Group News

In this bit of the site, we’ll put general news about the group that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

Virtual AGM

Because we couldn’t meet physically, we held a “virtual AGM” on September 1 to deal with business that we would otherwise have transacted in April. This was the formalities of approving the accounts for the last year (which we did) and electing the Committee and Officers.

Rob Dyer stood down from and Edith Morgan returned to the Committee.

Sue Dockerill retired as Membership Secretary and, as no-one else offered to stand for this position, Susan Lewis agreed to merge the role with that of Treasurer. Meanwhile, Sue has agreed to assume the role of Scrutineer/Auditor following the sudden death of Brian James.

John Kingdon’s term of office as Chair was extended, in accordance with the Consitution, to enable him to continue in that role temporarily to provide a bit of continuity as we dealt with the initial challenges of that virus thingy that we don’t want to talk about.

Musical (?) Chairs

The Committee has been meeting virtually via Zoom. At the last meeting, John advised the Committee that Edith had agreed to sit in the Chair again and that he was happily handing back to her. We wonder if he was taking advantage of the fact that Edith had missed the meeting as she preferred the far happier activity of having a tooth pulled by her dentist and was craftily getting revenge for the fact that Edith manoeuvred him into the Chair a bit over three years ago. John will remain on the Committee as an ordinary member and this means that, overall, we’re down on ordinary member and one officer.

Volunteers welcome!

Round of Applause Please

A Big thank you to Jan Thomas who has been selling plants from her garden gate to raise funds for our group. As well as plants she has grown herself,  she’s been selling plants from our late member June Jenkins. Jan raised a whopping £307.

We look forward to the time when we can meet again – who knows, with the prospect of vaccines, we may be returning to Coychurch sooner than we might have otherwise hoped – and Jan can return to her normal activity of beating members with her virtual hammer as she sells raffle tickets at meetings.

Meanwhile, here’s a little reminder of her happy smile (which gets wider when she wields that hammer).

Books

Many of you will remember Barbara Thorp who was an active member of the group for many years. Her husband, Charles, has now decided to downsize and has generously donated her collection of books to the group in the hope that we can sell them to raise funds. A list of the books can be found here.

We’re not setting prices per book but, rather, inviting members to make an offer. Practically, of course, the cost of posting books would be prohibitive but we’re hoping to find a way to get them to those who would like to have them, in return for a donation. Please get in touch with Sue Dockerill if you’re interested in acquiring a book or two and we’ll go from there.

Who’s Zoomin Who

Ah, nostalgia? We were all a bit younger and less creaky back in 1988 when Aretha Franklin was on our playlists. Had playlists been invented back then? Probably more a case she was on that cassette tape we’d made from naughty recordings from the radio (we weren’t supposed to make them!) or pounding our ears at the local disco.

But enough of that! We’re going to try Zooming as a group on 12 December. That’s a Saturday and around the day that, in happier times, we’d be meeting for our traditional Christmas social. Lots of groups like ours have dipped their toes into Zoom meetings so we’re going to have a go. Kick-off will be at 2.00 pm and all members are welcome to join us. If you’re new to Zoom we’ll provide some how-to notes to help. And we’ll publish more info here on our web site at the beginning of December.

If you’d like to join us, you’ll need a link to click sort of thing. So, for now, please just sign up by CLICKING HERE to send an email to John who’s organising the do. When you click, the site should trigger your email client (if you have one) to open a window to send an email to him. The mysteries of his website setup (which are mysteries to everyone bar him) will take care of things and you can look forward to receiving more info by email. Come along and join us. All you need is an internet connection. A mug of tea/coffee and a mince pie are optional.

Elaine will be giving a short talk and then we’ll open up to friendly chat for as long as people want to chat.

If this works, then we’ll look at organising more virtual get-togethers (or gets-together for the pedantics!)