Our Chairman’s Message – August 2021

At last! – a good title for a song – the long awaited removal of lockdown restrictions has arrived, despite the fact that there may well be some local ones on transport, venue capacities etc. It’s a sunny morning and this afternoon I am going to celebrate, outdoors of course, the 100th birthday of Warden in Hexham WI and I am really looking forward to seeing the ladies there. Happy birthday to you and any other WIs celebrating a birthday very soon.
I have actually met up with other members outdoors recently, which has been lovely and next week Southridge Flower Club will be the first group back at Cresswell House for a long time. From there on it will be a positive flurry of events with paper cutting, food demonstrations and the WI Day, tea and cake on the afternoon of Thursday 16 September, more details of that later in the Newsletter.
Before I tell you more about a couple of future events I want to tell you of a strange occurrence at a recent Officers’ meeting. As usual we were ready to draw out the lucky recipients of the 100 Club Draw and, for those of you who have already spotted this strange phenomena, all three winners are from the same WI and hold consecutive numbers. So if you are interested in strange happenings, then being at that meeting where those numbers were randomly drawn by three different people and verified by a fourth person (our Federation Treasurer) I can confirm that it was truly amazing. Well done ladies, maybe you should all together buy a lottery ticket!
In with this mailing is an application for the Council Meeting on Saturday 2 October at The Royal Grammar School in Newcastle. At this moment the RGS have not decided whether they will be going up to the normal capacity for the auditorium or not, but we do know that there will definitely be capacity for every WI to send a delegate. For this reason we are asking you to let us know if you will be sending a delegate and if, should the capacity increase, you would like any observer tickets. These will be priced at £7 per ticket but we do not want you to send any money yet as you will be invoiced for them if 1) the capacity is increased and 2) if you are successful in any ballot after the closing date. I do hope we are able to have observers and look forward to seeing many of you there where we will once again be entertained by Lesley Smith who many of you will remember doing Sex and The Tudors and the use of a certain citrus fruit.
I expect that many of you will be resuming meetings as soon as your venue permits and I hope you enjoy the excitement of being together once again. For those of you venturing abroad or just having a “staycation”, I wish you all a lovely holiday filled with joyful memories of just being able to be out and about in a more relaxed atmosphere once again.