Newsletter from your Chairman April 2021
I hope this newsletter finds you all well. By now many of you will have had your second jab and hopefully you are beginning to feel more confident and positive for the future! It’s so good to see the numbers of Covid cases falling so rapidly this month with a corresponding reduction in hospitalisations and deaths. What a year we have gone through!
Spring is a lovely time of the year with all the early morning bird song and the bulbs giving us such a good display. Perhaps one of the unreported side effects of the vaccine rollout is to put ‘ a spring in our step’.
So what has been happening with our U3A? Since the last newsletter your committee has met twice and has been looking at how we can get things moving again in terms of both our group activities and starting up our monthly meetings. The first thing we discovered was that the regular base for our monthly meetings was not going to be available for us in 2021. Very simply Crockham Hill hall has been block-booked 5 days a week for the rest of this year, and this is an opportunity that the hall committee could not turn down because of the financial gain.
So we immediately started a search for an alternative venue. Not an easy task when you consider that, for some of our speakers, we have had an audience approaching 130 members. Finding a hall to accommodate this possible number reduced our options considerably. But don’t despair - we have found an alternative and it is close to home. We have booked the Edenbridge Hall, previously known as the W.I. hall, which has undergone a complete redecoration recently and has all the facilities that we need. Although it looks like the final stages of the lockdown will end in June we have decided that we will leave the start of our monthly meetings until September.
Hopefully the position of the hall in the middle of the town will mean that some of you will be able to walk to our monthly meetings rather than having to drive. Yes, car parking is limited on the forecourt of the Edenbridge Hall but there are several other options to park your car nearby. The Leisure Centre car park is the obvious choice for many of you – it is about 250 paces from the front of the Leisure Centre to the hall entrance.
Not only are we changing the venue for our monthly meetings we are changing our meeting times. From September our monthly meetings will be on the same day but will be in the morning and, a date for your diary: TUESDAY 28th SEPTEMBER, will be our first full meeting with a guest speaker. Our committee are busy finetuning this important change and I will keep you updated in my monthly newsletter.
Perhaps this is a good time to remind you of our fabulous U3A team.
Membership Secretary – Estelle Barling
Minutes Secretary – Lynne Joyner
New Members Secretary – Lynn Swift
Business Secretary – Colin Fairman
Treasurer – Peter Welch
Groups Co-ordinator – Brian Swift
Website - Susan Farrell
(Speaker co-ordinator – Paddy Jennings, Catering Manager – Caryl Hayes)
We have just received news about an opportunity for those of you interested in Scottish country dancing. Grant Glanville, a U3A member formerly from Camberley, has set up a group in Oxted. If you fancy tripping the light fantastic contact Grant by email at [email protected] for further information. Try it – your first night is free!
Finally stay safe and alert. Looking forward to seeing you all together again in five months.
PS – It’s that tulip time of the year again!
Previous editions of our newsletter can be found in the Newsletter archive