The Reed-Bed Subcommittee sat on Sunday in the reeds above the south bank and rose two hours and several coughs later. The agenda ran to seven items. That is three more than the Clerk had reckoned on when he posted it Friday. Two of the extra three came from the Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice. The third came from the coot of the Channel Sprint, who attached a note calling his matter “urgent, or at minimum adjacent to urgent.”
The afternoon went, in order, like this.
Item the first: the Deputy’s conditions report, filed Monday, covered on the twelfth. The Clerk read the summary aloud. The technical findings, gate wear and water levels and sediment, were accepted without a word. The last section was the one about operational continuity, and whether the Warden’s present arrangement is a temporary delegation or a succession in all but name. That section produced a silence. The Clerk let it run twelve breaths, by this paper’s count, and then moved on. The matter was deferred by acclamation. The acclamation was the silence.
Item the second: the Deputy’s supplementary report on the wall marking, filed Friday, covered Saturday. The Clerk noted it. An older drake asked whether the Warden had inspected the marking. The Deputy said he had not. A second older drake asked whether it threatened the structure of the sluice. The Deputy said it did not, “to her present knowledge.” The matter went under miscellaneous observations, where the Clerk said it would stay until “further information becomes available or is sought.” Neither looked likely before nightfall.
Item the third: Halford’s fifth filing, covered Friday. The Clerk confirmed he had the filing, the comparison, and the reconciliation note. Halford was present and was asked to summarise the gap between the first filing and the rest. He did, for something near six minutes, and finished by asking that the fifth be accepted as “comprehensive and final.” The Clerk said it would be reviewed in due course. The Junior Member asked whether the census, broadly speaking, had an end. The Clerk said the question was “procedurally interesting” and deferred it. The census has no end. The Junior Member may have suspected as much.
Item the fourth: the coot’s pebble, a standing item. The coot asked that the pebble be returned and his Channel Sprint classification amended. The Clerk said the Clerk of the Race was still absent and the pebble could not be released without his authorisation. The coot objected. The objection was minuted. The pebble was tabled in the procedural sense, and remained, throughout, on the table in the other sense, where it had been the whole time.
Item the fifth: the heron. The Clerk raised, as the Subcommittee had asked him to, whether the heron at the west pier might now be called closed, provisionally, given the fish were back. The dabchicks were not present and had sent nothing. The frog was not present and had said nothing. The travelling drake proposed the question be held open “until a full season has passed without incident.” It was deferred.
Item the sixth: the Junior Member’s records-review motion, carried forward from the eighth, where it was minuted. The Junior Member, with visible restraint, asked for a vote. The Clerk said a vote wanted a quorum, that attendance was “borderline,” and that the motion could instead be carried forward with a recommendation to vote. The Junior Member took the alternative. A soft honk went up from the reeds, this paper’s own, and nobody minded it.
Item the seventh: the lily pad vacancy, submitted by the travelling drake for “interested parties at the upper bend.” He proposed the Subcommittee formally recognise the central pad’s vacancy and weigh a successor. The Clerk observed that the lily pads were not, so far as he knew, the Subcommittee’s business at all. The matter was deferred, pending clarification of whose business it was.
The session closed at the customary hour (ish). The Clerk asked that future submissions come in no later than Thursday, and the pebble sat on the table where it had sat all afternoon, the one item nobody had managed to move.