Tuesday, 16 January 2007

I knew it was going to be a tough old day so I rose early and arrived at the office around 7:00. Anne appeared shortly after and fed me hot tea. Thank you, Anne.

After a few hours of catching up on correspondence and preparing new accounts procedures, I spent an hour with Helen (Volunteer Centre Co-ordinator) and we almost (but not quite) completed her annual review. There is just so much to discuss.

Watford Compact

Then I had a very productive couple of hours with Sarah (senior grants officer at Watford Borough Council) discussing a revamp for the Watford Compact and many other areas of mutual interest. We were joined by Anne and made great progress: small task-focused groups are definitely the way to get things done.

During this meeting, telephone engineers arrived to update our telephone system and we lost telephone contact for a couple of hours. Originally it was meant to be “about ten minutes”. While the telephones were down, I met briefly with several other WCVS staff and volunteers and then with Laura (Voluntary Transport Office Co-ordinator) completed her annual review: two reviews now all completed.

With the telephones back on, I finally managed to talk with HomeStart’s regional co-ordinator Pauline before her meeting about her ongoing discussions with HCC over their grant decisions. HCC get many things right, but occasionally they will take a decision that defies logic.

WCVS News and the 21st Century

Eventually, I knuckled down to edit Watford CVS News number 126. This has been published since WCVS was founded in 1972 and recently has been published quarterly. WCVS staff have been looking out for useful stories for the past month or so. Articles have been typed up. Sue has laid out the first draft. And now I need to check through and find that so many of the articles are already out of date. And most of the information we are taking time to lay out has already been available on WCVS’s website for weeks. The fact is WCVS is simply not geared up for this sort of thing.

Tradition has much to commend it. But sooner or later we must grasp the nettle and drop this quarterly mailing - it takes up so much time! We can of course post news and information to the website, and if some of our members don’t have web access we can print off a digest and send it to them.

At 8:15 pm, thirteen hours after arriving at the office, I started putting through the journal entries for our project accounts that I agreed with Sue and Vanessa a week or so ago. I finished at 9:45. The accounts are now almost completely done – just a few minor queries about the Opening Balances.

Home at last

I left about 10:00 and headed home. After a lovely meal with a patient loving Jackie, I managed to finish reading Boris Akunin’s Turkish Gambit and complete a Telegraph crossword (Jackie helped!) before we both fell asleep.

Tomorrow is another day.