April/May 2006

Community Association

Village Fete - 8 July at Sotwell House
Once again, David and Jenny Dobbin have very kindly offered to host the Village Fete. Don¹t forget to put the date in your diary. We expect that all the usual stalls and activities will be there. Look out for more details, as well as the schedule and entry forms for the Flower and Produce Show, in the next edition of The Villager. The committee is always looking for new ideas, and particularly clubs and societies in the village who would like to run a stall, competition or display. As long as it is an activity that we feel villagers will be interested in or enjoy, we will be very happy to accommodate it.

Christmas Hampers
Although I reported on the Christmas hamper distribution in the last edition of The Villager, I have been asked to explain in more detail our policy and practice for what has become an annual activity.

The hampers are paid for from the profits made at the Carol evening, sometimes with the addition of other funds from the Community Association or other village organisations. The value of each hamper is set by the committee, based on the funds we have available. The criteria for receiving them is simple: all villagers over the age of 70 are eligible, except of course those people who have expressed a wish to not receive one. We try to make the hampers more about providing treats than necessities. Brightwell Scouts have, for a number of years, very kindly distributed the hampers.

As with all Community Association activities, our approach to the provision of Christmas hampers has developed over time and is by no means set in stone. We are always keen to hear what other villagers (and particularly recipients) feel about them, and we do get many letters of thanks expressed to the whole village. Why not write to The Villager if you have a view

Village Quiz evening - STOP PRESS
The Village Quiz evening attracted 14 teams to the Village Hall on 11th March. Amazingly, for the sixth time the winners of the salver were the Red Lion team. It has the dubious honour of setting next year¹s questions. Out-doing the Jubilee Pavilion¹s performance will be a challenge. As last year¹s winners (after only its second year as an entrant) the Jubilee Pavilion team put on a brilliant multimedia performance. Never have the results been gathered and delivered so fast! As ever, the evening was a great success, helped enormously by the efforts of Caroline Oakley and her team of cooks.

Hugh Roderick

Brightwell School

Do not read on if you are expecting the usual report of events at school but I am getting on my soapbox. My class kindly made me one last week in a Technology lesson and it wobbles a bit. Now I am not your run-of-the-mill Headteacher. I came into this profession as a late starter. So yes, when I heard teachers moan I joined the general chant, "You get all these holidays!" It¹s true, we do, but I know very few of my colleagues who do not spend a significant amount of their holiday time on school work. Last week I attended a course after school. It lasted 2½ hours, delivered 37 PowerPoint slides and provided me with ten handouts. It was the final straw.

Following the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988, schools have witnessed an avalanche of initiatives, all with the laudable aim of raising standards. Amen to that! However, it must have struck someone in the Department for Education that a high a price was being paid for the improvements that followed. It¹s only recently that doctors knocked teachers into second place for absence due to stress-related illness. Solution: Workforce Remodelling. It aims to reduce workload and provide teachers with sufficient time to plan and prepare for lessons and Heads to lead and manage. Schools are also required to run a wellbeing programme for staff to support work-life balance. There you are - sorted. Well - not quite. Down the same river sails a raft of new initiatives: Agenda for Change, Every Child Matters, Extended Schools, Healthy Schools, Strategic Leadership in ICT and Network Learning Communities, to list just some of the key ones.

Don¹t get me wrong, I will go to the wall to support anything that improves teaching and learning. We answer to a strong vocational calling and are privileged to be working with young, developing minds. I feel especially privileged to be the Headteacher of your school. As a small school we have limited capacity to absorb change. Our river widens only when those involved, and I include parents and governors in this, take on more work. And each raft, with its increased load, still has to negotiate the obstacles that are the vagaries of day to day life in schools.

I have a special request to make. Get involved, support us in any way you can. Recently Charles Wallis came to share his "treasure" with Class 4. These were items he had found locally with his metal detector - it was a fantastic learning experience for the children. Thank you, and thanks to Jane Dix for answering our plea for big logs for the school grounds.

Crack! Oh dear! There goes another soapbox.

Roger Grant

Parish Church

The long dark nights and the stark, bare landscape of winter, often result in a tendency towards sadness and perhaps even pessimism. This state of mind is fed by a media that constantly holds before our eyes events that are cruel and tragic, without point or justification. The headlines seem determined to send us into terminal hopelessness, as we contemplate the daily catalogue of crime, war, poverty and anticipated disaster, be it drought, avian flu, shortage of energy supplies or any other anticipated apocalyptic scenario.

The advent of longer days, the first spring bulbs and the greater warmth of a spring sun put a spring in the step and hope in the heart. The return of new life and hope in the cycle of the seasons is matched in the Christian calendar with the birth of an even deeper hope. Jesus Christ who was acclaimed by many as God¹s special agent, as God¹s Son, had been crucified. After his crucifixion, Jesus¹ body was buried, and with it the hopes of all those who believed that God himself had come amongst them and drawn near to them in a way they would never have believed possible. Good had been defeated by evil, God had lost his battle to reach to out to sinful human beings, to restore them to a close relationship with himself and to re-create them in his own image and likeness.

But Easter day dawned, the tomb was open, the body nowhere to be found. God had raised Christ from the dead, an act which declared once and for all that good cannot ultimately be defeated, that God is not the loser but the conqueror. It is that conviction that gives us hope not just for eternity but also for the present. Christ¹s resurrection means that he is present in this world, by his Spirit, and that he can bring new life and new hope even in the darkest times. This conviction enabled Jesus¹ disciples to break out of their locked room and out of their fear to proclaim his victory and to invite others to share it. Hostility, persecution, hardships of many different kinds could not quench their faith and hope. Hope or despair, darkness or light, good or evil? The death and resurrection of Jesus brings a new perspective from which to view our own situation and that of the troubled world in which we live.

Jill Chatfield

Parish Council

Green Waste - It is proposed to introduce a new service from April 2006. SODC intend to replace the eco-system of collection and charge £29.00 to provide a brown wheeled bin which will be collected every two weeks. The Parish Council were not in favour of this method for a variety of reasons: the service is likely to replace the garden waste skips at the community waste-sites; it will restrict the disposal of bulk garden waste if it cannot fit in the bin; difficulties in using a wheeled bin for disabled and elderly householders; 100 Eco sacks could be bought for £29.00 and these would last most people 2 years.

Wellsprings Pond - The construction work has been completed. The nearby residents, the Parish Council and the Environment Group are working together on this project. The Management Plan 2006-2007 is available in the Parish Council Office. Spring planting of shrubs -plug plants- etc, will be carried out as planned.

Wallingford Surgery Car Service - The Council wish to express their thanks to all the volunteers who throughout the year help to maintain this valuable service. If you are able to offer approximately 2 hours on a Tuesday or Friday morning once or twice a year to drive patients to the Surgery or to collect their prescription, please contact Carole Dennis on 837125. There is no service over the Christmas or Easter Holiday periods, and dates can be exchanged whenever necessary.

Didcot Expansion - Meetings continue on this serious issue. The decision of the Oxfordshire County Council to direct yet more housing to the Didcot area, the lack of adequate infrastructure and the traffic implications, particularly for the A4130 passing our village entrances, continue to be of grave concern.

Carole Dennis

Allsorts Pre-School

The Parents' Group are very pleased to announce that we have a new Chairman of the Pre-School. Mrs Sam Balfour lives in Didcot with her husband Chris and daughter Alicia, who attends Allsorts. Sam volunteered, along with Carrie Hammond as Vice Chairman, as the named Chairman of Allsorts Pre-school in January. It was very important that we had a volunteer for Chairman; otherwise the Pre-school would have had to close.

We would like to send a very big thank you to Lydia Cook for all the hard work she did and all the dedication that she put into the Pre-school over the last 2 to 3 years. Without this we would not be where we are today.

Thank you to everyone who helped or came along to the Valentine Ball and Auction of Promises in the Village Hall on 11th February. It was a fantastic evening with over 65 guests enjoying a meal, live music from "The Unusual Suspects" and the Auction of Promises. Not only was it immense fun, but also £4k was raised. Talks are now underway to make this an annual event. On Monday 17th April, 2.00pm, we will be holding an Allsorts Eggstravaganza in the Pre-School building and grounds. There will be plenty of egg-cellent(!) craft activities for the children, an Easter egg hunt and a chance for the grown ups to relax with a cup of tea and some home-made cakes. A great way to round off the Easter holidays, so please put the date in your diary and bring some friends along on the day. We are going to hold a Nearly New Baby Sale in the Jubilee Pavilion from 1.00pm onwards on Saturday 22nd April, concentrating on good quality baby and toddler equipment. If you have anything you¹d like to donate, contact the Pre-school.

The numbers of children at Allsorts are looking very healthy, with 56 children registered. There are a few slots available for Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons (1pm - 3.30pm), so please contact us to know more or arrange a visit to the Pre-school - please call Hilary on 826387.

We still need to raise a substantial amount of money before we can start the building work, which must start at the beginning of the school summer holidays in July. We would like to thank everyone in the village that has made a donation to our building fund, but we still have a long way to go in a short space of time.

Brightwell History Group : Leylines. Ancient tracks for our ancestors or their ghosts?

England is said to be criss-crossed by leylines. In the 1920¹s an Alfred Watkins observed on his travels around the English countryside that pagan sites such as burial grounds and standing stones could often be linked by straight lines, and it is still accepted that this can be the case.

Brightwell-cum-Sotwell has its very own leyline passing through the parish. It is comparatively short and starts at St Mary-le-More church in Wallingford. Travelling in a straight line, it traverses the Kinecroft and across to Sotwell then Brightwell. On reaching Brightwell Barrow it follows on to Wittenham clumps and skirts the edge of Little Wittenham ending at St. Mary¹s Church Long Wittenham. Both St. Mary¹s at Wallingford and Long Wittenham are thought to stand on pagan sacred sites. Pagan incinerated remains were also found in a "dig" on Brightwell Barrow in 1923.

What is a leyline? There are a number of explanations and the one you favour may well reflect your personality. For the scientifically minded there is the theory of leylines being invisible energy currents passing through the earth in straight lines, which our early ancestors could detect and tap into by means of standing stones and sacred sites.

For the romantic or imaginative, leylines are linked with German ghost paths or Irish fairy trails which all have the characteristic of being in straight lines. In medieval times there were the corpse trails, when bodies from remote areas were often carried several miles to the nearest consecrated ground. Many of these trails were not always straight, the pall-bearers took the easiest route. But with spirits, it is a different matter. They fly in straight lines hence the saying "dead straight". Witches are depicted flying through the night on their broomsticks in straight lines!!!

For the more practical there is the theory of prehistoric tracks linking ancient meeting places and sacred sites. It was the Ancient Britons network of ancient tracks. One leyline enthusiast, believed sighting staves were used for alignments and the chalk figure on the Sussex Downs of the Long Man of Wilmington holding a stick in each hand - is an ancient road surveyor. The name "Dod" often occurs upon Leylines and sometimes becomes distorted into the word "dead", with patches of land now known as "deadmans" piece or acre - we have a local example of this with land beside Castle Hill.

It was possibly the "dod" men who supposedly surveyed our lands. "Dod" is the old name for stalk or staff as used by surveyors. In Norfolk a snail is known as a "dodman" because of the two staves he carries on his head!

Despite all the different theories, it is clear that many prehistoric hill forts and barrows, to medieval churches and castles are all connected by straight lines.

The sceptically minded may wish to pull all these theories to pieces - arguing for example that leylines could not be tracks as some go through swamps and lakes and over mountains etc. However fascinating the theory, it remains that many ancient sites were connected by straight lines, unfortunately, nobody really knows why, but if we explore our imaginations we can have fun in choosing our own favourite theory.

These theories, or maybe crackpot ideas, were taken from the late John Timpson¹s book on a "Layman tracking the Leys".

Rosemary Greasby

Save the Children

On my recent holiday to Thailand I was privileged to visit the Tsunami Volunteer Center in Khao Lak and spend a day visiting some of the projects. This was very poignant for me as Save the Children are one of the Center¹s sponsors and it enabled me to see at first hand some of the projects that your generosity has helped to fund. I would like to share my experience with you.

The Tsunami Volunteer Center is a Thai-led tsunami relief organization, non-governmental which started shortly after the December 2004 disaster. Helen Sutton and her boyfriend James have been helping at the Center for several months. Clive and I met Helen at the Center one Monday morning and joined a group of new volunteers on an orientation day. This started with a briefing at the Volunteer Center and included cultural awareness and responsibilities which come with living and working in a foreign country. We were then taken in open trucks to visit the projects. Our first stop was a furniture workshop aptly name "Thaikea". In the aftermath of the Tsunami thousands of coffins were sent to the area, some were too small for the European victims. The resourcefulness of these people turned this surplus commodity into furniture for the new homes being built. Each household can go to the workshop and with the help of the qualified Thai workforce and the volunteers, design and make three pieces of furniture. When this project is finished the workshop will remain as a sustainable business using the leftover wood from the boatyard, to build outdoor furniture.

We went on to visit two rebuilding projects, one in Niam Khem and the other at Tap Tawaan. Both are the complete rebuilding of villages wiped away by the Tsunami. Each villager has to build their own house with the help of the volunteers; this engenders self-sufficiency and helps to develop skills to enable them to support themselves. We stopped for lunch at a small fish restaurant on a beautiful beach. It was hard to think, whilst sitting eating a delicious lunch, that the whole area had been totally devastated and these warm and wonderful people have gone through all the pain and anguish and yet are still courageously working hard to restore their lives.

After lunch we left for the Pakarang Boat Yard. This is an amazing project that employs 22 local full time boat carpenters. The local fishermen who lost their boats and their livelihood are required to work on their own replacement boat during its construction. They also have an input into the boat's specifications and details. They have built 47 boats and they have a further 22 to build. After the project is finished the boatyard will remain as another sustainable business.

We then went to see a group of Volunteers helping some Thai villagers in Environmental restoration around their newly built village. This project is a race against time as a Corporation is trying to take over the land to build a golf course and is subject to a Court case in three months. Our last stop was a visit to the Tsunami Craft Shop; here Thai women, affected by the Tsunami, make all the goods on sale to support their families. The quality and range of goods is excellent and hopefully their business will grow, as more tourists come back to the area. The Thai people and the Volunteers are truly amazing and together have achieved so much in just over one year. The ultimate goal of the Tsunami Volunteer Center is to enable and empower communities to become self-supporting without the need for external assistance.

Having been a part of the fundraising volunteers for Save the Children for over 27 years, I have never been in any doubt that the money

Celia Collett