Tuesday, 25 September 2007

I spent the early morning dispatching some e-mails and trying to sort out my diary (which was beginning to look a little wayward).

Promptly at 10:00 we had a meeting of our accommodation working group (expertly chaired by Pam Handley) and easy agreement was reached on the next steps. This group has now met three times and to the outsider I suppose it appears there has been little progress. But from the inside, I see this group gradually positioning itself to achieve something quite exciting.

With a continued steady hand from Pam Handley, continued commitment from the various participants, and in due course appropriate political buy-in from Watford Borough Council, I think …. Well. We shall see.

Maria (our Office Co-ordinator) is one of those people who absorbs knowledge effortlessly and seems able to turn her hand to anything. After the accommodation meeting, I spent a few happy hours with her going through the post audit journals and reversing journals. Eight weeks ago, Maria had never done any bookkeeping whatsoever. Now she knows the software as well or better than I do, and easily understood the purposes of the various journals we posted.

After this, I met with Sha-Lee (our Directory and Information worker) to talk through the first draft of the new Community Directory for Watford. Sha-Lee has collated and checked all the data and produced a simple very attractive design for the Directory. Now we are at the final proof-reading stage and it should be at the printers very soon.

Before leaving the office, I responded to the consultation Delivering Quality Health Care for Hertfordshire. I made the points that the PCTs needed to have an open honest partnership with the voluntary sector properly informed by the Compact, and that voluntary transport schemes could provide a perfectly practical and cost effective solution to the transport problems faced by many of the PCT’s users.

I finally left the office about 6:30 but still had to drop off for a few visits on the way home.

Back home, worrying news from Burma led to a minor disagreement with Jackie about whether Burma had a border with China. I was wrong of course, there is a border of about 1,000 miles. She barely crowed at all. Has there ever existed a more perfect and lovely being than my dearest Jackie? I think not.