Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Albrecht Square ·
The Minutes of the Wistful Meeting
A year of planning committee minutes is reviewed and found free of controversy, which is the finding the reviewer cannot set down.
- filed: "at the adjournment"
- reference: "AS/MN/03"
1. This paper reviews the whole run of minutes kept by the Albrecht Square Planning Committee (Development Sub, Ordinary Meetings) for the period January to December 1987, twenty-two meetings, one void (August, no quorum), and records no procedural fault. The membership was stable throughout. The clerk was stable throughout. The minute book itself, a Volume 4 quarto, is intact, collated, and signed at each adjournment by the chair, as required.
2. The business of the committee in this period was unremarkable. Shopfront consents, a satellite dish (refused, then granted with conditions), the annual review of the waste-ground behind the square, and the standing matter of the pump room, which the committee is obliged to mention at every ordinary meeting whether or not any works are proposed, by an old clause nobody on the present committee has read fully. The clause survives. It has kept the pump room on every agenda since 1931, and it kept it there through 1987.
3. The review was conducted by reading the minutes in sequence against the notice papers and the correspondence files, and by this means the following observation arises, which is set down here because review officers are instructed to set down what they find and not what they conclude. It concerns the adjectives.
4. In January, the minutes describe the square's stairwells as "serviceable". In February, "much used". By June they are "faithful beyond what could reasonably be asked of them", and in September a stairwell is said to have "carried its share without complaint these forty years". No member is recorded as objecting to any of this language. No member is recorded as proposing it, either. The phrases enter the record between one meeting and the next the way a stain travels upward through a floorboard: evenly, without an event.
5. A check was made. The pages for the meetings in question carry no erasures, no second hands, no interleaving. The ink is consistent within each entry. The chair's initials at each foot are hers, and she was spoken to in the preparation of this review and said that the wording was hers, agreed, and what of it. She was asked who she understood herself to be describing. The answer given is minuted nowhere and this officer does not repeat it.
6. It should be said plainly that drift of tone in committee papers is common and is not, of itself, a fault. Committees grow fond of their assets; clerks grow fond of committees; adjectives accumulate. What is not common, and what this officer has not found a precedent for in eleven years of reviewing, is a drift that runs the same direction in every asset, through every month, with no counter-movement, and ends where it ends.
7. Where it ends is the final meeting of the year, the 2nd of November, adjourned at 03:33, the last ordinary business being the standing mention of the pump room. The sentence reads: "The pump room was mentioned, and the committee expressed its gratitude that the mentioning was all that was ever asked of it, and hopes, for its part, that the same will be asked of it always." The word "always" is the final word of the minute book and the last thing in the volume to have dried.
8. At the adjournment of that meeting the duty officer collected the volume for filing under this reference, as is the practice, and signed for it, and did not read it until the following week, there being no requirement to read what one only files. On reading, the officer raised no fault and requested no correction. The covering note says only that the wording is considered uncontroversial, and that the committee's year is otherwise in order.
9. It is in order. The books balance. No works were proposed, so no works can be objectionable. The pump room was mentioned twenty-two times and nothing in the record asserts that it answered, or needed to, or that anyone waited to hear. This officer has checked whether any agenda for 1988 exists in draft, and it does, and the pump room is on it, first item, in the clerk's hand, dated before she can have known she would be writing it, and the review is not empowered to say what that means.
10. The review therefore closes with the wording accepted, the volume filed, and one matter left for the reader, which the reviewer cannot discharge: a gratitude, minuted on the record, for a silence that nothing in the minute book shows anyone had promised to keep.