Harrrington's - being the collected thoughts of the Hon Sec, by way of excuse and explanation.

Much has been written on the nature of committees and the most important thing is, on no account, to be lumbered with sitting on one unless the refreshments are more than adequate or your boiler has broken and you need an excuse to be somewhere warm in the cold winter months, with the proviso that you have the husbandly skill to put your mind out to another place while the distant murmur of wordage goes on around you. It has always been a founding principal of mine that under no circumstances should anyone who wants to hold a position on a committee should be allowed to. Those seeking such employment clearly have empty lives and are endeavouring to fill their waking hours with minutes, memos and reports about procedures that will under all circumstances not only take up the allotted span but will ensure Any Other Business creeps on towards closing time with the speed of a glacier and just about the same level of excitement. It is for this reason I always start any committee I was for...

  The point of having an 'Age of Reason' was to get it out of the way several hundred years ago so we don't need to do the whole thing again and have French encyclopaedia salesmen cluttering up the hallway or gloomy coves wanting you to sign a social contract. Millie is not impressed. She had intended a tour of cheese producing areas in north of France this June and now the whole bally mess in Parliament is threatening our supplies of Mimolette this autumn. I feel, at this point, a word of explanation is required for newer members. In 1605 some of our chaps were playing sardines in the cellars of the old club, it was up West in those days - before the Great Fire. Bounder called Fawkes stumbles in; chaps gave him a bit of a ragging, nation saved, cheers all round and the club is made a Parliamentary constituency along the lines of the   Universities but without the need to have Dons banging on about what do we mean by 'a haddock' or if a tree falls over in a fore...

It all began about the time the steam pudding dishes, each admirably spic and span after the careful attentions of all present were being removed that Moyglass began put forward the thesis that, all in all, we lacked a statue to ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill, which was very remiss of us, on the grounds that the cove had gone to war against the Nazi menace destaining the use of the Thompson sub-machine gun with its rate of fore of some 700 bullets each and every minute for a long bow which, even if the fabled 15 shots in 60 seconds were achieved, would then leave said bowman ammunition-less and was a little dodgy in inclement weather. This was the kind of chap whose wise visage ought to look down on us each and every day, an example of the blind refusal to face up to things was the living embodiment of the club’s existence. A little muttering was heard that noted all the said Lieutenant Colonel had done with said bent piece of wood was to kill a feldwebel but these were quashed on the grounds do...

I was talking to a cove the other day, looked at the edge of exhaustion poor creature and I wondered aloud if he spent the weekend in some sporting endeavour; apparently not.  He was a little reticent to fess up as I probed the defences of his reluctance.  Did he spend Saturdays bringing back canals to economic usefulness?   Possibly he was charitably inclined towards nature and built small homes for voles in the lesser known tributaries of the Trent or was he was the kind of fellow who spent the long hours in the endeavour of staking a claim that he had had a beef tea on every railway network, be it heritage, privately owned or in the public gift.  Well meaning, if irritating persistence can often overcome even the stoutest of defences and eventually he laid bare for all to hear that he belonged to a society which put amusing village names along the side of the ‘A’ Roads used by tourists on their way to their hols.  He’d spent the weekend along the A30 ere...

 Generally I feel I am the sort of chap who can get on with most folk. I can nod sagely while coves discuss the merits of the Fordson Model F tractor, compared to the Model N. I can endure sales of works and even hazard favourable comments about the Wives of Henry VIII, as viewed through the medium of crochet, to the extent of making encouraging remarks about the rendering of Katherine Howard’s detachable head to the tot who fashioned it. I can even stoically endure the opinions of taxi drivers viz the reason the government lavishes money on trains but keeps the roads ill-funded is to prevent people from travelling to the countryside to see things that would disturb them. I rather fancy the drivers compete to see what is the most outlandish view they can pass to the entrapped public and award a small prize on a daily basis. I do, however, find Hedlington, the Club’s Historian, a somewhat trying fellow. The first vexation is that he will never give a simple answer to a question. A...

 Lord knows how they find us but by thunder they do.  We have ensured any useful motor signage has been removed; never issued a brochure or had one of those inter-web things and even bribed that chap who takes photos for goggle to double back and circle around the nearby self-assembly dream factor that appears to have moved in to the old brick works on the by-pass.  All this was to no avail.   We had another one of those coves with drip dry handshakes and smart casual smiles turning up our own blessed St Audrey’s – the Club funds an educational school of an independent frame of mind - wanting to know the secret of our academic success.   As chair of governors of the place   I do keep writing to these research-wallahs formal letters pointing out   letting teachers shout at the little blighters till studying is left as the path of least pain is the key but this does not seem to convince. Well,   I felt it was time to ‘take one for the team’ so I...

  As you know, I am one to allow those keen young chaps onto the Committee so they could go off and form Development Subcommittees. Sort of thing keeps em amused and out of mischief. When popping out to attend necessary functions, burning the 2 AM oil you can still still them hunched around a table chuckling away at the breath-taking modernity of there wheezes, before you nip back for another snifter and a game of ‘Tattershall’s Progress’. That reminds, wonder if we should look for 'Nightcap' Compton. Last saw him trying to prove it was possible to cross the Thames using nothing more than Toby Jugs and a range of aquatic mammals. Where was I? Point is, give em enough graph paper and a supply of coloured pencils and they will amuse themselves for weeks. The occasional ‘have you thought of all the alternatives' will distract them and keep them from bothering the rest of us. Until yesterday. 'Are you happy' inquired Badesely Minor. I don't tend to go in for tha...