According to last night's Gazette there were 100 people in the Library Lecture Theatre for the BSF decision at Cabinet. They could be right - it was certainly full.
Friday was a chance to do something completely different, thank goodness.
The morning started with a meeting of a small group of the Western Area Partnership to decide on what to recommend as the next steps in spending our Communities Fund budget. This is an unusual experience for our board which doesn't usually have any kind of budget to spend. It has a very restricted remit related to reducing unemployment and we used our first year's allocation to set up some collection points and some training for the Credit Union in our area to help alleviate debt problems before they became major.
Now we have to decide on how to spend the next year's allocation and we had a very good discussion on that. Further work needs to be done before we know what we want to recommend to the Board but we have some ideas which we hope might help our young people.
Following that meeting there was a meeting of the Tees Valley Fairtrade Forum to catch up on what each borough is planning for Fairtrade Fortnight and to work out a bit more detail of what we're going to do at BBC Tees on February 22nd. Still some details to be sorted but things are taking shape. And perhaps even better, I could hand over some of the Big Brew packs to the Hartlepool representative thus clearing a bit of space in my garage:)
Soon after arriving home came the news that Focus was printed, folded and ready for taking to deliverers. So over the next week residents of Eaglescliffe should receive the information about the cabinet decision as well as all the other information that they look forward to getting from their councillors. A brief interlude of normality!
And today? Well today apart from sending responses to emails I've taken some time to be with my husband. After all, he was part of my life long before the council.