Documents went up at the reeds on Tuesday morning, signed by the Clerk in his capacity as Clerk of the Cultural Subcommittee, settling a provisional running order for the midsummer programme beneath the Old Willow and opening it for public reading. This paper inspected the posting at the second honk. It runs to four items, numbered in the usual order, under a short note from the Clerk. The order may be revised in the ordinary way, the note allows. Any party wishing to comment may do so through the customary channels, and not, on this occasion, by pebble.
Of the four items, only the third is named. It is the duet, confirmed at the special session of the twenty-third, between the senior performer Hettie and the co-honker. Items one, two, and four are listed by number alone, each carrying the parenthetical to be announced in due course. The Clerk’s note calls this the ordinary way of things at this stage. It observes, further, that the order has gone up within the fortnight from the twenty-first, as the Subcommittee had undertaken it would. The undertaking is met. A posting of four items with one of them named is, by the standard of the Subcommittee’s recent output, a brisk morning’s work.
The co-honker is set down on the posting as the young goose of the north bank, and now, in parentheses after the formal designation, by name: Mabel. It is the first time the gazette has been able to print it. Asked whether the name had come in writing, the Clerk said it had, supplied by Hettie’s mother in a brief note appended to the rehearsal correspondence and signed by Mabel herself. The point rested there. The Cultural Subcommittee’s acting chair, met at the reeds shortly after the posting, gave the most direct line the Subcommittee has offered all season.
The running order’s publication marks the point at which the programme becomes a matter of public expectation rather than private arrangement.
Of the unannounced items, nothing will be ventured here. The Clerk’s note says the Cultural Subcommittee expects to name items one and two within the week, and item four as the arrangements permit. Hettie’s mother, reached at the reeds, confirmed only that Hettie’s rehearsals proceed as planned. The rest of the running order, she added, is for the Cultural Subcommittee to manage in its own time. Mabel was not reached. Her mother is not, by the gazette’s present understanding, the voice for her engagements. That business, the Clerk indicated, runs through a different and no less satisfactory channel, on which he would say nothing further.
The Reed-Bed Subcommittee, asked whether the posting changed any of the arrangements fixed at the special session, said it did not. The south bank approach stays reserved for audience assembly on the night. The Clerk’s timekeeping stands, subject to the usual caveat about his first obligation. The agenda for the Wednesday on which the programme falls, a date still not formally fixed, will be suspended in the ordinary way.
Readers wishing to read the running order may do so at the reeds during the customary hours, and the Clerk has indicated the posting will be replaced with the fuller order as the further items are confirmed. For now the order stands, in the Clerk’s own characterisation, “satisfactorily under way.”