Papers lodged with the Reed-Bed Clerk’s office over Saturday morning show that the Clerk of the Exchequer has filed a brief statement on the bread index for the season. This is the same office this paper once said it suspected of having been only recently invented, as readers of the editorial of the thirteenth of April will recall. The Clerk’s quiet attendance at the back of the Subcommittee chamber all this month has, on reflection, obliged a change of view. The statement was entered on the roll of Items of Continuing Interest. Per standing practice for items so filed, it was minuted but not read aloud.
The full text, obtained from the Clerk’s filing, is reproduced here as it was lodged.
“The Office of the Exchequer, having considered the bread index across the period from the late spring through the present, observes the following: that the index has, in the period, varied within ranges this Office considers to be within the customary range; that the variation has tracked, on the available evidence, the variation of feeding patterns at the East Bank and South Shore points; that the Office is at present minded to consider no formal position on the matter; and that this Office will continue, as conditions allow, to observe.”
It was lodged in a single leaf, signed at the foot. The Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee called the hand “consistent with previous filings from the Office,” and would not be drawn much past it. Pressed on what those previous filings were, he said the question went to a matter of long practice between the offices. That practice was, as he has had occasion to say before, “cordial but procedurally distinct.” I left it there.
The statement commits the Office to no position on the questions this paper put in its editorial of the first instant. It does not touch the proposed redistribution of feeding hours. It does not touch the index itself, beyond saying the variation sits within a range the Office calls customary. It does, in a small but distinct way I think worth recording, commit the Office to keeping a watch on the matter. The closing clause, the one undertaking to go on observing as conditions allow, reads as the most active thing the Clerk of the Exchequer has, on the record, committed to anything.
The Clerk of the Exchequer was not himself at the office when the filing was made. The leaf was carried in by a party of no particular acquaintance, who set it down without a word and left with no sign of further business. The Clerk was, on a separate inquiry, unavailable for comment for the usual reason.
A run-down of the Items of Continuing Interest now standing on the Clerk’s roll, which the Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee agreed to summarise at my request, stands as follows:
- The bread-index statement of the present filing.
- Drake Halford’s seventh filing of the seventh instant, with its supplementary arithmetic.
- The Household Adjoining’s letter of the third instant, filed alongside.
- The matter of the lights at the upper bend, held pending further information.
- The wall marking at the sluice, noted under miscellaneous observations.
The roll is, the Clerk said, “of a length not inconsistent with the season.” The Subcommittee will take the matters in the usual order at its next session. The Exchequer’s statement will, by precedent, be minuted again without being read aloud.
The Office of the Exchequer is now to be taken as an office that exists. Its holder attends sessions at the back of the chamber and does not speak; is unavailable for comment when asked; and files, at intervals of his own choosing, statements that commit him to nothing in particular. Over the months of his slow arrival in these pages the gazette has come, at last, to take him at his word: that this Office will continue, as conditions allow, to observe.