Thursday, 11 January 2007

The traffic was again heavy this morning, doubtless aggravated by the very blustery wind. The drive to Watford took me over an hour. Again.

And I’m still not smoking. I’m saving nearly £5 a day on cigarettes but I’m spending about £6 a day on chocolate.

I spent most of the morning with Sue working on a new central system for transaction processing. I adjourned this when I noticed an e-mail arrive from the Big Lottery. Our Reaching Communities bid is being assessed and our assessor must arrange a telephone interview. She offered two times but I can't do either. I telephoned her to arrange a new date.

Also I received a host of other e-mails on lots of other meetings: Who will be at this meeting? Can you check these minutes? Can you change this meeting date? Is this venue ok? Can you do a presentation? Will you forward these minutes? Can we meet at 10:30 instead of 12:00? Meetings can be very helpful. It is good to talk. But it is also important to know where to draw the line.

At 2:00 I met with Anne (Funding Advisor) for the second stage of her annual review. We talked at length about priorities for the coming year and identified three:
1. Better integrating our funding advice with our development and QA support.
2 Developing a better strategic overview of fundraising throughout Watford’s voluntary sector.
3 Developing a clearer relationship to WBC's grant programmes.

This was very fruitful. But, despite my best intentions, we overran and my 3:30 meeting with Sue (also a second stage annual review) finally began about 4:30. We talked until 6:00. Most of this was focused on internal systems. Sue has been shown huge flexibility and supreme patience: hopefully her role is now settling down.

I finally left the office about 8:00. On arriving home, there was still very little actual decorating done and the house was still in chaos. Jackie had cooked a stir fry, but we had to eat standing up in the kitchen – which we decided was slightly better than eating laying down in bed.