Much like any week leading into a bank holiday, it’s been a slightly quieter one. Not only do we lose a whole day’s productivity, several days slip by as minds wander to countryside walks, seaside trips and pub gardens. Still, we deserve this break. Oh, God.
Of all of us, Anya has probably had the finest week. After coming close to breaking her foot, she’s spent the best part of a fortnight being forced to sit in the shower. This not being a time that anyone wants to trouble the NHS unduly, she resorted to Amazon and bought her own Stormtrooper boot. Which, we’re told, is working wonders. She’s now able to hobble around the house, lending her crack librarian skills to a taxonomy of her kitchen cupboards. We all know Anya and suspect few things could make her happier. A Guinness perhaps. And pubs reopening.
Robert and Michael spent several more hours chipping away at the coalface of ontology comments. Some have called them slow, but they prefer to say methodical. Anyway, the treaty ontology comments have been polished to a diamond-like sparkle. They are, as ever, interested in feedback. So in the unlikely event you get 30 minutes free over a packed Easter holiday, please do take a look.
Anya, Librarian Jayne, Robert and Michael took to telephones to attempt to parse David and Paul’s feedback on their bill amendment model. David’s contribution proved relatively simple. They feel Mr Evans would be secretly pleased to learn it took four people two hours to pick apart his subclauses. Nevertheless, they pulled out all the stops and managed to come up with another hot mess of a diagram. Which will wing its way to David and Paul shortly. Probably accompanied by more questions. All of this would have proven much easier if they still had access to their beloved whiteboards. But we all know Anya, Jayne, Robert and Michael. They don’t like to whine.
A tweet on our new treaty comments occasioned a conversation with a number of Parliament’s finest treaty minds on the subject of the new EU International Agreements Sub-Committee. We like to keep our evenings footloose and fancy free. The conversation continued in email and a plan was hatched to amend our treaty map. Jayne and Michael again took to telephones and, with minimal swearing, created a new map. We’ve sent it on to Journal Office Jane, Dominique, Alex and Ed for sense checking. Jayne and Michael cannot lie, the Lords’ committee allocation routes are something of a mess. It’s all complicated by the lack of time-bound routes, which would allow us to say that the routes to the other sub-committees will stop being valid on the day after Easter. Without that we need to add preclusions from the new sub-committee to all the old ones. So that’s why the new map looks like blue-rinsed spaghetti.
Some time back, Jayne and Michael removed assorted ‘considered by’ steps and the JCSI scrutiny reserve lifted step, all of which were considered redundant. This left behind several thousand business items that had been created to actualise these steps. The existence of these business items didn’t impact the service but was a little scruffy. And as librarians, the team abhor scruffiness. Ideally this would be a task best suited to computers, but that option wasn’t available to us. So Jayne spent a large part of the week deleting 4758 business items by hand. Sorry again, Jayne. Still, she has the very, very long weekend to look forward to.