It rained and drizzled all day. Looking on the bright side, I've plenty of indoor jobs to be getting on with, and it's easier to discipline myself to do them when the outdoors looks so totally uninviting. But I hope the Martagon lilies aren't going mouldy in their bags. Perhaps I should unpack them, but then they might dry out. The rain is supposed to stop by tomorrow afternoon, and Sunday is forecast to be dry, so with any luck I'll be able to simply get on and plant them. Of course if I were that worried about them I could have got on with it today, rain or no rain, but after my run of bad colds last winter I was reluctant to tempt fate crawling about in the damp.
The minutes of Wednesday's music society committee meeting were not really difficult, other than that the meeting covered all the right topics but not necessarily in the right order. I decided to sacrifice real world running order in the interests of grouping the discussion points under the headings in the agenda, in case anybody ever wanted to refer to them ever again. They probably won't. Proper minutes are a good thing to have, in case of later debate over what it was that was agreed, and I would guess are a requirement of being registered charity, but I don't believe that half the members of the committee ever do more than skim through them. When at each meeting the Chairman asks us if we agree the minutes of the last one, my reply is always that I believed them at the time when I wrote them.
The minutes secretary is potentially in a position of power. It's my version of events being laid down for future reference, ready to be whipped out sometime next year when nobody can remember exactly what anybody said the previous October. Since the music society committee is rather sensible, though, it is generally a purely theoretical power. The most contentious thing I've recorded recently is who it was that offered to provide a sandwich lunch for a ten piece visiting German orchestra, and yesterday was mostly about various people updating the rest on ticket sales, changes to the programme and possible artists for next year's season. About the most urgent thing we need to do is make sure the heating is turned on in the church for the first concert, since the verger is ill, and I scarcely got to write it was agreed (highlighted in bold type) at all.
A certain amount of lobbying goes on in committee meetings. The member who likes jazz sought to establish a jazz concert as a regular extra event, to be staged in alternate years, while the member who is keen on education did the same for young musician's concerts, but upped the stakes and sought to instate one as an annual event. The Chairman swerved giving an absolute commitment on either count, but so gracefully that you could easily have missed the fact that she hadn't actually said Yes. I didn't like to lobby for more baroque music, suspecting that it was a minority taste and one already catered for by another local society, but couldn't resist slipping in a sly hint of a suggestion when emailing the draft minutes to the Chairman for comment.
There are two issues with staging concerts as a platform for young musicians. One is the audience. Local people who are very happy to hear professional chamber groups with international careers performing conveniently on their doorsteps, saving them schlepping off to the Wigmore Hall or St John's Smith Square, are unaccountably less enthusiastic about giving up a Sunday afternoon to listen to an unknown fourteen year old, even if he has reached Grade 8 on the piano. OK, he might be the next Stephen Hough and they saw him here first, but he might not be. And the average performance slot in a young musician's concert lasts about three and a half minutes, so you need lots of them, and none of them have agents, so the Chairman has to negotiate with umpteen sets of parents and music teachers.
I have still not entirely recovered from listening to a quartet of small boys playing trombones at Dulwich College, but noblesse obliges, I shall be there, buoyed up by the thought of the Chairman's tiny scones at the cream tea afterwards.
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