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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About a dozen of the WI members this evening had had to expend considerable powers of concentration at the Investigation and Discovery Day but were delighted to sit back to watch a restful demonstration of Ikebana by Ruriko Risai Kojima. Wearing traditional Japanese costume, she produced three flower arrangements in which she converted twigs that we would have confined to the bonfire into works of art.
The ballot for the Winslow WI Denman bursary was conducted and it was an appropriate time for the acting president to read out the letter from NFWI in response to adverse criticism of maintaining the College which had been aired in the Daily Mail.
The celebration of International Women’s Day this year has resulted in lots of media attention to the role of the WI in history and in present society. Many of our past resolutions have tackled inequality in different fields but this was a sort of blanket coverage of the unresolved issues. Another topic of interest to a crafty membership is the discovery that knitting is therapeutic in dealing with stress and anxiety. The clicking of knitting needles has been known to drive some out of the home but now it can be part of a programme of mindfulness.
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Investigation and Discovery 7th March
This event has become so popular that the BFWI Education and Current Affairs Sub- committee has had to admit that it has outgrown the Gateway at AVDC, Aylesbury and is looking for a larger venue to avoid having to ballot the members for tickets.
The first speaker was Dr Mark Spencer who worked at the Natural History Museum for many years: he is an expert in the use of natural history collections in the study of climate change and forensic biology. Mark began by telling us about the work of Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, who started to name and paint every plant including some which he more or less sponsored Capt. Cook to bring back from his voyages of exploration during the 1700s.By comparing modern specimens with those in his collections it is possible to study climate change on crops, ferns, coral and seaweeds .Plant growth gets out of sync.as the atmosphere heats eg. aphids are not available when needed by blue tits and things such as ragged robin are in decline. The botanical collections provide a source of DNA in research in pharmaceuticals and agriculture. He concluded by advising members to save any pressed flower albums in their possession and offer them to local museums as they are of value.
The second speaker Professor Elizabeth Tunbridge had started out in molecular and cellular biology at Bath University but then had moved to Oxford and specialised in neuroscience. She is presently the lead in a research group in psychiatry working out how genetic and environmental factors impact on the function of dopamine. I must admit that at the beginning of this talk I quaked thinking how is it that this young girl can use so many words whose meaning I cannot understand. However after a few minutes I realised that she was very skilfully leading the audience into an understanding of what she was doing ie. trying to treat the symptoms of psychiatric illnesses where the brain function is affected by genes and proteins bearing electrical activity. Gently she introduced us to RNAs (ribonucleic acid which codes and de-codes genes), to COMT which blocks Dopamine and to MINION (the DNA sequencer). At the end I felt enlightened about the human genome and could imagine some of what is happening in the human brain and how difficult it is to plot why things go wrong and how to repair the damage with drugs yet stop them from interfering with other organs. Neuroscientists always work with post mortem tissue so Elizabeth stressed the need for the Brain Bank and the UK’s biobank.
After lunch another slip of a girl Louise Hall who has been working on flood defence schemes in East Anglia gave a presentation: she described with slides her successful delivery of the £20m replacement of tidal defences in Great Yarmouth and recovery schemes in Essex following the East Coast Surge in 2013.She is also Commercial Services Manager for the £300m Thames Estuary Asset Management 2100 programme. We looked at her technical drawings for calculating the flow and weight of water and engineering budgets; we saw her team manoeuvring huge cranes along esplanades and doing bolstering work below the water in winched cabins. She concluded by asking the audience to encourage their family members to study engineering and she stood there a living advertisement for females at the top of the engineering ladder.
The final speaker was another female engineer and leader. Naomi Climer had studied chemistry then moved into engineering but obviously her real forte was in broadcasting and communications for the technology industry via the BBC and ITV in Europe and USA. Naomi talked about the Internet of Things: the ether is not overflowing with communications between people on social media, it is heaving with conversations between things--- 50 billion machines talking to each other: remote controls for heating , soon driverless cars advising each other, Satnavs and robots to name but a few. It is going to be perpetual connectivity between everyone and everything. Naomi finished with a cartoon of what she imagines our lives will look like in 50 years’ time---but it isn’t a cartoon, it is already happening. Again, what a wonderful explanation of the technical future and of course, she wants more scientists and technicians to come forward to STEM education.
Talk about food for thought we certainly were provided with excellent speakers and will not need to be encouraged to attend next year’s event. The questions were good throughout and it was obvious that the members appreciated being talked to at a steady pace and did not feel they were expected to receive dumbed down information. All the speakers seemed to value our attention.
 
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7th March
A fairly large contingent of members from our WI attended the Investigation and Discovery Day at the AVDC Gatehouse in Aylesbury. If I had been told that nearly 200 WI members would sit enthralled listening for an hour to a talk on Maths at 10.15 in the morning, I would never have believed it. Adam Kucharski who is an Assistant Professor in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine talked about how epidemics can be fought by the use of maths to predict the spread of diseases. Early intervention and co-operation through WHO is vital in dealing with epidemics. We heard about recent outbreaks and Adam showed us how his graphs plotted the true rise and fall of infection rather than the panic reaction reported in the media. Unfortunately, he does think that the biggest threat is another strain of flu which could sweep quickly across our shrinking world.
Then it was the turn of Helen Arney to explain some physics and astronomy accompanying herself on the guitar as seen on TV and at the Edinburgh Fringe. She concluded her entertaining presentation by singing the periodic table to the music of Gilbert and Sullivan. Before lunch there was a brief talk by an emergency motorbike rider from SERV OBN, the rapid response team who wanted to tell the Bucks WIs that the organisation had speakers available to come to meetings to raise funds for what is a very worthwhile service manned by volunteers.
Denise Smythe-Wright was an Honorary Research Fellow at the Ocean Biogeochemistry and Ecosystems in Southampton and is now the President of the International Association of Physical Sciences of the Oceans, advising on climate change at World conferences such as the next G7. She talked about her life travelling across and under every ocean as she analysed sea water and tracked plankton distribution in their currents. Denise designed and built her own equipment. She explained about the effect of melting glaciers and the shrinking icy coasts of Greenland on the jet stream which we all knew a little about and the thermohaline circulation of water which we didn’t. Of course, in Bucks WIs this year, debate touched on pollution through micro-plastics but also halocarbons and iodine.
The final speaker was Dr Giles Yeo who is working on genetics and severe human obesity at Wolfson College, Cambridge and at the Medical Research Council’s Metabolic Diseases Unit at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. He has appeared on the Horizon TV series. Giles is a very dynamic speaker, entertaining to listen to but he explains clearly complex ideas. We learned about the importance of leptin which is the hormone which inhibits hunger. It tells the brain when the human body needs food.  Many of the cases of obesity are because of the absence of this vital hormone which can also cut off the immune system and prevent puberty.
It was a fascinating day and everyone went home feeling that they had learned a lot and enjoyed the day. There was a representative from WI Life present again but I shall be very surprised if an account of the day is ever printed in its pages which is a shame as WI members in other federations would benefit from these informative days on science and discovery.
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​29th June
The WI members and guests had taken great pains to dress in floral clothes, predominantly pink, to celebrate the Queen’s 90th birthday as if it was a lovely summer’s day---Barbara Cartland would have been proud of us. Fortunately, we were all under cover. There was much chatter and rueful laughter in the foyer of the Community Centre in Amersham as people shook themselves dry after crossing the car park. However once inside, everything was lovely: a traditional strawberry tea plus cakes and sandwiches accompanied by pink drinks. Many guests had made tiaras which they wore with style. A nonagenarian was installed as the Queen of proceedings and wore a very impressive full crown. In the course of the afternoon there was a royal quiz and an entertainment put on by members of the Board of Trustees and WI advisers. The finale of synchronised swimming was very well received. If you are wondering how this was achieved, I will just say that we were in Drake’s Hall and there had been a lot of rain that afternoon. If you don’t believe me, you should have attended this event put on by the BFWI for our entertainment to see for yourself.
 
8th June
The local WI’s Discussion Group met in a member’s house this evening to talk about “Engineering”. Some of us had been at a bit of a loss wondering how we could discuss such a huge topic so we started by defining engineering as the application of science for the control and use of power, especially by means of machinery. This made things a little easier when trying to separate science and technology. We discussed the rise of female engineers in spite of parental and social prejudice against young girls taking up what is still considered a career path more suited to males. Of course the inequality of rates of pay between the sexes was also mentioned. There is also a tendency for the public to imagine that the UK is no longer a big player in the field of industry. The evening’s discussion included other forms of engineering such as genetic, social engineering and even political manipulation which was a rather topical subject this month. We concluded by planning to ask the BFWI Education and Current Affairs sub-committee to consider inviting a high-power female engineer to talk at one of its science days.