Back at its Wednesday hour sat the Reed-Bed Subcommittee, holding its first regular session since the special session held on the twenty-third of last month set routine business aside for the run of the midsummer programme’s preparations. Routine has its place again. The Clerk opened on the customary note that the day’s agenda ran to a manageable length on the present showing. For once the older drakes in the back reeds let that pass.
First on the list stood the heron. Marked “unchanged” at the special session after the bird’s return to the west pier on the twentieth of last month, it had been carried forward to the present session. The Clerk read it into the record. Before the Subcommittee lay one question: whether the resident-in-absentia designation, in force since the twentieth of April, might be closed provisionally, the bird having come back and sitting now, by reliable observation, in the very place it had been called absent from.
Short the discussion ran, and arrived nowhere, and the nowhere it arrived at did the Subcommittee more credit than its usual one. The Junior Member put it that no closure should go forward without a word from the parties on the west pier it touched most nearly. Three of those there were, and each carried the same difficulty. The family of dabchicks had not filed on this occasion. The fish have not filed on any occasion. A second member, not minuted, slipped in that the heron had not filed either. Pressed for guidance, the Clerk said what the Clerk says: that the Subcommittee’s practice, where every principal party to a question declines in its several ways to be heard, the dabchicks by silence and the fish by their nature and the heron by standing on the pier and offering nothing, is to hold the question over until one or more of them have been heard. The matter was deferred by acclamation, in the form the gazette has long since stopped expecting otherwise.
Under the second item the Junior Member laid down a procedural note. He took pains to call it a note and not a motion, a distinction this paper records. It asked whether the Subcommittee’s deferral count for the season had ever been formally tallied, and failing that, whether the Clerk might run one up at his convenience. The note was received. The Clerk said he carried the tally in his head, to a reasonable degree of accuracy, and would gladly set it on paper the day the Subcommittee held a paper version preferable to the present one. That the Junior Member took. The note was deferred for further consideration.
In other business: Drake Halford’s fifth filing was again recorded as under review, no further action. The coot’s pebble was noted as remaining in the Clerk’s keeping. The Channel Sprint rematch was carried forward to the next moon at which the Clerk of the Race might attend, conditions allowing. The marking on the sluice wall was noted under miscellaneous observations. The Deputy’s request for a photographic record was noted as pending. The Deputy’s conditions report of the previous day was tabled for a future session. The session closed at the third honk, a quarter-hour early on recent sessions, which the Clerk called a small improvement in the present circumstances.
This paper records the meeting as it found it. The Junior Member, on his way out, traded a brief and wholly unrecorded word with the Clerk. Discouraged he did not look. The heron question stays open. So does the count, so does the rematch, so does the wall. Every one the Subcommittee deferred, and on this occasion it was right to. A body that defers with nothing to go on is doing the only honest thing a body can do. The habit shows on the other days, when the deferral comes easy and there was everything to go on. Wednesday was not one of those days.