Wednesday’s session of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee convened at the usual hour. The Clerk noted at the opening a quorum of “the customary sufficiency, with three additional observers” present. Second on the agenda were the lights at the upper bend. They had already come up at the session of the twenty-ninth of last month and been deferred there pending further information. Further information had since arrived, in the modest quantity the upper bend reliably produces.
The Clerk read the present state of the file. Three sightings are now formally recorded. The first was the fishing party of mallards, whose evening sighting fell on the twenty-second of July. The second was a drake of no particular acquaintance, on the evening of the thirtieth. The third went onto the file Monday morning, from a passing drake who had reason to be at the upper margin on the third instant and reported what he had seen on his way back. The three accounts agree on the main feature, three lights, small, steady, and disagree, in minor particulars, on how many minutes the lights stayed visible. The Clerk summarised each. The Subcommittee was invited to consider.
The Junior Member rose at the customary point and tabled a motion. The Subcommittee should send one of its members to the upper bend, on a future evening to be fixed, for an independent observation, and the member’s report should come to the next regular session. The motion was moved in terms I found both more cautious and more concrete than his earlier ones. He asked the Subcommittee to note that it proposed no view on the nature of the lights, only on the propriety of having a look.
The motion was taken up. A short discussion followed. The Clerk said, with what I have come to recognise as his post-special-session candour, that the proposal was reasonable in form, but that the Subcommittee should bear in mind the upper bend is, on the whole, not its customary territory. The Cultural Subcommittee’s acting chair, attending by invitation, was asked whether the Cultural Subcommittee had scheduled any activity at the upper bend in recent or coming weeks. He replied that it had not, and added, in a tone close to mild puzzlement, that it had scheduled nothing at the upper bend within his memory and could not, on the spot, think of a reason to. The Travelling Drake, at the rear of the chamber on his Lammas business, was asked whether he had seen anything on his recent approaches. He had not. He offered that the upper bend has, in his opinion, always been less reliable than the rest of the pond, which the Clerk recorded under “general observations.”
The motion was put. The matter was, again, deferred. It was deferred pending the Junior Member’s revised proposal. It was deferred pending the Travelling Drake’s continued and now requested attention on his future approaches. It was deferred, the Clerk said, pending “such further developments as may, in the ordinary way, develop” hereafter. But this time the Junior Member’s motion was fully minuted, one member voting against. The dissent was recorded in the customary form, the dissenter’s identity protected in the customary way. I take the minuting to be the real development of the session. It is the first time a motion about the upper bend has carried past a general observation and into the formal record.
In other business, the Clerk of the Exchequer was at the back of the chamber, in the company of no one, taking no notes. He did not speak. He did not, at any point, present himself for the attendance. His presence, the Clerk said at the close, was “informally welcomed.”