The Reed-Bed Subcommittee met at the reeds on Wednesday afternoon, the last full session of the gazette’s summer. The Clerk afterward called the proceedings, in a private word I pass on without attaching his name to it, consistent with the season. The agenda was small. The session ran short of the hour. Several matters of standing interest came up. None was settled.
First, the Cultural Subcommittee’s proposal that an autumn programme be put on in the longer October evenings. Advanced now for the third time at a regular Wednesday session, and for the second time with a small written submission attached, it was approved in principle by acclamation. The Clerk, wearing his Cultural Subcommittee hat, will be back in October, and the particulars can be looked for then. Of the performers, Mabel of the north bank, whose availability had been sounded out in advance, has let it be known through the Clerk that she is available for consideration, terms to be settled as a future engagement requires. Hettie’s mother has indicated, by the same channel, that Hettie is not available for anything more before the year is out. Both replies are recorded here in the spirit they were offered.
The lights at the upper bend came next. The matter sat on the agenda at the preceding session of the twelfth and had been held over for further information. The Junior Member, asked by the Clerk to give the position, did it with a brevity I admired. The lights had been reported for the evenings of the twenty-second of July, the thirtieth of July, the third of August, and the thirteenth, and on every clear night since by whoever was about to see them. No party, on any night, had been able to settle on an explanation. No party had been able to settle on ruling one out. The matter, in the Junior Member’s view, was one the Subcommittee should go on recording and not try to resolve. The Clerk thanked him. The matter was deferred.
The sluice wall marking, which has sat on the agenda at every regular Wednesday session most of this summer, was deferred without a word said over it. The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice’s third conditions report, tabled back at the session of the twenty-second of July and held over since, was deferred. The Subcommittee did not, this time, take up the question of who, in the present circumstances, ought properly to be handling the routine business of the sluice office.
The Junior Member, his summary done, then tabled a motion of his own, the fourth he has brought this season: a small reform of the form in which deferrals are minuted. It was taken up. It was deferred by acclamation. One member of the body has now, on the record, dissented on three separate motions. They are the records-review motion of the twenty-third of May, the motion to send an independent observer of the fifth of August, and this procedural reform. He dissented again on this one, in the same single syllable I have more than once failed to catch well enough to set down. The Clerk was asked by no one to clarify it, and did not. Over the season the dissenter has grown, as far as the records carry it, into a figure of some weight. The gazette will venture one thing more. The figure of some weight has, on the records, no name at all.
The Channel Sprint result of the eighth of July was formally entered. The pebble, as a formality, was noted as in its owner’s keeping. Drake Halford’s seventh filing, which stands in the register of Items of Continuing Interest beside the Household Adjoining’s letter on the bread arithmetic, was noted and carried forward to be taken up with whatever Drake Halford sends next. The Clerk of the Exchequer was not in attendance; whether he ought to attend future sessions was, in the Clerk’s settled manner, recorded as a thing on which the Subcommittee had no view.
The session shut with nothing more before it. The Clerk, finishing his minute, said the gazette would be furnished in the usual way with a record of what had been recorded. Which, the season being what it is, was a record of a great many things put off until later.