Wednesday, 17 January 2007

Another long day

Again I arrived about 7:00, but this time there was no Anne to keep me supplied with tea. I resorted to the extreme measure of making a cup for myself, and at 9:00 I even made more cups for those people who had already arrived at the office. I did warn people it may be the only cup they get out of me this year.

The post bought Third Sector magazine, including an article emphasising the strengths of the Compact in Hertfordshire (after last year absurdly naming the county as the least Compact-friendly in the country). I was pleased and amused that the article was illustrated with a photo I had provided of Watford CVS's 3oth anniversary celebration cake.

I had a few hours writing up the staff reviews and preparing for the trustees meeting and then spent an hour with Anne (Funding Advisor) concluding her staff review (three completed, six to go).

At 12:00, I was joined by Sarah and Kim from WBC to talk through WCVS’s funding and targets for the coming year. Everything seemed to go very well and of course we took the opportunity to catch up on lots of other ongoing discussions. Most congenial and business-like.

After this, I had to offer my apologies for the 2:00 meeting of the Disability Forum so I could make some serious progress on papers for the forthcoming trustees meeting.

Preparing for meetings shouldn’t be too much of a problem, but at present there are so many changes and no standard formats for things. Starting work at around 2:30, I accomplished very little in the afternoon other than designing a format for the financial report.

At 5:30 I had to spend some time on the database we are producing of Watford’s voluntary groups. Sha-Lee has made great progress but then reached an impasse and needed help sorting out the Watford groups from those outside Watford, and sorting out the genuine voluntary groups from those that just sound like voluntary groups but are actually part of the statutory or commercial sector. Over a period of about three hours, I whittled down our list of 480 groups to about 380 groups. And I spent an hour or so on the telephone to the wonderful people who run Watford's Scout groups. Thank-you Ian and Cynthia, it was a pleasure to talk. So around 8:30, I finally started serious work on preparing the papers for the trustees meeting.

I left the office about midnight. At least I didn’t get caught in the traffic going home. Jackie had retired but had left out a very tasty hotpot (God I love this woman!) which I ate while I finished reading Ian Sansom’s The Case of the Missing Books: A Mobile Library Mystery. Quite jolly. And so to sleep.