Eclipse time

Yesterday, I had to stay in and miss going to St John's for the Eucharist so that a handyman could take a look at our oven door and see if the problem we have is fixable. It turns out a roller catch that keeps the door closed is broken, and needs replacement. It's easy enough to order on-line, but installing it is tricky as it involves dismantling the front of the oven first. It's no longer the kind of thing I can tackle as my rheumaticky hands don't function with enough sensitivity to hold on to small things or turn tight screws any longer. I understand well the meaning of the phrase at the end of Psalm 137 where in one translation the poet says "If I forget you O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its skill." 

On my afternoon walk in the park today, I saw for the first time in a couple of years a family of long tailed tits foraging on the bare branches of the avenue of trees leading down to Blackweir Bridge. I only got one photo worth keeping. The little things move so fast. In Bute Park, I saw a Jay foraging on a tree trunk way above me, and got several photos, the best of this bird I've ever got. I noticed that the daffodil shoots which first appeared after Christmas are acquiring heads, and may flower before the end of this month, a lot earlier than normal in such a mild winter. It's been 8-10 degree for weeks except for the occasional day near freezing. 

Almost at the end of my walk I met briefly with Ashley and Julie at Riverside surgery where he was collecting medication. RadioNet business has altogether ceased now and winding up the company formally has started, thankfully without debts. All that remains is to complete the clearance of the office prior to surrender and dispose of radio assets, then by the end of next month it will be all over,  apart from submitting closing accounts, almost eleven years since the service first launched. I believe we served the city centre very well indeed in that time, but our best efforts were eclipsed by self interested political gamesmanship, rather than by a genuine concern to maintain highest standards of service. Nobody will thank us for what we achieved so consistently for so long. Amnesia is rampant the business world, which is why so few lessons are learned when mistakes are made or con-tricks succeed.

Walking home from our meeting, I saw the January Full Moon, aka Wolf Moon above the rooftops in a cloudless sky. A wonderful sight. There's an eclipse of the moon tonight, a special moment in the lunar year, when sun earth and moon are in perfect alignment and the moon is swallowed by the earth's shadow. Unfortunately there's a veil of clouds tonight, so the visual effect of the dimming of the moon's light by the earth's shadow won't be obvious. Stymied again by the weather.

I sent my euro PTO application by email this afternoon. Next I must obtain the Spanish police check certificate to add to the process. My Llandaff PTO on CRB check runs out in April, so I have asked to be sent application form for this one as well, rather than wait to receive a notification. Next thing after that will be a passport application. Not that I want a new blue post brexit one, but mine runs out in September this year, and the chances are that I'll be away as the expiry date approaches, making things that much more fraught if there are delays, which seems inevitable with such a major change in view. And there's the International Driving Permit to obtain also. Sad and sorry things in my life.

A glorious, but also fateful day

I celebrated the All Saints Day Eucharist at St John's for a different dozen people this morning, and Emma sat in the congregation, until she had to leave, as she was being picked up and taken to a conduct a funeral service just after. 

Ashley called at the church at the end of the service and we walked and talked together. He said that he'd only received formal official notification in a letter received at the the Motorpoint Arena reception desk yesterday morning, stating that as of today, South Wales Police are no longer going to be responding to calls from RadioNet users but answering calls exclusively from the commercial radio system backed by 'For Cardiff' since the breakdown in relationships between Cardiff BCRP Board and its Chairman and Crime Manager, despite previous Council and Police undertakings to the contrary.

Some of the top people running 'For Cardiff' are ex-cops. They were only willing to hear the account of the breakdown given to them by fellow ex-cops. There's been amazing indifference about this on the part of Council officers, to whom it was reported, when a formal complaint was made. So much political time and energy was expended in launching the Cardiff Business Improvement District scheme that spawned 'For Cardiff', that investigating the conduct of 'For Cardiff' management so soon after its launch would have been highly embarrassing, given that continued use of RadioNet, was endorsed as an existing asset available to the project at an earlier stage. 

The Police claim not to prefer one radio system over another and earlier gave an undertaking to respond to calls from both radio systems,  but reality tells a different story. 'Operational reasons' or 'lack of resources', can always be used and there's no obligation to account publicly for this change of decision. It would be a different matter if Cardiff Business Safe had launched a civil court action against all parties involved, but as a voluntary not for profit organisation, no funds held in reserve were ever set aside for litigation, only for outlay on the radio system in the event of a breakdown. 

There's always the possibility of trial in the court of public opinion via social media of course, but I doubt there's much interest in these issues out there on anybody's part. It would only ever come out if a major catastrophe or breakdown in public security involving secure communications failure occurred in the city. Then it would only be part of the inevitable blame game achieving nothing.

For ten years Cardiff Business Safe did its utmost to provide the best quality of service and equipment  to the city centre through RadioNet. Now this comes to an end. Let's hope all those who promoted this initiative won't live to regret it and have their reputations damaged, their trust and goodwill undermined behind the scenes, in the way that of Cardiff Business Safe was dealt with.

To cheer myself up after this news, later in the day I went out and bought a wide angled lens for my Sony Alpha 68 DSLR camera as I promised myself I'd do once the insurance reimbursement came through.  I also bought a solid state hard drive to install Linux on and fit to one of my laptops. If I'm satisfied with it, I may convert another. The price of SSDs has come right down this past year.

Christmas puddings have been cooking all day today, two of them, one big and one small. And yes, we did get around to making our 'Stir Up' wishes a month ahead of time. Clare has also made a start on Christmas cake too, soaking a second lot of fruit, ready for cooking tomorrow. Kitchen aromas are arouse seasonal anticipation, way ahead of the wreath on the door, and candles on the table.

Unchanging things - for good and for ill

I went to St John's City Parish Church this morning to celebrate the noon Eucharist, for Canon Sarah as she needed to be away. There were only five of us, and a couple of people seated out in the nave, who didn't join in, but stayed quietly, while others came and went. It's seven and a half years since I left, but it was as if time had stood still when I looked out over the altar into the church. That's not so much about remembering the past and the people who were here with me then. It's more about that persistent sense of presence, despite the noise of people coming and going outside, or a busking saxophonist bleating romantic melodies somewhere behind the East window. It's as if the building is silently listening to the passing world, and gently drawing you in, persuading to you pay attention, despite the bubble and clamour of thoughts and feelings within yourself.  It's such a gift to the city.

I went home for lunch, then later returned to town and visited the office for a couple of hours, to work on another document for Ashley, and discuss the current state of affairs, now that a competing security radio system has been foisted on users without anyone realising what problems this is likely to cause for city security and safety, not least because of the way this has come about, to the discredit of those entrusted with the welfare of this city. It has caused me lose respect for our local government and leading public 'servants'. I have heard people who know well how other cities in Britain operate declare that behind the illusions of modernity, nothing much has changed in Cardiff in forty years. Despite pretence and public relations exercises, power is still being exercised without genuine accountability. Nowadays, for better and for worse, we have social media. When people get fed up with being used and manipulated, who knows what'll come out next?

    

The big switch-over

Tuesday, more time in the office working on the inventory database for all our new equipment, now being readies for issue over the coming weekend. Our long term equipment replacement plan has been in place for a couple of years, and it's been beneficial to us, as a not for profit enterprise that the expected 4-5 year lifespan of our radio handsets has been extended, thanks to many careful users, to seven years. The government, however, has reassigned our operating frequencies to the roll-out of smart metering, and given us replacement frequencies, so our oldest radios turn into useless scrap when the original transmitter switches over to a new one, soon to be installed. 

Fortunately, our unused stocks and newer ones issued can work on different frequencies, and this has reduced significantly the acquisition of extra replacements needed. Organising the switch-over is something we've been preparing for a long time, and thanks to good housekeeping it won't cause us a financial crisis either. The challenge will be co-ordinating the front line volunteers to get the job done without interrupting the use of the network. My small part in all this is simply keeping track of equipment stocks as they arrive and are processed, and there can be 6-7 components to unite  and register before each handset, fully charged, ready for action, is fit to issue. In an office workspace temporarily inundated with hundreds of items of packaging of different sizes, this is something of a nightmare, and quite stressful. I certainly was glad of a Chi Gung session in the evening.

Same again Wednesday, except that I went into the office early by car, before going to St German's for the midweek 'class Mass', to retrieve and replace some handsets left on charge overnight, and log them into the inventory database. After church I returned to the office and spent the next eleven hours charging and logging radios, not sure how long any of this would take, given that very few arrived fully charged and most were two thirds empty. On average, high capacity long life batteries of the kind we use take around three hours to charge. We were running eighteen chargers at a time, and by the time I left two thirds of those to be issued were charged and recorded.

Today, Gary, one of our Board members joined Julie, Ashley and I, completing the detail task of assembling all the replacement equipment for issue. In the afternoon, Gary drove Ashley around the city centre issuing equipment, instructing and making test transmissions. Thus, the great switch over began! After lunch, I had an engagement to speak to the St Augustine's Mothers' Union group in Penarth, which took me away from the action for a couple of hours. There were thirty people there, including a couple of men who are members, and during the meeting the new Vicar Fr Mark was also admitted as a branch member. Sadly I didn't get to meet him apart from an introductory handshake as he left the meeting almost as soon as I'd finished. I hope that doesn't mean I went on for too long.

Back in the office, Julie had continued the work of inventory data building in my absence, only to discover, after several hours of intermittent additions, that nothing new was being saved to the OneDrive account. She'd opened the file direct from the cloud account and it appeared to behave normally. She thought she'd saved in the routine manner when closing the program, but the time displayed in the browser version of OneDrive, was four hours earlier. The browser version is usually more reliable than the version sync'd from the computer's hard drive, which not infrequently takes time to update, even on the fastest machine in the office. 

This is not the first time we've had this kind of issue with OneDrive. I now need to do some hard thinking about an alternative. Once upon a time we used Google Drive, although its quirky dealing with documents is not an easy thing for lifelog MS Word or Excel users to get used to. But, I guess there'd be no harm in using it for uploading critical data files for storage only. I'd just need to test this out for reliability and ease of access before inflicting the change on other users. Just the sort of additional hassle we didn't need right now. By the time I got home, late for supper again, I was drained and exhausted. All this, and preparing for the Danube Cruise makes me feel my age.

But nobody can say my life is dull, can they?

   

Getting the record straight

At the St German's midweek Eucharist yesterday morning, I told the children about St Mark and how he collected stories from St Peter and others about their time with Jesus and made them into the first of the Gospels to be written. Mark probably grew up speaking Aramaic, and learning to read and write in Hebrew and Greek, I told them, and how fortunate they were to be learning Welsh as well as English in school, and for many of them to be hearing other languages spoken at home - some will learn basic Arabic to read the Qu'ran outside school hours, as well. Whether they find it a chore or not, this is a special thing about good education, that we can learn to communicate and say good things to people in their different languages. I'd so like children to appreciate the diverse environment they are part of, and learn from.

I went into the office in the afternoon and worked on an equipment inventory database format to record our newest acquisition of handsets prior to issue. It's important to get as much as possible of the recording done ahead of time, to keep track of the complex exchange and upgrade process step by step.

Thursday afternoon I started the laborious task of entering data. Just doing the first few entries reveals the limitations in design, and calls for discussion and modifications to the framework. Even before the number of data entries grows, the framework itself has to grow, as we understand more clearly our own need to record different kinds of information to help the project to progress. 

It wouldn't be all that difficult to scan this information from bar-codes on each piece of equipment, and I did some tentative experimenting with this some months ago. It's even possible to scan data into a spreadsheet of sorts, but the challenge is to configure the data received so it can easily be imported into our database. Sure you can buy scanning equipment and software packages that will do this, and deliver an inventory database, but you still have to take time learn how to use the kit, and take the risk that the database is in a proprietary format that isn't all that flexible about exporting data, or else you pay extra to do so. We simply don't have to time to invest on this, nor are we running on the volume or turnover of equipment or have numbers of staff that would make this seem a sensible worthwhile option. So the old fashioned slow steady plod of manual data acquisition will continue, so long as we are not going to be overwhelmed by the task.

Clare and I both completed our postal ballot sheets for the Welsh Assembly and Police Crime Commissioner elections, taking place next week. While we're in Spain in June there's the EU referendum. I hope the postal ballot papers arrive before we leave. For this election they were issued two weeks ahead of the date, and if this happens again they may arrive after we leave. Clare will return in time to vote, but I'll still be in Spain and unable to use mine. Such a shame if this happens, as to my mind it's one of the most important voting issues of my lifetime.

I watched the final episode of 'Line of Duty' tonight, tense and demanding watching to the end, with a fairly satisfactory conclusion in which right and justice prevail, but only after much suffering and struggle. Almost everyone involved seems at some time or another to have compromised their own integrity or told lies to cover their tracks, but in the end the truth comes out, and the courageous prevail.

There was ome impressive acting from the leading characters in the Police anti-corruption squad which gave it all a very convincing and realistic feel. To think that a twenty minute interrogation scene in one room, crammed with references to investigative detail could be so dramatically gripping, is a credit both the writers and actors. For this to be shown in the same week that the inquest into the Hillsborough Stadium tragedy revealed police corruption in the fabrication of a cover-up, blaming fans for non-existent misbehaviour, is perhaps co-incidental, but most remarkable in the way that dramatic art can sometimes reflect authentically the unhappy realities of life.

    

  

School in church

Out of the house and on my way by car to St Germans's by nine this morning to prepare to welcome the whole of Tredegarville School to church for the specially devised Way of the Cross service instead of the usual weekday Mass. It was an opportunity to tell the whole story from Palm Sunday to Easter Day in a way that involved the children. Eight of them were involved in readings, and the whole school sang cheerfully some of their favourite songs. As we got to the Easter story, the sun broke through the clouds. As Angela is still off sick, the heating wasn't switched on as early as it usually is, so the church was chilly to start with, and the children kept outdoor jackets on. A brisk pace kept us going without too much discomfort. Let's hope that it gave them more to remember than the routine service attended.

After lunch, I went into the office to meet with Ashley for a discussion with a new enquiry about radio service use. At the moment the office is like a warehouse, with boxes of new radios everywhere, as the roll out of a planned upgrade gets under way. The high quality of our operation is much more important to improve than its rate of expansion. Our motto is 'expect the unexpected', and being ready for fresh challenges is important, and quite an adventure in many ways.

Since we were mentioned honourably in a Council Scrutiny committee report earlier this month, we seem to be getting noticed a little more than hitherto, though whether that will lead anywhere interesting is anybody's guess. Although RadioNet was started to support of the work of the Business Crime Reduction Partnership of Council, Police and City Centre Retailers, it's often felt as if we were regarded like an illegitimate offspring that unwittingly exposes the embarrassing family secrets. It it really beginning to change? I hope so.

There were eight of us for tonight's Eucharist, and we had an opportunity to congratulate Hamid, who, after six months of living in a squalid hostel has been offered a place of his won to live while he waits for his asylum appeal to be heard. I heard earlier in the week that the representations I made about the judgement against him have been registered with the Home Office, quite apart from any that Cardiff's Asylum Justice voluntary advocacy scheme may have made to petition for an appeal. I suspect that the first we'll hear of the success of a petition will be a date given for a hearing, or more ominously a deportation notification issued.

Meanwhile, Hamid can have a place of his own, but sadly for us it'll be in Portsmouth, and not in Cardiff, so keeping in touch will be a challenge, and we'll have to find him a new congregation to welcome and support him as he develops in Christian discipleship. Until he can give as a postcode for his new abode, we can't start searching to identify one.
          

Home alone

My turn to do the week's shopping yesterday, and buy food to cater for myself, as Clare will be up in Kenilworth looking after Rhiannon. In the afternoon, I went into town and met Ashley for a planning meeting in John Lewis' over a cup of tea, for a change. We're preparing very carefully for some developments in our radio network in the coming months that are likely to stretch us and keep us busy. The business is never routine for long without some new challenge to stimulate us.

In the evening I finally got around to responding to a request from Bishop Dominic, episcopal Visitor to Ty Mawr Convent to contribute to his enquiries, addressed to friends, associates and supporters about the life of the community and its relationship to the wider church. Having to write this was a pleasure, as it caused me to look back on the part played in my life by the Sisters and the place itself over the past forty years. I go there less often these days, but it's often in my thoughts and prayers. In fact, Ty Mawr been influential on my spiritual journey, sharing its hospitality, its beauty and the silence of its peace generously, all of which are things I cherish now, wherever I live.  

After breakfast this morning, I drove Clare to the station to take the train to spend a few days of half term week looking after Rhiannon in Kenilworth. The rest of the morning I spent in the office, preparing documents requested yesterday, which I found were never digitized for inclusion in our Cloud archive. Not an onerous task, once I'd located the hard copies, but hindered by finding that the HP scanner/printer wasn't installed on the PC I'm now using. I recall finding the location of the driver download when I configured my home PC to use an identical device recently, so it was easier than last time. I just had to learn how to use a new scanning app, to get the job done. The time taken just accumulates.

Having woken early, I had a siesta in the afternoon. I'd meant to go for a walk, but the sky clouded over, so I stayed in and worked on my Lent blog. I'm finding things to write about prayer based on texts in the Psalms, not surprisingly. I work on an idea I want to develop, and then find Psalm verses and other scripture texts gather around by a process akin to association of ideas. The process works itself out in a way that doesn't seem to need much planning, so there's an element of discovery and surprise I find most enjoyable.

Confident accountability

I went into the CBS office earlier than usual this morning to meet up with Ashley, as we had a meeting scheduled with the City Council's Scrutiny Committee across lunchtime down in County Hall. The committee is reviewing the Council's engagement in support of the night time economy, or NTE as it's referred to in bureaucratic circles. CBS supplies half of its radios to those working evenings and nights. Restaurants, pubs and clubs comprise about forty percent, and ten per cent are public service or pro bono users like the Street Pastors, Ambulance and Alcohol Treatment Centre users. 

It was pleasing that we were, for the first time, invited to give an account of the contribution made by CBS, to inform the committee of the level of resources the NTE demands of the City. The question is: does the City cover the cost of this commitment. If not, how can it? None of our business. We just run a voluntary social enterprise that benefits the NTE as much as the daytime economy, and supports, at the point of need, others making an effort and giving their services. All is funded from the revenue radio subscribers provide. All radio users are stakeholders in making Cardiff a better place to be in, and trade in. Without the support of so many volunteers, it wouldn't be nearly so good.

I joined CBS when I retired as an expression of appreciation for the supply of a pro bono radio to St John's tea room, after a spate of thefts from handbags in church over the previous year. The radio is still there, still in use. The thief was caught by other means, but the fact that the radio was there  to provide a link to help from the outside world in one small quiet corner, was a confidence booster for volunteers. This was the first of more than a dozen radios now in the hands of city centre volunteers. I can't hide my satisfaction at applying admin and management skills I learned as a parish priest to the task of building a company back office, and enabling it to deliver a service, driven not by personal profit motive, but by the creative energy of voluntary goodwill, for the benefit of the city. 

This impulse has, down the ages, been part of city life, recognised or not, and it has everything to do with ensuring citizens' welfare, safety and security - not for personal gain, but building a community worth living in. It's similar to the impulse that drives people into the local political area, volunteering themselves for election as councillors in pursuit of the common good, regardless of the criticism they have to endure. It's not about personal gain or status, but about ensuring the common good through personal service. Thank heavens so many are prepared to commit themselves to make this effort!

   

Landmark moment

My only Sunday duty was St German's Mass at eleven. Just as well, since I went to bed rather late, and breakfasted only when Clare returned from the eight o'clock at St Catherine's with fresh pain au raisins and croissants for breakfast. By the time I got back from church, Owain was up after an even later night out, supporting a Bristol DJ in his regular club setting. He was still in a sombre mood reflecting on the Paris attacks. I'm just  wondering about city centre security and what else CBS could be doing to make sure Cardiff doesn't get taken by a surprise attack of any kind. The weather was against us doing much the the rest of the day, apart from following news updates. It's times like this when I most miss being in Spain.

I went into the CBS office in the wind and rain this afternoon to prepare documents for the Partnership's evening board meeting. It was an occasion to approve shortlisting for the Business Crime Reduction Manager's post, which we've been working so hard to raise funds and set up for ever since I joined Cardiff Business Safe after retirement. The we ran the recruitment advertising process, but selection is a matter for the Board. I've not looked at any of the applications, but those on the selection panel have been suitably impressed, judging by what was said in a very reserved way. 

One by one we are passing the landmark moments that are essential to the development of both our crime reduction organisation and the RadioNet enterprise. It's pleasing enough, but there's still the business to be run, and with a full time employee in post, taking on many of the Partnership's core tasks, Ashley and I can pay more attention to the rolling out of RadioNet service further afield.

On not building with sandy foundations

For the past two years CBS has been working towards re-establishing a Board of Management for the Cardiff Business Crime Reduction Partnership. The process has been fraught with misunderstandings and difficulties rather than consensual thinking about what needs to be done and how it should be achieved. 

Often in the past while working on this goal, I looked at the scant documentation Ashley and I inherited when the present business organisation was set up in 2008 and saw only deficiencies in the formation of an agency intended to unite participants in common concern to act in response to business crime issues in the city. Each time there's been a change of office holder responsible in the Council or Police, there's been a change of approach and ideas about how to achieve what had looked like common goals. 

Why this should happen was all the time staring me in the face, but I couldn't see it over the months we were preparing to re-launch the Business Crime Reduction Partnership Board of Management in a meeting at the end of October. The penny finally dropped a few days before the meeting, and after strenuous discussion with Ashley I took responsibility for what was ultimately a unilateral decision by CBS to abort the meeting, then work out how to explain this to invited participants after the event. A huge foolish risk. But better be pronounced a fool if I'm wrong than to let something happen, which if I was right would ultimately perpetuate the cycle of wrangling and mis-interpretations.

We say the devil is in the detail. In this case, the devil I finally glimpsed at work making clarity and consensus just about impossible to achieve, is in the lack of detail. There's no doubt about the good will and high intent of public officials and politicians who agreed and launched the Business Crime Reduction Partnership back there, eight years ago this month. 

The immediate outcome was the set up of a security radio network run for the city centre by contractors, plus a number of minor public initiatives issuing from that.  A constitution was drafted for the Business Crime Reduction Partnership by someone involved in its early activity, but this never seems to have been run past a lawyer, and was not fit for purpose, being unable to survive any change in its original membership. I realised this in my first spell of involvement with CBS when I was still at St John's, and first started work on a draft revision in 2008. I continued this after retirement and worked on it occasionally ever since. It was only in the days before re-launch I belatedly saw plainly what else was missing.

I took it on trust that some original documents relating to the formation of the Partnership were lost in the upheaval following the collapse of the Chamber of Commerce and Cardiff Initiative. We carried on, and I never stopped to question what might have been missing - like formal agreements signed between the various partners, a formal agreement commissioning Cardiff Business Safe to manage the service provision by whatever means approved by the governing body of the Partnership. What about instruments of governance for the Partnership were they any? 

Over thirty years I spent a lot of time serving on school boards of governors. I hated the formality, I hated the strictures and bureaucracy of governance, preferring to work with kids at classroom and playground level. But, due to the loyal and conscientious nature of local government education officers, lots of good things were achieved and often in difficult situations. So I learned respect and patience, and over a long period acquired an understanding of what was needed to make everything work well. If you have a proper organisational framework and the appropriate agreements in place, amazing things can happen.

At the eleventh hour, I realised we had none of this where the Business Crime Reduction Partnership was concerned. If it ever had been, somewhere along the path it got lost and forgotten. Frankly it doesn't matter how or why this is so. Blame and shame is stupid news media entertainment fodder, not the stuff that delivers worthwhile change. Big institutions running society achieve much on the basis of custom and precedent. That's their default position. They can also achieve near miracles with conscious planning and preparation, however. This I witnessed at first hand as Vicar in the city centre when re-development happened while the city continued to do business as usual. Any time something went wrong the only question of value was how to get from here to where we need to be?

Once I realised, all I could do was risk making a fool of myself and then explain what I perceived to be the problem and what remedy could put us back on track to where everyone was aiming to arrive at. How daft, how arrogant is that? If I'm wrong, then I'm exposed as well intended but ignorant. No fool like an old fool. At least it will prompt others to think harder about getting things back on track an initiative driven by CBS over the past five years. 

It wasn't actually part of what CBS was commissioned to undertake when set up to provide security radio network services. It happened by default as there was no custom and precedent to cater for the task. Maybe the only historic documents give the Partnership a framework for development are a handful of publicity leaflets and the launch press release. I'd be interested to be proved wrong, but so far, no evidence, so I press on with drafting terms of reference and service level agreements - the regles du jeu, that offer certainty and stop new people making it up as they go along.

This morning it was my turn to explain my actions at a top level meeting in County Hall of people committed to make the Partnership work. This was a meeting I prayed about more than I usually do, so that my habitual self doubt and anxiety didn't obscure communication. From a deliberate annoying confrontation I wanted to move towards dialogue, that recognised the need to ensure the Partnership started on a foundation stronger than presumed agreement and precedent. I was aware my action could be regarded as a breach of trust, but truth will come out if truth is recognised.

We came away from the meeting with an agreement to consider anew the question of foundation documents for the Partnership on the basis of the drafting work I've been doing since the day it dawned on me what the problem was. I have little trust in my expertise to provide what's needed. All I've done is devise a tentative answer to the problems caused by perceived deficiencies in the formation process. It's a first step, for proper consideration by real experts. Getting around to asking the right questions proved to be a lot harder than any answer could ever be. Who dares to say life is dull?