the flood meeting

a full turn out for the village meeting with the bonus of one or two unexpected guests, one of which was our local MP. Not bad for an invite only meeting! To be fair to our guest, Laurence Robertson did what all good constituency MPs should do. Listen and offer help. The dynamics of any meeting are always interesting and it is amazing how often the participants full into neat boxes the mnagement literature says they should! The lessons from anthropology are never far away as well! Whatever your political views, Laurence handled himself fine.

Will add the minutes of the meeting which fortunately did not ramble on too long and covered the bases as well as could be expected. There are still people who look in shock and those who were not flooded almost wish they had been in a perverse way.

The star of the evening was undoubtedly Andrew Leeke, who talked a lot of sense in a lawerly way and "held" the meeting as would be expected from someone in his line of work. There were glimpses of a dry SOH even! How little you know people when you have lived 50 yards away for 20 years!

After all the talk, the situation is clean up (Kensal), take an accurate survey, form a company limited by guarantee (under a name like Deerhurst Flood Relief) to confer legitimacy on our efforts to deal with EA, BC etc and form a committee to run this company. Problem solved! Well, it is not going to be that easy. Account needs to be taken for those outside the flood bank and the landowners (e.g. Church) that we need to build up the defences. Full minutes to be posted later.