What February Is For

Every February the houses sit down with their books and find out whether they have been keeping the same institution. Hours are brought into agreement. A page at Shore says six hours kept over where the same six hours are carried forward at Cedar, and someone spends an afternoon establishing that these are one figure and not two. There was difficult weather at two houses this year and it is not in any figure I can print. There is tea, and there is a radiator that has been on the repair table since 2019.

People expect me to say that this is secretly profound. It is not. What it is, is the only defence a long practice has against becoming whatever its current members happen to feel. A wording that nobody checks drifts, and a drifting wording will eventually be used to do something no one agreed to.

A house that cannot say how its books stood ten years ago cannot say what it is now.

Two habits do most of the work. The first is that we print the wording as it stands beside the wording as it stood, so that a change has to be looked at. The second is that where a house objects, the objection is entered beside the decision and the two are read together; nothing is answered by a summary. Both habits are inconvenient by design.

The February meeting is also where things are refused. A question is put; the room considers it; the question is left standing, or the matter remains referred and comes back next year, or somebody says plainly that the House has no present answer and we go on to the accounts. Newcomers find this maddening. They are right to. It is still better than the alternative, which is answering in order to have answered.

This year the room spent forty minutes on the two founding dates, again, and made no change. It spent rather longer on a boiler. That proportion is the practice, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The rest of it is the long attention: turning up in the worst month, checking the near work, keeping the whole day rather than an hour of it. In February the houses keep twelve minutes of quiet at the same point in the evening — the common quiet, for which we claim nothing except that both rooms were quiet — and then somebody puts the kettle on and we go back to the hours.