Category: Resolutions

The Members' Blog

Authorship
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.

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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.

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29/11/2017 1 Comment

Resolution selection

27th November
The Resolution Selection Meeting was held at Gatehouse, Aylesbury this afternoon. The WI Advisers briefed us on the 5 resolutions on the short list to go to the Annual General Meeting at Cardiff in June next year. Every WI has the chance to send 2 representatives to hear a little more about the resolutions than is printed in the November WI Life magazine. They can then return to their WIs and hope to bring more information to their members before they hand in their preferred personal selection. In the old days, the advisers had to rely on written notes and do lots of homework for themselves but nowadays NFWI provides screened presentations and videos which can be used along side personal experience and research. This certainly makes the afternoon livelier and helps to lift the gloom induced by the topics under discussion. The two, one on Female Genital Mutilation and the other on Modern Slavery were second visits to previous subjects but more specific in their approach. The one on mental health is certainly very topical and may be a battle already half won. At first, I thought the problems of presenting a positive body image in the digital age was too lightweight to deserve a resolution but having listened to the presentation I could see there was more to this one than I had first considered. (Therein lies the importance of these selection meetings). However, the one on oral health strikes me as too minor to “waste” a resolution on. It is always difficult not to show one’s own bias when presenting the resolutions to one’s WI or indeed to an audience like todays---or on this blog!--- but obviously we will try. It is shaming that so many of the members feel that the resolution process shouldn’t take up part of two monthly meetings in the year. I am going to be very naughty and reveal an exchange in the break which absolutely made my day. A lady who had been travelling in Africa was talking about the abuse rampant against salamis! One of those moments which occur increasingly often at certain times of life. Of course, she realised almost immediately her mistake and we switched our sympathy towards the Somalis.
16th November
This morning there was the Jigsaw Swap coffee morning held in a member’s house. It was well attended by mostly WI members but a few Ramblers were there as well. Funds raised were split between the Denman College Appeal and Adoption UK so each charity received £50. One doesn’t need to buy or sell a jigsaw to attend: to sit around and talk is quite acceptable.
14th November
I have been meaning to visit the WI shop at Stuart Lodge and finally did so today. I didn’t do my homework beforehand so arrived when the craft people were engaged in a group session of decorating candles. Apparently the second Tuesday of the month there is always some kind of a craft going on. It didn’t matter as I could still browse around the shelves and chat to people I hadn’t seen for ages. Now I know about this activity I might bring some of the local craft group down---those who have never been to Stuart Lodge at all. It was a lovely drive south, past Chequers and under the golden leaves of the trees with the sun shining AND a roe deer stepped out into the road ahead of me, surveyed the approaching cars and returned the way he had come. Of course, I hadn’t got a camera so missed recording a really magic moment.

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26/6/2017 2 Comments

Challenges

21st June
Was there ever such a hot day for a WI outing as today? Winslow WI was celebrating its annual group excursion and had chosen to visit Windsor where fortunately it had booked a cruise up the river lasting for most of the afternoon. This was a little cooler than on the riverbank and was very enjoyable and ---guess what?--- I saw a kingfisher for the first time in my life. There was a lot of bird life to be seen and the commentator on the launch was very knowledgeable. The coach driver went a long way round to avoid the usual traffic jams in Aylesbury but the passengers didn’t mind how we reached home provided we could be reasonably cool. The members were grateful for the work of the committee in arranging the day.
19th June
Happy Stitchers were suffering from the heat so attendance was down but a few stalwarts managed a few stitches and quite a bit of chat.
7th June
The National Federation’s Annual General Meeting in Liverpool and I was halfway up a mountain in The Lakes but I was willing the Ashley Green WI resolution to go well. Without one of these ultra-modern gadgets I had to wait to be told by text what the outcome had been. What a vote! Now we will need to lead the way in getting things done about the pollution caused by plastic fibres in the ocean and also, from the home front, to tackle loneliness in the community.
I am looking forward to hearing all about the meeting and reading about it in WI Life. I don’t think I have ever written in my blog so little about this the most important day in the WI calendar so I am hoping someone else will cover it on the Bucks website.
30th May
The book discussed by the local WI Book Group this month was not a novel but the autobiographical account of Joe Simpson’s survival story “Touching the Void”. We all learned a lot of new words to do with ice and mountains and knots used in climbing but what most impressed us was the sheer courage and determination demonstrated by both the mountaineers in extreme conditions. The decisions they both had to make with as much detachment as they could muster facing the almost certain outcome of death were mind-blowing. They were up against frostbite and broken limbs in blizzard conditions but never once did they blame anyone but themselves although both began to think of the mountain as a malevolent force against which they were fighting. We admired the book and the endeavour but still Joe Simpson couldn’t really explain why people like him have to challenge themselves to climb up these peaks and put themselves in such peril.

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2/4/2017 0 Comments

Local and global issues

30th March
Like many WIs across the county our WI organised a coach to take us to the WI Craft Fair at the Alexandra Palace today. This was the second day of the exhibition and after a marvellous run up to London we arrived just as it opened so it was easy to walk around and find a coffee before getting down to the business of the day---buying craft items and looking for inspiration. Actually, it never became crowded which was a bit worrying. There was a good variety of stalls selling clothes, food and drink and promotional stands for travel firms offering holidays and outings. In the centre was the official WI area where we could talk to the members of the National Board of Trustees. There were also workshops and presentations on craft and cookery. However, I was not the only person who would have liked more stalls selling craft equipment and supplies. Very few were selling wools and fabrics, no skirt lengths nor frames nor patterns to inspire projects ---not even the WI knitting wools were on offer. We enjoyed our day and the weather helped us to appreciate the London skyline. Judging by the bags being loaded onto the bus for the return home we obviously spent money even if not quite how we had intended.
28th March
Four members from our WI attended the presentation afternoon to learn more about the resolutions that are going up to the NFWI Annual General Meeting in June at Liverpool. These were introduced to the audience so that they would be able to take the information back to their WIs to help decide on how to instruct their delegates to vote. Thelma Sackman introduced the Loneliness resolution and Graham White, the Bucks County Council Communicating Links Officer told us what was happening in our own area. We are fortunate locally on what is being done to alleviate loneliness but certainly there are many places where the inner cities are hardly covered at all: the smaller the community, the more chance there is of this problem coming to light but the prospect of financial cuts hangs over us all. This is a resolution on which WI members can work.
The resolution on the pollution of the seas by microfibres was presented by Hilary Haworth who will be taking it to Liverpool. It is a global problem and therefore the WI can only educate the public about it and pressurise the politicians and industrialists into doing something to reduce the damage already done and what is being done every day as we wash our synthetic clothes. We watched a very American cartoon presentation explaining the problem and Hilary concluded by singing an alternative version of the Gloria Gaynor hit song “I will survive” which would make a great battle cry for the WI.
27th March
Members from both the WIs in Winslow spent the day helping to serve drinks at the NHS blood donors’ session in the town today. In the evening, we were together again at the Chase Group Meeting when the talk was given by an auctioneer who told us tales about his experiences in antique salerooms. He had brought along various items for us to examine and talked about some of the extraordinary things he had had to value and sell in his showrooms. He also answered questions on how to approach the task of deciding how to bequeath our belongings. The reports from the WIs were entertaining as always and the meeting was well attended.
25th March
It is always a great relief when something that has been in the planning for months actually happens and is a success. Those were certainly the sentiments of the WI committee at the Murder Mystery Evening tonight. This was the return visit of the Lacey Green Players and the mood in the hall was very good but there proved to be very few gifted detectives among the audience. Maybe the fact that they had brought their own liquid refreshments clouded their thinking powers. We hope that the event made a good profit which is going to two local hospices, the Florence Nightingale and Willen.
16th March
One of the local WI members held another jigsaw coffee morning in aid of Adoption UK which the members supported well. Apparently, there is a surge of interest nationally in doing puzzles which is leading to a rise in sales in the shops and at charity shops too. The exercise is being promoted as a way of avoiding dementia and enjoying an evening’s entertainment fairly cheaply---what could be nicer than a warm room, a good light and a glass of wine and to find the one piece you have been searching

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