Titbits – Echoes, waves and Britpop faves

◆ At a recent cabinet procurement and insourcing committee, the chair Cllr Robert Chapman found himself in difficulties with the audio. Just over a minute into the meeting, his greeting reverberated around the room: “Hello? Hello? Hello?” Chapman persevered: “Slight IT problem here, bear with us for a second or two.” The issue was made worse by the acoustics of the near-empty space. The council’s very own echo chamber in full effect!

◆ Titbits was enamoured by the literary merit of a recent council document concerning plans to fix the borough’s ailing lifts: “It is both a privilege and a duty to repair and maintain the council’s homes and estates, where more than 30,000 tenants and leaseholders live and are their beating heart,” opined the grandiloquent report.

◆ Jeremy Martin (pictured), the council’s head of carbon and energy management, appeared to join the meeting by boat. Titbits is glad to see remote working being taken seriously at the Town Hall.

◆ Titbits was impressed by councillor and musician Gilbert Smyth’s homage to Jarvis Cocker at a meeting earlier this month. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Pulp frontman, Smyth (pictured) let out a phrase, caught by the subtitles, that had a ring of the kitchen sink realism that has made Cocker so popular. Imagine this in the singer’s famous falsetto style: “Everyone happy. Somebody called Veronica’s come on to my screen.” A touch of razzmatazz to liven up a licensing subcommittee.