The Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee read the documents on Wednesday afternoon, at the hour the session always keeps, with the Subcommittee in its usual configuration around him. This, he indicated, was the last regular session before the midsummer programme, by the terms of the motion carried at the special session held on the twenty-third of May. This correspondent attended from her usual place at the eastern fringe of the reeds. The session ran a little under an hour. It produced, the Clerk said at the close, “no deferrals of substance.” The gazette records the phrase with the usual caution as to its accuracy.
The Clerk confirmed, for the public record, the three principal arrangements that the special session’s motion had occasioned. The south bank approach is reserved for audience assembly from the late afternoon of Sunday the twenty-first. Assembly will proceed from the western end inward, and the older drakes’ usual station will move, for the one evening, to a spot the older drakes themselves had named. The Clerk’s own timekeeping will be available from the first item to the last, subject to the standing understanding that his first duty is to the Reed-Bed Subcommittee. Routine agenda items are suspended until the morning of the twenty-fourth. Any matter arising during the suspension is to be filed with the Clerk’s office for the resumed session.
The Cultural Subcommittee’s acting chair attended by invitation. He confirmed that the four performers had been notified, that the running order would be posted in final form by Saturday morning, and that no further call on the Reed-Bed Subcommittee’s resources was expected. Asked whether the Cultural Subcommittee was satisfied with the state of preparations, he said it was “satisfied within the customary margin.” The Clerk recorded the phrase as given. This paper has not established the customary margin’s exact value, but notes that in the Cultural Subcommittee’s hands the phrase appears to admit a range.
The Junior Member of the Subcommittee attended in his accustomed place. He arrives there now at the end of an interval that has lifted his standing in the chamber further than the Junior Member himself seems quite to have taken in. He raised one procedural question. He asked, in terms that were brief even by the Subcommittee’s measure, whether the suspension of routine items extended to the Wednesday after the programme, the twenty-fourth being itself a Wednesday, or whether that session would convene as usual. The Clerk replied, and the reply came in a register this correspondent had not before heard him use toward the Junior Member. The Wednesday session would convene at its usual hour, in his understanding. The Junior Member would, by then, “have a number of matters to raise, which the Clerk would be pleased to see on the agenda.” The Junior Member nodded once. He did not speak further.
The remaining matters were left where the suspension left them. Drake Halford’s fifth filing is still under review. The heron question is unchanged. The sluice wall marking sits under miscellaneous observations. The pebble is in the Clerk’s keeping, pending the Clerk of the Race. The Clerk noted each in the order given and carried it to the resumed session of the twenty-fourth. The Channel Sprint deferral, reported in the bulletin of the fourteenth, was carried forward too. No further word had reached the reeds.
The session ended at its customary hour (ish). The Clerk was last seen leaving the reeds toward the willow, carrying the timepiece and a small bundle of paper this correspondent has been advised, by the standards of professional discretion, not to describe further. The willow, by all accounts, awaits him. So, it now appears, does the Wednesday after.