Friday, 12 January 2007

I began the day with more frantic efforts to catch up with correspondence and then I plunged into a review meeting with Vanessa, our Development and Training Officer. Vanessa is passionate about the voluntary sector adn about Watford, and both would be much poorer without her. We had a very productive meeting but we've had to schedule a third date to complete the review.

Next I had a preliminary review meeting with bookkeeper Priti, and at 12:00 I met with Pam (WCVS’s Chair of Trustees) for my own supervision meeting. We talked through the agenda for the forthcoming trustees meeting (1 February) and about the importance of the 31 January meeting of the Voluntary Sector Alliance. WCVS’s Strategic Plan depends in part on local voluntary groups contributing to strategic developments. 31 January will show how realistic this is.

Steph has confirmed that I am the new chair of the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium: I do hope it will be fun.

In the afternoon, I met with our Connexions workers Des and Farzana, sorted out some network problems, and caught up with some more correspondence. I also had a long overdue chat with Andrew - he is the HCC man behind the Herts Compact and is exactly the sort of chap you would want in this role. We had a long discussion about Compact and Herts VCS issues, and I took the opportunity to raise with him the problems being encountered by HomeStart in Hertfordshire.

Late in the day, I took a telephone call from my brother Jez who told me that our Dad had suffered a bad fall and had spent most of the previous night at the hospital with our Mum. When they returned home in the morning, he had fallen again, and again been admitted to hospital, where he was sleeping. On Jez’s advice I didn’t visit Friday night.

One arriving home, our living room redecorations still weren’t complete. The decorator had left promising Jackie he would return Saturday morning. Jackie and I ate out.