Monday 6 July 2015

getting ready for the meeting

The beekeepers accounts have finally caught up with me.  There's a committee meeting tonight, and I thought I'd better prepare a proper Treasurer's report this time round, after having got away with simply telling them how much money there was in the bank at the last couple of meetings, without mentioning that the accounts were up to date to the end of March, and everything else since then was sitting in a box waiting for me to look at it.  Truth to tell, I have been saving it for a wet day, and there haven't been enough of those to go round.  And then when it did rain yesterday I spent the time messing about in the kitchen.

(The macaroons turned out all right, by the way.  I use a recipe from Nigella Lawson's How to Eat, which says to cook them at 160 Celsius but the Aga doesn't do anything from almost but not quite boiling to just below 180.  After giving them a very long time at slightly under 100 degrees in the simmer oven and finding their bases were still sticky every time I checked them, I ended up finishing them off at 180 for about five minutes, checking them every couple of minutes, because it was getting late and I needed to go to bed).

The accounts took all morning, by the time I'd managed to find the letters from the bank explaining why we hadn't completed our mandate change forms properly, and count and double count the vast collection of tea and raffle money I've been allowing to accumulate instead of banking it, because I'll need a supply of small change and five pound notes to make up floats for the Show.  The personal details form the bank requires new signatories to complete seems to me to be mostly about allowing the bank to work out what extra financial products it can sell them, and not a lot about preventing money laundering, but there you go.  I found another letter advising that we would be moved to paperless statements from mid August unless we requested otherwise, and fired off an email requesting that we stay with paper statements.

Our account must cost them money, what with processing all the membership cheques and bags of fifty pence bits we pay in and sending me statements every month, but I feel no guilt, only a vague anxiety that sooner or later they'll start charging us fees, or find an excuse to make us leave. Meanwhile I look on their provision of free banking to the beekeepers as being a small act of social atonement for fixing Libor, to go along with the multi billion dollar fines.

After lunch I thought I'd better nip round quickly with the vacuum cleaner, though it's less than a week since I vacuumed when we had company for tea, and twice in one week is more than I run to normally.  In fairness, there wasn't as much fluff as there often is and it didn't take as long as sometimes.  Mid way through I took a short break from my labours, and sat down in the study, where Our Ginger found me and twiddled round my legs while I rubbed the top of his head, eyes fixed on my computer screen.  Only when I put the laptop down to get up did I see the corpse of a small rabbit about four inches from my left foot, eyes wide open.  It must be confusing for Our Ginger as I tell him that rabbits are evil, and then when he brings me one instead of showering him with thanks and eating it, I shriek and hastily leave the room.  The Systems Administrator was kind enough to come and put it outside.

Addendum  About the coleslaw on the SA's Waitrose offers list.  I thought afterwards it sounded pretty odd for anybody to pick coleslaw as one of the ten grocery items they would like a regular twenty per cent discount on.  Coleslaw is not that expensive, and we don't eat that much of it, but the list of items to choose from was restrictive and most of the things we buy almost every time we go to Waitrose weren't on it.  Milk, tins of cat food, loo roll, staples we really do buy regularly weren't included, and many other things that we buy often weren't on it either, so there was cheddar cheese, but not our preferred choice of cheshire.

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