Wednesday, 28 February 2007

Saud will soon be our new Connexions Personal Advisor. This morning I finally agreed a start date with him after waiting more than six months for his disclosure form the Criminal Records Bureau. Six months! Thank goodness he wasn't going to be doing anything important like supporting disadvantaged Muslim youth through their schooling.

Later in the morning, I installed the Volbase client on my PC and started looking at the data sets and configuration options, responded to some queries raised by our members, and met with Steve from the Watford Credit Union who will soon be our new neighbours.

In the evening I attended an excellent and thought provoking presentation on Watford's economic, social and envionmental performance. The statistics were a little bit "Heath Robinson" in places, but were telling nonetheless: poor health, pockets of deprivation, culturally diverse, many affinities with outer London boroughs.

Most worryingly, the statistics suggested that Watford is missing out on the Knowledge Economy burgeoning all around it.

Reading - I know you're interested

I completed reading my 1940 collection of British Political speeches and essays and then tackled Jon Ronson's Them (a rather unsatisfactory exploration of "extremists" throughout the world).

I quickly followed this with And Another Thing by Jeremy Clarkson - I suspect that a large proportion of his books are bought by people buying them as presents. And I am now reading the much more satisfactory Prize of all the Oceans by Glyn Williams - a seriously good account of Commodore Anson's extraordinary 1740 voyage around the world.