering. The Gathering has wanted a settled venue since the central pad went under on Friday the seventeenth. The notice went up at the usual board. The Clerk of the Cultural Subcommittee signed it for his colleagues. First readers took it for a preliminary indication, which is what it was.
The pads were three. The first lies somewhat east of where the central pad stood. The notice called it of generous proportion and good visibility, with reservations as to the footing. The second is smaller and sits nearer the willows. Intimate in scale, the notice said, well sheltered, with reservations as to the capacity. The third the notice located only in approximate terms. It is newly observed, of uncertain history, and recommended subject to further examination.
The Reed-Bed Subcommittee, which has held that no replacement may be rushed, issued a clarification within hours. It did not contest the Cultural Subcommittee’s right to name whatever pads it liked for its own purposes. It observed only that none of the three had been “constituted as central within the meaning of the term as it has been applied at the southern waters in previous seasons,” and that centrality was a matter of some procedural weight. The Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee signed it. This paper is reliably informed it was drafted with care.
Both bodies then declined to say anything more. The Cultural Subcommittee would not go beyond its notice. The Reed-Bed Subcommittee would not go beyond its clarification. Between the two there is held to lie a question of jurisdiction, and neither body looks willing to be the first to put it into words.
So this paper walked down to the willows and asked the long-resident frog, whose observations ran here on the twenty-ninth, whether his long acquaintance with the water would call any of the three central. He considered it for the better part of two minutes, in which he did not otherwise move. None of the named pads, he held, ought to be preferred over another (ish), and he was not himself of the cultural persuasion. This paper’s apparatus chose this moment to emit a honk of its own, by way of editorial overflow. The frog took the interruption with his now-customary equanimity, and the audience moved on briefly to another subject. But on centrality he was exact. “None of them,” he said, “is in the position the central pad occupied. That is a matter of geometry, on which I cannot offer a different view.”