29 April 2025Well, my holiday to Bamburgh is just a memory of blue skies, yellow sands, and orange puffin feet (it might have been sunny, but it was cold on the north-east coast).
Whilst it’s not been as busy with in-person branch meetings as March was, I did pop into Oxfordshire’s online meeting, made it all the way down to Sussex and back (in the same day!), and over to Newark for Nottinghamshire’s branch meeting.
It’s great to experience each branch in action and get an insight into what it is trying to achieve for clerks. We joked about ascribing the Sussex branch a symbolic animal to represent the branch character – a panda bear was mentioned as an alternative to the badger that was first proposed. I wonder if I will find a puffin branch (puffins are not the most elegant of fliers, and have comical orange feet that wiggle about, but they are constant and faithful). What animal symbol would you ascribe your branch?
With less travel this month, I had time to chat to 11 branch officer teams, and really get behind the workload and preparation that officers put in to keep the branches healthy and to engage with members to ensure they are delivering a wide-ranging set of branch activities to support clerks. I have a few invites in May and a diary that is filling up for June. In between, I will be continuing those branch conversations and starting to make sense of all the information I have gathered, so watch this space.
