Back to the customary hour on Wednesday afternoon came the Reed-Bed Subcommittee, the special arrangements of recent weeks having run their course. The agenda was no longer held back for the midsummer programme. The cultural aftermath had stopped shortening it. Gone too was the quiet shuffle around the Channel Sprint of the eighth. Four substantive items stood on the agenda. The Clerk undertook to dispose of each as it deserved, and did, which is to say he deferred all four.
First up: the heron at the west pier. On a motion carried forward from the session of the third of last month, the Subcommittee was once more pressed to shut the matter “provisionally” on the strength of the bird’s continued residence. Back to deferral it went. The family of dabchicks had lodged nothing since the statement of the eleventh, and so the heron question was deferred for the fifth time this season.
Then the rest, briskly. Drake Halford’s census: the fifth filing still under review, a sixth understood by the Clerk’s office to be in preparation, the comparison of first and later filings reckoned unadvanceable until it lands, and so put off to whatever session the sixth should occasion. Drake Halford did not attend. The marking on the sluice wall, photographed by the Deputy on the twenty-sixth of last month: kept under watch, the watch to go on. The coot’s category formalisation, raised in his letter printed here on the thirteenth: weighed by the Clerk and called “a question of standing rather than of fact,” and “more conveniently determined by the office which adjudicates than by the office which records,” and so handed back to the Clerk of the Race. Three items, three deferrals, the better part of ten minutes.
Which left the one piece of afternoon business that turned the Subcommittee to face itself.
Asked at the close whether he wished to comment on the four resolutions, the Junior Member said he did not care, on this occasion, to address the substance. His one question came with the kind of formality this paper has learned to read from him as procedure rather than rhetoric: whether the Clerk’s count of the season’s deferrals had reached any figure the Clerk cared to give out. The Clerk paused for what the reporter clocked at two breaths. Then he granted that the count lay within his reach in a general way but not down to the unit, the season having thrown up a number of borderline instances in which a deferral and a postponement and a holding-over sat, on the strict question of tallying, too close to be sorted one from another, so that any figure he named would lean toward a false precision he would rather not supply. The count was, he said, “in the appropriate range.” He would not, on the present occasion, go finer than that.
The Junior Member took the answer and let it lie.
The session was, by the Clerk’s customary phrase, “satisfactorily concluded.” The next sits in the customary place on the customary day, conditions allowing. Asked in the end to work one sum, the body deferred the sum.