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Until January 2020, this Blog was the voice of an individual WI member. Over her 40 years of membership, our Blogger had made a very fine contribution to this and other Federations in England. With interests in crafts, reading and writing and in travel, she also took an active part in campaigning for women's welfare and education and on environmental issues. While she has now handed over the Blog to the wider Bucks membership, her archived blog posts are a testament to someone who always made the utmost of her membership, and a rich source of information about the part the WI can play in today's society.

20/4/2018 3 Comments

Annual Council Meeting

What a difference a bit of sunshine makes not only to the coloured clothes worn but also to the sunny smiles as the Bucks WI members poured into the Waterside Theatre today! Jenny Street opened proceedings with an up-date on the changed sub-committee structure, a new name for the Friendship Club and information on exciting plans to celebrate our County Federation’ centenary in 2020. We were all pleased to learn that BFWI was in good financial heart and making strategic arrangements to be able to afford to celebrate our centenary.
The High Sheriff, Professor Ruth Farwell described how she achieved the honour and high-lighted the inequality still present in the academic world. Bucks Resilience has a new name too as Stephen Irons encouraged the WI members to volunteer to be on hand to help in the Emergency Plan should there be any major disaster in the area. Another celebration this year is for Stoke Mandeville Paraplegic Games which was founded in 1948 by Sir Ludwig Guttmann. The speakers for WheelPower had just returned from the Gold coast in Australia where the disabled athletes had held their games in parallel with the main Olympics event.
Dr Natalie Welden from Portsmouth University then reported on the latest developments in the identification of the scale of the plastic soup problem. Natalie was the main speaker in Liverpool at the Annual General Meeting and she described her most recent work with langoustines fished out of the Clyde estuary. The morning session closed with Nick from Countryside Books exhorting all of the WIs in Bucks to contribute a passage about their own village or town to replace the Village Book produced way back in 1987. We all know how much has changed since then.
Then it was lunchtime and the members spilled out into the sunshine to sit about on the walls and seats around the theatre just like we do when we visit the Albert hall for AGMs. The speaker in the afternoon was a typical example of Northern Grit: no one crossed her path with impunity. Christine Walkden talked of her life and times as a gardener working from a front garden strip via grave-digging to Kew Gardens and becoming a TV gardening guru. Christine is convinced that tender loving care is just as important with people as it is with plants. She is a wonderful natural speaker and her talk was full of humour which really appealed to the audience.
The members were sorry to learn that Jenny was standing down after 4 years as our Federation Chairman and we wished her a well-earned rest. It was another successful Council Meeting to end on. Here’s to the next year as we race towards 2020.

3 Comments

15/4/2018 5 Comments

In the public eye

Oh dear! What an uproar about a member’s comments on the activities of the Shoreditch Sisters WI! Is this another occasion on which we should say “There is no such thing as bad publicity”? I can understand how some members could find its approach too forthright (displays on quilts of female parts not usually discussed at the dinner table and pictures of sanitary wear worked into posters) but it is a generational problem and the WI does pride itself on catering for all ages. What Shoreditch does for our WI campaigns is not all that different to the rest of us except they are more active publicly. It is more direct and aims to shake everyone up---which it is obviously very successful in doing. What shook me in the press articles was that it had come from a federation trustee which seemed a bit disloyal: I thought trustee members stood together at least in public. Someone must have leaked the blog entry to the media because I don’t believe the local press reads our WI blogs.
If my blog is to go more public I had better be a bit more circumspect about what I say---especially now that I see I have been given categories for people to click to find specific subjects in my ramblings. Have you noticed this re-arrangement? Nothing has disappeared from the website. More future events have been added and some items shuffled about a bit. Our federation website was one of the first and was a role model for quite a few years so we should be proud of it. I wish more Bucks members used it.
The local WI discussion group met to discuss tele -medicine which we had to have defined for us at the start but then discovered that our local surgery has been using the system for some time but we, the patients, hadn’t known its title. Several members were appreciative of booked phone calls to avoid attending the surgery and felt confident that if there had to be follow-up on the diagnosis they would be able to see the doctor or specialist more promptly. Others were insistent that they preferred to speak face-to-face. With today’s pressures on hospitals and doctors generally, this must be helpful like the triage systems in A&E departments. And what about operations being conducted on Skype from one continent to another or being performed by an AI robot being manipulated by a surgeon in another room?
In support of our WI’s charity MIND Buckinghamshire a coffee morning and jigsaw swap in a member’s house raised £75. This is a gesture towards the resolution on mental health going to the AGM in Cardiff in June. This resolution is another example of the WI not being afraid to tackle subjects that have been considered unsuitable for discussion in public. I wonder how the Shoreditch Sisters will handle this one.

5 Comments

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