The Committee and the Kitchen
The village hall kitchen has needed replacing since about 2009, and for eleven of those years the committee agreed that something would have to be done, which is not at all the same as doing it. Every March somebody would raise it, everybody would nod, and the item would go into the minutes under Any Other Business, where items go to die. I sat on that committee for four of those years and I nodded along with everyone else.
What changed was the flood. When a pipe went in the January before last and took the floor out with it, the writing was on the wall for the old units, and even Ronnie, who had sat on the fence about the kitchen for a decade, allowed that patching it up a fourth time would be throwing good money after bad.
The money was the difficulty. When I asked at the April meeting what we would do if the grant fell through, the chair said we would cross that bridge when we came to it, and moved straight on to the noticeboard. The question is not in the minutes for that meeting. He caught me by the door afterwards and asked, very pleasantly, whether I would mind letting him handle the funding side.
The grant did fall through, in November, and we found out because Ronnie opened the letter by mistake. There was a meeting after that at which several people cleared the air, in the sense that they said out loud what they had been saying in the car park for a year. I put my foot in it early on by mentioning the minutes. The kitchen went in eventually, in the spring, out of the reserve fund, and nobody has drawn a line under any of it — but the ovens work, and last month the hall did three hundred lunches for the over-sixties without anybody boiling a kettle in the corridor.
Glossary
- Any Other Business
- — the last item on a formal agenda, kept for anything nobody put on it
- sit on the fence
- — refuse to come down on either side of a question
- throw good money after bad
- — spend more on something that has already failed
- the reserve fund
- — money an organisation keeps back for emergencies rather than for plans