2.6: The Contingencies: Consideration and Cogitation Committee
By chance there is a meeting of the Potting Shed’s Contingencies: Consideration and Cogitation Committee (the ‘4Cs’, as it is called) today and Alcock decides he will mention the curious letter in the newspaper to them. Not that anything needs doing. Nor is it anything to do with them. But Alcock is a little uneasy about the tone of the letter, though he has long since given up hope that any aspect of the local newspaper will be reasonable.
As tends to happen in the Potting Shed, there is a committee for every eventuality. Readers of the Curious Case of Juggins-the-False will recall that that affair was handled by three distinct groups: a sub-committee, a working group and a ‘war party’, even though all three comprised the same creatures, but in a different order. Today, the ‘4Cs’ is Alcock, Masongill and pTravis. It is frightfully secretive.
If any reader is a little worried about gender representation in the Potting Shed, they need not be. There are many, many committees, panels and working groups within the Potting Shed’s portfolio with diverse memberships. Moreover, the main Potting Shed Committee itself answers to a group of external governors, including the mysterious Florence the cat and the even more mysterious Pod matriarch, though being a peapod she is usually represented by one of her peas, Tiffany-Anne, linked telepathically.
Let us all hope that a future chapter may set out of the whole committee sub- and super-structure and their respective terms and conditions. It is Alcock’s pride and joy!
The points Alcock raises for subsequent mulling over while they are out going for walks, digging the garden or, in Masongill’s case, keeping watch overnight from his muddy hollow are:
- There are local elections soon but the Barman has never stood for anything, nor seems likely to now. So why are elections mentioned by the letter writer?
- His only obvious semi-public role is being the landlord of a local pub, which he has owned for several decades. But he does need to hold a license to do that.
- Surely no one has been reciting the scurrilous poem the letter cites?
- The letter seems, all things considered, an unjustified character attack on an elderly bear. What is the motive?
- There does not seem to be any address or details concerning the mysterious Herbert, so called ‘honest reader’. Who is he?
The meeting ends after all the coffee and cake has been drunk and eaten with no one any the wiser but all promising to think about it. At least, now, Alcock knows with what he is involved: The Who is Herbert?
Hmm, no, that does not quite work.