Tuesday, 9 September 2008

I started this morning at Hatfield Fire Station for a meeting of the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium which faces some tough challenges: core funding is reduced, project funding is reduced, and many members are now only partially engaged (unsurprisingly as no-one is paid for being engaged, of course). The Consortium will survive because at its heart is a solid group of a dozen or so individuals fully committed to working in partnership to support voluntary groups to fight poverty and inequality - but we need to find the right structure for things to move forward.

After the meeting, I talked with the new Director of Three Rivers CVS. Our CVSs have been working to launch a Trustee Network for Watford and Three Rivers. We have arranged the speaker (the ever popular Alan Clarkin from the Charity Commission) and Three Rivers CVS have arranged the venue. But with the change of Director at Three Rivers CVS they have not yet actually promoted the event to their members. Jeanette (brand new in post) is worried that it is now too late for her to start promoting an event that takes place in less than a month and she wants to withdraw from the initiative. It's not what I wanted to hear, but what can I do?

Back in Watford, I fussed over last minute arrangements for tomorrow’s AGM and trustees meeting.

Recent reading (I know you're interested)

A Book of Common Birds (a 1940 book by Edmund Sanders) contained two startling facts: Great Tits will kill any smaller bird he can master and then feast on its brains and when Starlings have used the same wood for two or three years their droppings make it so filthy that not even a fox will enter it and all the trees die. Were birds really so badly behaved in the 1940s? Or was it all part of some complex propaganda initiative to trick the Nazis?

PG Wodehouse’s Pigs have Wings was completely predictable and completely enjoyable.

Forgotten English by Jeffrey Kacirk was written for Americans and Kacirk displayed only a tenuous grasp of etymology. But The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers was a pedant’s joy.