Tuesday, 9 January 2007

After being out of the office Friday and Monday, it was a bit like returning from leave today and as ever the day began with a struggle to catch up with correspondence. I didn’t make much of an impact.

At 10:00 I had a preliminary review meeting with Anne our funding advisor. Very good.

Something is Not Quite Right

Then I took a telephone call from a lady who is at the Berry Grove school in north Watford setting up a Children’s Centre. She wanted some advice on charity status etc. Creating the Children’s Centres is undoubtedly A Good Thing as these services need some focal point in each community.

Allowing each community to adopt its own form of governance for its Children’s Centre raises questions about consistency and so on but is also, generally speaking, A Good Thing – a practical compromise between central government and local control.

But something is Not Quite Right: the overwhelming focus on services can obscure the fact that there are profound differences between the state sector, the private sector and the voluntary sector. And it makes a Big Difference whether a service is provided by a charity, a school, a local authority, a government department or a private company. And it is dangerous to think otherwise.

Tackling Odds and Ends

Next, Sue asked me about legal advice for the Watford Refugee Project. Their clients sometimes need legal advice but resources at Watford CAB are stretched to breaking point and CAB cannot earmark resources for use by just one group. We couldn’t help with the resource issues, but Sue was able to direct the project to a number of national websites and helplines offering specialist services.

Next, I met with Vanessa to talk about support for another local group whose trustees are coming to WCVS on Thursday for a workshop on strategic planning.

Then I sorted out a date for the upgrade of our telephone system, had a preliminary review meeting with Sue, spoke with Maria (who I had not seen since before xmas) and then finished the day desperately trying to keep a lid on the correspondence that is always simmering away in my in-tray but now looks set to boil over. I left the office around 6:00 keen to get home and relax.

Back Home

But I can't relax at home. Our house is not our own. Downstairs, our furniture is stored everywhere covered in dust sheets and there is barely room to move. Upstairs, everything is covered in a thin layer of fine dust. Everything is disrupted and we are all touchy. Poor Aged Ken feels it the most: his usual perches are all gone and at night he wanders around the house mewing plaintively. He doesn't understand.

I managed to complete reading a compendium of comic novels by Eric Sykes. As a comic performer and writer, Eric Sykes is to often overlooked - or perhaps overshadowed by his greater contemporaries: his output was prodigious and he secured his place in history early on as co-writer of the Goon Shows. But I stuck with his three novels more from affection than for any other reason.