I enjoyed a very promising telephone discussion with our grants assessor at the Big Lottery Fund. She said we had “a really good project” with "very strong" outcomes defined, and that our business plan was “absolutely fantastic”. I am too cynical to enjoy this praise unreservedly and concluded that she probably says similar things to everyone. But her flattery did at least slightly sweeten the pill of having to break down our annual budgets into quarterly budgets. I passed on our assessor's compliments to Vanessa and Anne (who did so much of the work on our business plan).
Then I dealt with some of the 200 e-mails I'd received since last in the office and prepared some entries for our website.
I then spent three hours or so preparing a second draft of the ten priority project definitions agreed by the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium's development steering group. This last is probably the ugliest sentences ever rendered into English. I apologise. But I can think of no other way of stating this without writing a short essay. Trust me, that's not what you want. For more information just visit Capacitybuilders.
In the evening, I finished Balham to Bollywood, Chris England's brilliant account of filming in India.
Still exhausted from yesterday's exersions, Jackie and I opted for an early night and a companionable tilt at the Daily Telegraph crossword. We were just snuggling up when I noticed that Jackie's full mug of hot cocoa seemed somehow to be floating freely about four feet off the ground. It wasn't: it was falling freely. It hit the floor with a crash and hot cocoa erupted into the air and landed all over the floor, the rugs, the bedside tables, the pillows, the hand-stitched quilt, the valance, the bed, the curtains, the Daily Telegraph and the bemused old married couple in their 40s. It was truly spectacular. And it was another hour before we finally got to bed again.
