Tuesday, 4 March 2008

Awards

I learned this morning that the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium has been accepted by Capacitybulders as “fit for purpose”. Congratulations all round. Of course, none of us really doubted it but there is always a nagging undefinable fear that deadlines will slip and queries get raised. It’s good to have this decision. Now we just have to wait another month to see which of our projects they will fund.

I also received news that Watford FC has been voted “Community Club of the Year” by their Football League peers. Congratulations all round.

Collaboration

After this bright start, it was a long day writing up the Staff Annual Reviews. At the end of the day, Vanessa (Development and Training Officer) and I visited neighbouring Three Rivers CVS to discuss opportunities for further collaboration. We agreed to continue the joint training programme and to launch a trustees network together.

Recent reading

My reading has been a bit Hit and Miss lately. Peter Biddlecombe’s Travels with my Briefcase, an account of his experiences travelling around the world as a businessman, was really neither here nor there.

I began Mark Powers’s authoritative biography Mark Twain but I can’t say whether it was any good as I was soon defeated by the tiny weeny typeface.

Then I part-read the Oxford Dictionary of Saints - patriotically reading about British saints and only occasionally savouring the foreign fare. Naturally there was no genuine evidence of miracles but the history was interesting and I learned that St Audrey and St Ethelreda are one and the same, which was useful.

Laughing Gas was a typical Wodehousian frolic and was very enjoyable. This was followed by The Custom of the Sea, an imagined account of an infamous Victorian shipwreck including a case of “survival cannabalism”. With all due respect to author Neil Hanson, I could not warm to his subject matter and I despise “imagined” histories of this kind. The book was full of historical background and contemporary references and accounts but what could I believe? Either a thing is Fact or it’s Fiction and no-one benefits by blurring the distinction.

I am now on much happier ground reading Bevis Hillier’s biography Young Betjeman.