Tuesdays in this stretch of the summer are not, on the evidence of past weeks, the days the pond does its principal business. The Subcommittee meets, when it meets, on Wednesdays (ish). The cultural calendar is on its post-programme breathing period. The Channel Sprint has lately been re-run and will not, in the foreseeable, be re-run again. So Tuesdays go to the ordinary motions of the bank, and the reporter spent the better part of this one at the south bank, in the manner of a paper too lately busy with weighty matter to insist on producing any now.
Drake Halford, of the east shore, was at his usual station shortly after the second honk, looking over a small parcel of reeds. The inspection had to do, possibly, with the question of his household’s seasonal allocation, and possibly with no such question at all. He gave no sign he wished to be approached. He had, at the time of writing, lodged nothing further at the Clerk’s office. The gazette sets that down as one of the week’s quieter facts.
The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice was at the sluice gate at intervals through the morning, working what has by now become recognisable as the daily round. She took her readings. She wrote in her notebook. She examined the lower hinge of the gate at some length, in a way that suggested the hinge was on her mind again. The Warden has not visited the sluice in the period under report. The Deputy is, and the gazette thinks this worth saying plainly, the bird to whom the sluice’s matters now in practice repair.
The long-resident frog of the southern waters was at his usual station beneath the willows, and not alone. The smaller frog seen in his company off and on since the morning after the midsummer programme, the second frog, as he has had occasion to be called, was in evidence again. He kept a small remove from the long-resident frog, in what the reporter takes, with the appropriate hedging, for an attitude of attentive watching. What passes between the two the long-resident frog has not vouchsafed, and there is nothing on it to report beyond the watching itself. No earlier report settled the question, and this one does not pretend to. The second frog is, on the present count, increasingly visible at the willow’s edge. He is also markedly less inclined than at first to go under when the reporter approaches.
The pondweed at the willow’s edge is in the condition the season’s pondweed usually shows. The light is, by the older drakes’ standard, acceptable. The dabchicks of the west pier have not, in the period under report, issued a statement. The heron is at the west pier, in the position it took up some weeks back, and has not moved.
This is the kind of dispatch the gazette’s readers have lately come to know: nothing of immediate consequence to report, the principal parties at their stations, the season turning over slowly with the air of a thing that does not mean to be hurried. Some weeks the news is the absence of news, and the pond, this Tuesday, was content to be exactly that.