Friday, 19 October 2007

I woke up to Jackie gently singing “Happy Birthday” and presenting me with breakfast and tea and cards and gifts. What do you buy the man who has everything? The box set of Indiana Jones DVDs: I can’t wait.

After breakfast I drove over to Hertford to drop off our tender bid at County Hall. The bid looked rather pathetic shoved in a re-cycled envelope and done up with sellotape. It was before 8:00 am. I had been told: “just deliver it to the Rear Reception, they’ll be someone there and they’ll know what to do.” But when he finally turned up, the man at the Rear Reception had no idea what to do. Apparently each HCC department has its own procedures and systems.

Having finally been given a receipt for our tender (albeit from the wrong HCC department), I headed off to St Albans for a meeting of Herts CVS. We were meant to meet with nine CEOs and nine trustees to discuss the Herts CVS Strategic Plan. One difficulty was that this meeting arrived at the wrong time: too long after the plan was drafted but too early to introduce any elements from the Herts Infrastructure Consortium’s Strategic Plan. Another difficulty was that there was really no agreement on what we wanted from the meeting. Another difficulty was that nine-plus-nine was reduced to eight-plus-eight and then to seven-plus-seven.


As professional CEOs, this was not one of our finest moments: I fear our unpreparedness was obvious and I had not the feintest idea what contribution our facilitator was trying to make. There were one or two interesting disussions, but mostly we replicated discussions that had already taken place in Herts CVS or the Herts Infastructure Consortium. I felt slightly embarrassed that my Chair of trustees gave up a morning for the event.

In the evening, Jackie and I went out for a nice quiet romantic meal together. A truly blissful birthday evening.