19th March
The local WI held a New Members' Evening tonight in one of the town's pubs.We have welcomed several new WI members over the past year, some of whom have belonged before in other county federations but the rest are new to WI. One doesn't really get the chance to get to know people at the monthly meetings until they have come a number of times and certainly one cannot explain much of what the organisation which they have just joined is about. So the committee drew up a programme of speakers from within the WI to cover the most important points of the WI movement. Of course we had to run through its formation and its 3 level structure and translate a glossary of initials which we bandy about happily all the time.After that we got on to resolutions and mandates and our place in the community. Then it was up to the various groups which have been formed in the local WI to give a sales-pitch for her own interest group.Time then for another drink over which to chat and get to know who everyone was, whereabouts they had come to live and what had brought them to the town. I am sure that we all went home feeling that we had done our best to give a good impression of the WI and what it stands for and made our new members feel welcome. It is however a twoway process so the fact that the new people had come along showed that they were willing to play their part.

12th March
The subjects that the discussion group choose are often topical. We were a little late with the talk about flooding but some poor unfortunates are still mopping up their homes and land after the rain has stopped.The Thames Valley is the nearest disaster area to us but Buckingham and Stony Stratford suffered from floods and had endured some anxious nights watching the rising levels of the local rivers. Quite a few of us had suffered the effects of domestic flooding and knew the time it takes to dry out after a sudden influx of water; but that is usually just water. To have the house full of water and sewage for weeks on end must be a nightmare. We felt that it was noticeable that there was an increase in aid once the Thames Valley was affected but before that the farmers and residents in rural villages had received very little help.Some farmers had lost everything they had and even their future income was jeopardized for a couple of years.If climate change is going to bring about these intense storms, preventative measures will need to be made, drainage needs improvement and houses cannot be allowed on flood plains. There was very little that the WI can do except make the Government aware of its concern through the resolution process. Many WIs like ours take part in the local emergency planning scheme and these prove their worth when these situations arise. The media was criticised for getting in the way of relief operations and hyping it up unnecessarily with pictures of teenage girls "being carried to safety" by soldiers walking in water which just about came up to their ankles!

13th March
The Current Affairs sub-committee met this morning and the members spent quite a long time analysing the Investigation and Discovery event held at the Oculus the week previous.Although we all knew it had been a very successful meeting in promoting science and the WI, it was difficult not to feel slightly cross and hurt by some of the quibbles that people had raised. I imagine readers of the report at the Institute of Physics will be highly amused at the comments about loo paper provision and the positioning of the notices about parking which were matters to do with the venue and not about the content of the day.Fortunately some people had the grace to thank the Institute of Physics and BFWI for providing a free event.We will almost definitely repeat a science day to co-incide with the National Science Week in 2015 but I doubt whether we will be able to obtain a grant again to meet the costs. Nor can another hall be found elsewhere in central Bucks which is so well-equipped and so comfortable as the AVDC premises nor big enough to cope with the demand for seats.You have been warned.
This was the final session for the committee members at the end of a two year stint.Fortunately most are willing to stand again and we have some new members waiting in the wings to take their places. A couple of outings are being planned for the summer and something more serious in the autumn so I hope the organisers' time and effort in the planning will be fully appreciated.

8th March
This evening the Bucks Federation of WIs joined the Soroptimists of Aylesbury to celebrate International Women's Day at the International Centre in town.It was very crowded with people and stalls. BFWI put on display the campaigns currently being run at National level and there was a stall featuring the work of the ACWW. The programme was most interesting with displays of Indian and Irish dancing, singing and a costume show of saris from different areas of India. The main speaker was a doctor from the East End of London talking about her family and her experiences in a problem area. Her grandmother was illiterate, the mother of 10 children and then widowed. Yet, through her eldest son coming to London to be educated and be able to send money home to support the family, she was able to see her grand-daughter graduate in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. What an achievement! I hope we can persuade this doctor to come to speak at a BFWI event because she would be an inspiration to us all: she also has experience of the problems facing girls with the dangers of female genital mutilation which was nearly a resolution for the June Annual General Meeting at Leeds.

5th March
Our WI met for the monthly meeting when one of our own member's husband spoke about the Human Impact on Wild Life in Africa.Some of the photos were very gruesome but they brought home to us the enormity of the problems of poaching and the threat of reducing the natural habitats for all sorts of animals.We now have a membership of 66 and 3 new members were welcomed to the WI tonight. Plans are progressing for our May Fair and there are lots of stalls booked ahead from traders both local and at a distance. A visit is planned to a chocolate factory at the end of April which will appeal to the chocoholics among us.I hope they don't eat too many sweets before the journey home.

3rd March

A capacity audience converged upon the Oculus at the AVDC Offices in Aylesbury for Investigation and Discovery, an event organised by the Current Affairs sub-committee. BFWI was able to offer a free entrance to everyone thanks to a generous grant from The Institute of Physics who wanted to encourage interest in science among the general public.WI members had shown last year that this was the sort of meeting which they wanted to attend.

Professor Carolin Crawford started us off on a voyage round Saturn, its rings and moons. One could see that everyone was fascinated by the photographs from the Cassini probe and I am sure I was not the only person holding their breath as we parachuted down through the rings to land in what might be a dried up river bed on one of Saturn's moons.How can the space team contemplate the probe's final suicide mission to crash into Saturn itself in a few years time? We need a SAVE THE PROBE campaign as thanks for all the information that it has sent back to Earth! When someone asked how long it took to receive an answer from Cassini and was told about 70 minutes there were audible rueful comments comparing it to Broadband.

After that we were in the air again as Dr John Methven described how meteorologists fly into cyclones and study high impact weather. There were wonderful shots of weather fronts chasing each other across the Atlantic and the inside of the special aircraft fitted with computers and electronic gadgets. Personally I was rather relieved that we didn't see the effects of the turbulence aboard as I would have needed a sofa to hide behind.

After lunch Dr Kat Arney from Cancer Research UK who is an information and communications officer for the charity, gave us an entertaining account of Cancer:past and present. Entertaining and cancer are not words that usually sit together but that was what it was.Kat was so dynamic and so positive in her approach that no one could fail to be inspired to fight against the disease and promote research. Did you know that some of the Egyptian mummies revealed the presence of cancer? And we saw pictures of fleas suffering from cancer in the eye.Kat stressed that there was much yet to do but also she traced the successes already achieved. I hope she didn't catch anyone enjoying a smoke in the car park over lunch!

Finally Tracy Alexander returned with another talk about the difficulty for forensic teams when they tackle Cold Case Investigations. This was entertaining too as we were helped to see tiny spots of dried blood on jackets and heard of the exhaustive tests conducted on articles of clothing and weapons stored in the secret vaults of murder enquiry evidence.Even villains from pre-DNA days cannot be sure that someone from forensics will not come knocking at their door.

It had been a wonderful day, lots to think about and well worth being inside rather than out on perhaps the first day of spring. There was a sting in the tail though because as we left there was a heavy downpour and hail followed by a triple rainbow. Now we were able to imagine how that would have looked on John Methven's charts.

25th February
I must admit that everyone's immediate reaction to the sight of our chosen book for this month was a mixture of alarm and dread. It was certainly the longest we have ever attempted. The Letters of the Mitford sisters edited by Charlotte Mosley cover hundreds of pages. How to tackle this? Some focussed on the letters written by one sister, others broke it down into decades ie the 1920s or the 1960s but amazingly the majority of the group found themselves dragged in and read nearly the full series. What an interesting and talented family it was! The girls knew everyone in British political life, and artists and stage personalities from across the world.Some readers could not ignore the snobbery of the U and Non-U and see how a lot of this was a surface gloss which was amusing to them as well as to us;again, some readers found it difficult to believe and accept their emotional attachment to people such as Mosley and Hitler in the 1930-1950s. The Mitfords seemed to be attracted to strong males and in our eyes they were not very good pickers. Was all this Left wing politics a reaction against their privileged background? Whatever cause they each embraced, they gave it their all. They were all hard workers and good writers and had a great sense of humour. It was lovely to read about the Duchess of Devonshire's activities with the WI and some of her accounts of state occasions are hilarious.

24th February
A meeting of the local craft group when we were able to show off examples of the work started from the last session on slash patchwork.Some very effective pieces are ready for making into cushions. But the main topic today was our planned new WI tablecloth. A design has been vaguely agreed and everyone has been allocated an area to work. Obviously the whole has got to blend well together so at present it is a case of go away and think and then come back for a group decision. Are you going to watch the new series of the Great British Sewing competition? Amazingly enough it is good television.

I also heard about our Green Gym's launch into geo-caching on Wednesday mornings. It sounds great fun--- a cross between those round robin things we used to do and orienteering! Anyway, somehow or other there was talk of linking Bucks with Iceland. Maybe I've got that wrong! Thinking of the wider stage and the WI it was good to see letters from Bucks WI members in both the last two WI Life magazines. It was also heartening that they were not letters of complaint but had a positive outlook.

12th February
The discussion group managed to debate the pros and cons of immigration without being in any way party political. It was treated very seriously and the outcome was that the majority did not want to ban immigration but they wanted the system tightened up to avoid abuse. We were against ghettos being established but realised that this problem had to be worked on from both sides. We listed the benefits from immigration and recognised that there were very few people whose family has not at one time or another welcomed new members from other nationalities or religions.I wish the WI could attract more members from different ethnic groups in our society because it would help to fight prejudice and strengthen community links.