April news round up from the Chief Officer

As we prepare the papers for the AGM and Board meeting to be held at Tollymore in mid-May, a whole series of threads are gradually coming together. As always the day-to-day running of the office is a full-time job in its own right and I can only say that it will be a huge relief when the new Executive Officer starts in post in June. For those of you who are wondering who this is, I can reveal that it is John Cousins, who was my predecessor at MLT so it is fair to say that he already has a good understanding of the various organisations that constitute MLT! Currently our executive are so busy dealing with many issues as well as getting on with their own lives that there hasn't been a statement forthcoming about the appointment, but this appointment will make an enormous difference and will enable me to focus on core issues such as quality assurance at national and international levels, the design and implementation of the coaching scheme and the publishing house, which is after all our main income strand. In any other business these 3 areas would be regarded as a pretty ambitious work plan, so it's not as if I will now be putting my feet up!

The CWLA has been well received, MLTE and MLTW ran a joint providers' workshop on Friday, and registrations levels are very healthy. There are a lot of success stories to celebrate but we also face some real challenges as the reality is that we are still several different organisations all working towards a shared vision but with different infra-structures, largely built on out-dated technology. One example of recent development is the new website, which is database driven. The first indication of the power of this system is the searchable list of courses, which will be a great service for providers and students alike, but until all the home nations join into this database it will not achieve its full potential. I have every confidence that we will bring all this information together during 2010. However the biggest frustration is the cumbersome process involved in registrations; I spend an average of an hour per day dealing with registration enquiries! I can't even begin to express how much I would like to see a simple one-stop shop for all the home nation boards; there are undestandable reservations about a possible loss of autonomy but we need to resolve these and make the registration process work properly. Right now we can be sure that anybody who gets as far as completing the registration process is really committed - this probably adds to the kudos of the ML schemes but it doesn't make good business sense.

I'm currently recovering from an inflamed elbow; it's not the dreaded golfer's or tennis elbow but it was pretty bad by the end of last week, when I could neither bend nor straighten the arm. This was caused entirely by pulling too hard on small holds every evening and weekend! I saw the warning signs, but with a bunch of new routes to squeeze into the Tremadog guide, as well as photo shoots and a couple of days climbing at Montserrat, there were too many goodies around so I decided to pay the price later, when the rains arrived.

Early last week I took a morning out to join the BMC/RSPB crag inspection of Cilan Head on the Lleyn peninsular. This resulted in a new access agreement, and a good chance to document the whole coastline photographically (perhaps a future guide book project?) We were accompanied by a pod of dolphins, who proved very difficult to photograph.