The crust index at the East Bank feeding point has reached twelve to the hour. Your correspondent compiled the measurements across the working week and confirmed the figure at the third honk on Friday morning. Twelve is one above the previous peak of eleven, which this paper recorded on the thirteenth of April. It is, with what reluctance an editorial column is allowed, the highest the index has stood since the keeping of it began. Two parties confirmed the reading on their own account, one at the feeding point on Thursday, the other on Friday. Both are reliable in ordinary matters. Neither cares to dispute it.
This is the seasonal pressure first marked in this column on the twentieth, carried on at a clip that ten days ago would not have been called. On the twentieth the index stood at nine to the hour, and the available evidence read that as a summer pressure of the sort the East Bank has shown before. Nine to twelve in a single working week is harder to lay at the door of the season alone. The Subcommittee, asked on Wednesday whether it had taken the rising figure into account, said the matter was on the agenda for “such consideration as the agenda permits,” and that the Clerk was to record the figure at each session hereafter. No further position was taken.
The Clerk of the Exchequer was approached on Thursday morning, at the same office where his existence as a working officer of the pond’s economic affairs was, at last, confirmed in person on the twentieth. He was again available. He was again willing to hear the question out. He again did not have a position. He knew the figure of twelve, he said, and had taken it under consideration, and was “not yet of a mind to comment further.” He was left to keep his counsel.
The Travelling Drake comes into this. His letter on the nineteenth of April, printed in the correspondence column here, demanded “a firmer editorial line” and put conditions at near fourteen crusts to the hour at the southern approach to the East Bank. He is understood to be due back at the pond before Saturday’s Lammas observance. He will, in his usual manner, let his views be known.
The considered view of this gazette is that the present figure cannot be let to pass under the same “seasonal pressure” heading that has, in summers of a more ordinary cut, covered an index of this kind. The question will be taken up at length at Saturday’s Lammas observance, where the position arrived at on this week’s evidence will be set out, for the second time in this paper’s history.
On a separate matter, a second observation of the upper-bend lights has come in, of the kind the fishing party of mallards first reported in the bulletin of the twenty-fifth. It came from a drake of no particular acquaintance, met at the lower reeds on Friday morning. He puts three lights at the upper bend on the evening of Thursday the thirtieth, about one watch after sundown, in moderate visibility. The lights, by his account, were of the same character and configuration as those described before. The matter has gone to the Clerk and will sit among the miscellaneous observations at the next session, in the form such items get: briefly, by reference, and with no further comment for now. What the lights are, a second witness does not tell us. It only tells us there were lights again.
Two heavy matters in one edition is more than anyone would have ordered. The edition got them anyway, and so did you.