Friday, 16 March 2007

A busy day

I arrived at about 7:00 am on Friday morning and soon managed to plough through some of the many outstanding e-mails. I knew it was going to be a tough day because Anne was due to be off all day, and Sue was off all morning (both taking up their remaining annual leave), while Helen was off at a conference. Then by 9:15 two other members of staff had called in sick and a normally tough day suddenly looked very hard indeed.

Thankfully, our bookkeeper Priti arrived at 10:00 to offer some support. But Priti only added to my feelings of abandonment by handing in four weeks notice. She wasn't to know. And she was very nice about it (she now has work much closer to her Middlesex home) and I am pleased for her.

Of course we all got through the day: our wonderful volunteers filled in the gaps, and Sue arrived at lunchtime to take over and allow me to concentrate on my own selfish pursuits.

Between all this, I spent some time showing one of our volunteers how to update our website.

I also spent time on the telephone talking to an elderly lady who thought she had a large sum of money to donate to a local charity. By the time I’d worked out that she owed the money in tax, I was seriously worried about how isolated she was and about how vulnerable she might be to more predatory strangers. I promised to send her information on volunteering.

I also met with Allan Hall of the Watford Bowls Club to talk about car-parking at Cassiobury Park. And in the afternoon I had a good meeting with our three Connexions Personal Advisors: Saud, Farzana and Des.

Relief

When I got home around 7:00 pm, Jackie and I decided (without much enthusiasm) to watch Comic Relief on the BBC. This turned out to be a real treat – far and away the best I can remember. The only bad thing was the "official song" - two girls' groups absolutely slaughtered Walk This Way with no discernible humour or irony: they lured it down an alleyway, they taunted it, they clubbed it to the ground, they tortured it, killed it, buried it deep deep down and danced miserably on its forsaken grave. And it was never a great song to start with.

Otherwise, everything seemed absolutely spot on. The short reports were all superb, and among many other highlights I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) was hugely enjoyable. Breaking the £40 million barrier was just reward for their efforts. Although by that time I was tucked up in bed utterly exhausted.