June/July 2008

Community Association

ART for all – 17 May, Village Hall
As promised in the last Villager, Wallingford’s very own Sinodun Players came back to the village in May to help celebrate its 60th anniversary year with a special performance of ART - a brilliantly funny play written by Yasmin Reza. (The Sinodun Players was of course formed in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell on 8 January 1948.) The event was a sell-out, and a brilliant success. One audience member mentioned that having seen ART performed three times, including professionally, this intimate performance was the best yet! Directed by Graham Fyffe, the three hander held the audience throughout – and for a fascinating discussion about the play afterwards. We are very grateful to the actors, the dedicated technical team, and to Trevor Twentyman, who offered his memories of the Players’ early days in the village. A special mention goes to one member of the audience, Harry Bonner, who was in the Players’ first pantomime in 1948, aged 11. Caroline Oakley and the Community Association catering team enhanced the occasion with a delicious meal.

Hugh Roderick

Allsorts Pre-School

This edition’s article is brought to you by the letters: J, R, T, and W!
J is for “Jolly Phonics” which has been introduced into our daily sessions this term. It is the first step in helping children to read and write, using different senses to make learning fun. For example, each letter has its own sound and action, e.g. for J, pretend to wobble on a plate and say; “j, j, j”. Our toddlers learn letter sounds, then progress onto letter formation and identify sounds within words. This helps provide a solid foundation and ease the transition for our tiny tots as they continue their schooling after Allsorts.

R is for RAF and T is for transport, this term’s topic. The “home corner” has been transformed into a bustling transport depot where our fledgling train drivers, cabbies and pilots are busy preparing for a special treat. Despite having two detachments on active tours of duty, RAF Benson hopes to land in the Village School’s playground and let our mini-pilots swarm all over the helicopter they normally only see in the skies above our village.

T is also for a very, big “thank you ” and W is for WI ladies. Thanks go to our fabulous parents and staff who made a great success of our BYOB (bring your own barrow) working party. We also cannot thank the WI enough, for the amazing transformation they achieved by planting our toddlers’ sensory garden. Eat your heart out, Titchmarsh! We look forward to watching both the plants and our little ones blossom.

W is also for “Welcome Packs” and lots of very hard work. More thanks to unsung heroes like: Alison Wood for devoting hours to painstakingly reviving our “Parent Packs”; our energetic committee for completing everyday tasks enabling staff to concentrate on stimulating activities for the children; and, not least, our Fundraising Committee for slaving away on many ideas, including the Nearly New Sale to help provide Allsorts with badly needed funds.

Victoria Clyde-Matthews

Environment Group

Thermal Imaging
Because of the arrival of spring (or is it summer?) thermal imaging has had to stop. However interpretation of the images of the properties which were scanned is underway. Peter Varley, David Evans-Roberts and Andy Deacon are at work trying to understand what the different images show and to produce reports for the householders. The camera has been returned to Heather Saunders at SODC and the Council has been given a report prepared by Peter on the problems we ran into. Several other villages have asked Heather to use the camera next winter.

Rubbish
At the Group’s annual meeting Lowelle Bryan (SODC) gave a talk on “Rubbish”. The starting point was that a typical family in South Oxfordshire produces nearly one tonne of rubbish every year, space for landfill is rapidly running out and we all need to make a greater effort to reduce waste, by reusing and recycling. In Oxfordshire, we have to reduce the amount sent to landfill by 25% by 2009/10 and 50% by 2012/13.

SODC is letting a new rubbish and recycling contract starting in June 2009 – this is a big opportunity to improve services, increase recycling and reduce waste going to landfill, so paying less landfill tax. The new system will include: weekly separate food waste collection in kerbside bins, fortnightly residual waste collection in wheeled bins, kerbside collection of glass (at least fortnightly), kerbside collection of dry recyclables (at least fortnightly), collection of garden waste will remain fortnightly in wheeled bins (charged). The final decisions about the frequency of collections, are to be agreed once the new contractor is appointed at the end of 2008. It makes sense to collect food waste separately from other waste and then compost it. This will reduce the amount of rubbish sent to landfill by up to 5,000 tonnes a year. SODC will give every household a container to put it in and collect it weekly. Glass will be collected at the kerbside with the new contract in June 2009 and the popular fortnightly garden waste collection service will not be changed All garden waste is composted locally, and used to improve farmland. Once everything that can be recycled or composted has been sorted out, there will still be some rubbish left that will have to go to landfill. Evidence from other parts of the country is that if the council only collects this residual waste once a fortnight then people recycle and compost more, which is what is wanted. By collecting food waste weekly, instead of every fortnight as some councils have done, concerns about smells and litter can be addressed.

John Rodda

Brightwell School

All visitors to the school remark on the excellent play areas around the school. They are particularly impressed by the field and the adventure-activity equipment that surrounds it, all purchased through fund raising by the Friends of Brightwell School (FOBS). However, in wet weather it is not possible to access the field or much of the equipment so we are especially pleased to see summer begin to peep through the clouds. The advent of dry, warm weather means our children will be able to ‘run off steam’ and benefit from these generous and welcome contributions to school life. Still, every silver lining has a cloud and, as much as the children can freely exercise their bodies at break times, their brains are required to be just as active and agile in the classroom.

Not to be outdone by the children, a few plucky parents have attended several workshops at school on new approaches to teaching mathematics. These lengthy but informative and engaging sessions were led by Tricia Godfrey, a former parent, on behalf of Extended Schools’ services. Thank you to all those parents who attended. Mrs Jones, one of our Teaching Assistants, recently took a few of our School Council members to a county wide conference. The children, all excellent ambassadors, were able to share and gather ideas through talking to representatives from other schools across Oxfordshire. Well done children! Congratulations also to those Year 6 pupils who successfully completed their cycling proficiency course under the guidance of Mrs Alder, Mrs Murton and Mrs Lidstone (parents). Similar salutations to Miss Shinner (teacher) and her dance troupe of children for a polished performance at the recent Dance Festival at Wallingford School. On the sporting front the school participated in the annual football and netball tournament at Manor School and some of our older boys and girls took part in a rugby event at Stephen Freeman School. On the community support side we welcomed a Student Teacher into school to complete her final teaching practice and accommodated two students from Wallingford School, one a former pupil, for their work experience.

Fund raising goes on unabated and the children gathered donations for Water Aid, our adopted charity for the year, through a ‘Whacky Wellies’ and ‘Bucket of Pennies’ day. These events raised £140 and £72 respectively. FOBS have been very active raising money for the school by hosting a children’s Fashion Show. Forthcoming events include our Summer Fete on Friday 27 June between 6-9 pm. Do come along and enjoy the evening.

Roger Grant

Friends of Brightwell School (FOBS)

Saturday 29 March saw the school hall transformed into somewhere straight from Milan or Paris!! Using the new staging, a catwalk was set up, with seats arranged around and a Fashion Show took place with a professional compère. The children had arrived earlier in the afternoon, chosen outfits and worked out routines to perform once they hit the catwalk. Younger siblings took part and so the children ranged in age from 2 - 11 years. All the children who took part had tremendous fun and received a certificate for taking part. Mums, Dads, Grannies, Aunties etc all enjoyed the wonderful homemade cakes provided by the members of FOBS whilst perusing the clothes for sale. This event raised £240 for FOBS.

Sally Eccleston

Parish Church

As I read out the eulogy at my uncle’s funeral a week or two ago, I realised how little of his life I had actually been aware of until now. His early years on the Isle of Wight and in London, and his years of work in Singapore and Malaysia, I had only heard hints of until I had help from his son and daughter to piece more of his life together. The Old Testament reading they chose for him was Ecclesiastes 3; ‘for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.’ There followed a poem about ‘how we spend our dash’ (i.e. the dash between our date of birth and the date we die) with the reminder that, as none of us know how long or short our ‘dash’ will be, we would do well now and again to think more carefully about how we are treating our loved ones and the world around us, and to slow down a little.

Whilst we are living through pretty painful times economically at the moment, what’s happening in the long run might well be a return of sanity following a period which has often felt like the economics of fantasy. The 171 per cent rise in average property prices in a decade, could give us the illusion that we’re 171 per cent better off. But we aren’t. And the idea that banks and building societies could lend out of all proportion to real economic growth was bound, one day, to come crashing down. If illness is nature’s way of telling you to slow down, then a credit squeeze does the same for an economy. Once in a while we all need to slow down. Time and again we’ve been reminded, these last few years, about the risks of ignoring limits. Our patterns of consumption are destroying the natural environment, and the search for short term profit is endangering economic stability.

‘And, for all this’, wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘there lives the dearest freshness deep down things’ – nature is not spent and hope is not spent. So as summer approaches, I’m looking forward to welcoming it with you at our churches and wider village events (Cricket and St.Birinus’ Pilgrimage spring to mind). Look out for new and ongoing Emmaus courses as the year unfolds; if you’re a lapsed anything or just thinking that the Christian path might be worth exploring then why not give it a try? Let’s see if we can’t re-discover our balance and one another through all the changing shades of light and dark.

Love and Prayers,

Jeremy Goulston

Flower and Produce Show

If you entered the Brightwell, Sotwell and Rush Court Horticultural Show at Style Acre in July, 1914, you could expect to face some fierce competition. None of your namby-pamby ‘bowls of fruit’ for these exhibitors. You want to enter gooseberries? No less than 24 will do. broad, dwarf or runner beans were only acceptable in groups of 24 pods – and jam came in 2 lb pots. Nothing less, nothing more. If you entered a “Collection of Vegetables”, you had to specify whose seed you had used – whether Lay’s, Hunt’s or Tarry’s - and keep the seed packet, to be produced if required. Competitors paid 6d per entry, and there were cash prizes of up to half a crown. The biggest reward – at five shillings - came to the person who sent the largest quantity of queen wasps to the show secretary by June 1st (before 6 pm). My sympathies, I have to say, are with the hapless secretary – who presumably had to arrange for the destruction of all those queen wasps so lovingly collected. Children under the age of 14 had a choice of two classes: “A Vase of Wild Flowers” (not something that would be encouraged today) and a “Model of a Garden” in a two foot box. Prizes were donated by people in the ‘big houses’, and there was more than a whiff of class distinction in the division of some of the vegetable classes between ‘farm labourers’ and ‘cottagers’. My thanks go to Leon Cobb, who unearthed this from the archives of the History Group – and prompted some thoughts about the place of the show in the village today.

We can’t offer the cash prizes of yesteryear, but we hope that the reward of having a prize card or a trophy on the mantelpiece will be enough. This year – thanks to a grant from the Community Association - we have some fancy new purple Highly Commended cards. We also have some less than serious classes – including a chance for everyone to try their hand at making an animal from vegetables. The results will be judged by popular vote, something that seemed to work well with the flower arrangements in unusual containers last year. Thanks to the healthy state of the allotments, we have growing numbers of entrants in the vegetable classes – and a new class especially for novices aims to introduce newcomers to the Flower Arranging section. If nothing else, most people will have the odd photograph they can enter; if they’d like to send digital versions to me at the village website afterwards, we can ensure that the Produce Show continues all the year round. We do genuinely try to be open to all – and if we get it wrong, you must let us know.

Sally Dugan

The Village Shop/Stores

Say not the struggle naught availeth…
We are making progress with enthusiasm undimmed. Since my last report, we have held two meetings of the fundraisers and of the steering group and have made a presentation on the Village Stores at the Annual Meeting of the Parish Council at the Village Hall on 24 April.

New sites reviewed
The two groups looked at about ten different sites suggested by a number of people. The most important factor is the likelihood of getting planning permission and this led us to reject a number of them and we are concentrating on two for the present.

Planners approached
By the time that you read this, we hope to have talked with the Planning Department of the SODC and to have received some indication of the probability of being allowed to proceed. We are keen not to spend any money on professional fees until we have an idea of what they will allow us to do – they are all-powerful!

Next steps
If we get a positive answer, we will then instruct an architect to draw up plans, estimate the building cost and factor that in to our forecast operating budgets. Planning will then go hand in hand with fundraising, building will come next, closely followed by the detailed planning for the operation of the Village Stores.

Fundraising
We received a welcome boost to our funds from the sale of Andrew Luck’s Easter Cards which was added to the generous donation from the WI in the specially designated account held for the Village Stores by the Community Association. Thank you all so much. We have also decided to delay the late summer ball to be held at Smalls House until the second quarter of 2009 when the weather may be better and our plans more advanced. Watch this space for the new date.

What now?
We are in the hands of the Planners; aren’t we always? As soon as we know anything definite we will produce a flyer to go to every house in the village and you will hear it through these pages. Arthur Hugh Clough against Jerry Bremer? My money’s on Clough.

Jim Sanger

W.I. – Spring Season Underway!

Our new year got off to a great start with a wonderful visit from Bill Stratton of Raptor Rescue in April. Bringing with him two full-grown birds and several in various stages of hatching, he explained the work of the charity and about the way raptors and owls hunt, breed and live in the wild. In May we discussed the proposed campaigning issues for the WI in the coming year. Animated discussion of the two topics – a ban on fishing by bottom trawling, and the inappropriate imprisonment of the mentally ill – was followed by a ‘clothes swap’ to raise funds for mother and child centres in Sri Lanka. We’ve also managed to fit in visits to two beautiful gardens, a special pub lunch at the Red Lion, plant up the Allsorts sensory garden, set up a pen-pal link with a women’s group in Western Australia, and sponsor 12 members through a first aid course.

There’s lots to look forward to in June and July: garden visits, a theatre trip and lunch by the Thames as well as talks on the life of a pantomime dame and whether prison works for women.

More information on our website: www.bcs-wi.co.uk

Catherine Inwood

The Red Lion

Brightfest
Our big event in June is the Red Lion Brightfest on Saturday 14 June from 12.00 - 12.00. Let’s hope the sun shines as we have planned a day of live music, barbecue and great local beers and wines. Most of the bands are from Brightwell-cum-Sotwell including Unusual Suspects, The Brazilians, Factory, Myron and Saxtet, but we are also welcoming musicians from as far afield as Ewelme and Long Wittenham.! None of the musicians are charging to play, but we will be passing round a bucket as we would like to raise money for the Oxfordshire Multiple Sclerosis Therapy Centre at Milton Park (M.S. charities are close to my heart as my mum had M.S. until she died some years ago).We will also be selling special edition Red Lion Brightfest T shirts and any profit will also go to the charity. Do try to join us for some (or all) of the day, it should be fun.

Barbecues
Our first barbecue was a bit of a surprise. We had 10 people booked in and actually served 77 lunches. Unfortunately this meant the portions were not as big as we had intended (it was a bit of a loaves and fishes job!). We dropped the price accordingly, but it was not ideal -my steep learning curve continues! Hopefully we will get it right next time and for the many barbecues we hope to have over the summer. Hope to see you soon.

Sue Robson

Climbing Kilimanjaro

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who supported me in my Kilimanjaro adventure. As you may or may not know I did make it to the summit, not only that but I decided to punish myself further by walking around the crater further to the highest point in Africa and the highest point on a free standing mountain in the world!

The first 3 ½ days were really very manageable and our group was in strong spirits marching up the mountain, making jokes about the ‘team shovel’ (lack of toilets…I’ll leave it to your imagination!) and excitedly talking about our big adventure.

We were walking through forest and cultivation first and the path was fairly gentle. At the start of the route we had to dodge begging children and my friend made the mistake of getting out some food in front of them. I'm not sure I could bring myself to pry some dry biscuits from the hands of a crying, orphaned 5 yr old who was dressed in rags- but he’s a growing guy so I wont judge him!! However at camp 3 some of the group were vomiting and no one had much of an appetite, I was still fine at this point howeve, as I concentrated on breathing deeply.

Nights were the hardest as, obviously, because it was a mountain, our tents were pitched on slopes and you spent the night trying to caterpillar yourself back up to the top of your sleeping mat…. the image of a beached whale springs to mind. Also I found I was concentrating so hard on breathing that I couldn’t go to sleep as if I stopped I kept getting headaches, like someone had bludgeoned my head with a rounders bat. Being woken up by a cheery voice saying “Washy, washy” after very few hours sleep does wear thin very quickly! As does having to pack up all your damp dirty clothes in your bag and roll up your sleeping mat and bag every morning. This was probably what I hated most about the trip as the higher you got the longer it took, even looking for your hat in your bag took 20 minutes as you got out of breath with every movement. What was amazing was even turning over at night woke you up, as your heart started beating in your mouth, you got out of breath and felt like you were about to have a heart attack all due to the lack of oxygen.

Although I was lucky enough not to suffer from nausea, sickness and hallucinations from the altitude, many of our group were and I found it really disturbing to see such strong, stubborn members of the group so weakened, to the point that they couldn’t walk or even see they were just being dragged up the mountain by our guides. In fact at one point I burst into tears saying, “There’s nothing wrong with me, I’m just sad because everyone’s getting sick” (pretty pathetic and very embarrassing! The altitude did make me into an emotional wreck; it was all just so overwhelming)

Getting to the top was the single hardest thing I have done in my life and the summit day (day 5) was the longest of my life. It started at 11pm on day four after 4 hrs sleep, a cup of tea and a biscuit. We walked in the dark for 8 hours all you could see were thousands of headlights that snaked up the mountain until they joined the stars-an amazing sight until you realise you don’t think you can actually make it that far. Once at the top I burst into tears as a wave of relief and pride overcame me. However, I wasn’t going to go all that way and stop short of my ultimate goal, to make it to Uhuru peak, so I then walked for a further 4 hours, which did nearly finally finish me off, as I was then starting to get nauseas and headachy. We then walked back to the camp, I say walked, it was 4 miles of loose screed, so it was more slide-fall-slide-fall -not the most dignified of procedures. After that (no it wasn’t over yet) we had to walk down to the next camp, which took a further 3 hours. All in all we walked for just under 16 hours in one day.

Thanks again to everyone who sponsored me, gave me advice, told me to start training! and wished me well. I couldn’t have done it with out all of your support and I will be eternally grateful.

Ellie Devey-Robson